# Katharine Gorka

Katharine "Katie" Cornell Gorka is an American national security analyst who served as a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the first Trump administration from 2017, and press secretary of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for two months in 2019. She is married to Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to the president.

## Background

Gorka was born in Boston and grew up in different places on the East Coast. She attended the Hotchkiss School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Master of Science in international political economy from the London School of Economics. She lived in Budapest, Hungary for twelve years after the fall of communism, and married Sebastian Gorka in Sopron in 1996, with whom she had two children. She founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security think-tank, and the Threat Knowledge Group consulting firm, which provided counter-terrorism training for the U.S. government and military. She has also been a contributor to Breitbart News, and a co-editor of the book Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies from Communism to Islamism with Patrick Sookhdeo.

## Views

Prior to her appointment in the Trump administration, Gorka has advocated for an "ideological war" against Islamists, and supported legislation sponsored by Rep. Michele Bachmann to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, which would extend to United States Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). She has claimed that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the "headquarters" of the enemy of the West, and that the Obama administration was "supporting Islamist groups abroad" and "allowing Islamists to dictate national security policy." She has also proposed "shutting down the radical mosques," and suggested that Al Jazeera should not be allowed to broadcast in the United States. She has been described as a part of the counter-jihad movement.

## Trump administration

Gorka was named to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) transition team by Donald Trump in November 2016. It was noted that she had previously complained extensively that the DHS trained its agents that Islam is a "religion of peace", which she stated to be false. In May 2017, Gorka was named an adviser to the DHS's policy office. She then ended funding from the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force (CVE) to Life After Hate, a group that works to de-radicalize white supremacists, as well as to the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Watchdog groups requested records during her time as a senior adviser at DHS, with the Democracy Forward group suing to get documents.
It was later alleged by HuffPost that Gorka had wanted, apparently without success, to redirect the focus of the CVE against antifa during her time in the DHS.
She became press secretary of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in June 2019, but left her position in August in order to spend more time with her family. Gorka did not appear frequently in public during her time at the CBP, leading the Democracy Forward group to sue the DHS to find out "what Gorka is doing" there.

## Later activities

Gorka served as Director for Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation from 2020 to 2022. She was elected to the McLean, Virginia Community Center Board in 2023, where she had lived since 2008, after having unsuccessfully tried to become elected the previous year amid controversy over a Drag Queen Story Hour.
She was elected chair of the Fairfax County Republican Party in 2024.