About Katie

Katie Tobin is a national security expert with two decades of experience working in government, the private sector and United Nations. She has served in Washington D.C., Chicago, and across Latin America. 

For the last three years, Katie served in the Biden-Harris Administration as a top migration advisor in the National Security Council. Appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Transborder, Tobin led U.S. policy development on a wide range of cross-border national security matters, including aviation and maritime security, border security, global immigration and visa policy, and security screening and vetting.  

During her tenure in the White House, she spearheaded the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,President Biden’s signature migration framework that was adopted by 21 countries in the Western Hemisphere in June 2022. She was also a lead architect of Operation Allies Welcome to bring our  Afghan allies  to safety (August 2021), the largest humanitarian evacuation in U.S. history; the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program (April 2022), the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela Parole Process (January 2023), and the Safe Mobility Offices Initiative (June 2023).  In the aviation sphere, she drove the launch of the Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) National Action Plan in April 2022, the first whole-of-government strategy to protect against the nefarious use of commercial drones.

Prior to joining the Biden-Harris Administration, Tobin served for nearly a decade with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), advising the United States and governments across Latin America and the Caribbean on refugee and migration response. She has also served as a Refugee Officer at the Department of Homeland Security and an attorney in private practice in Chicago. During law school, she clerked for Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Richard Durbin on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Katie started her career working at Annunciation House, an organization that runs migrant shelters on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

In March 2024, Tobin returned home to Chicago to be closer to family. She currently serves as a nonresident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of its American Statecraft Program. She also serves as senor advisor at WestExec Advisors LLC and is a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Tobin is an active press contributor, including the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC and News Nation. 

Tobin earned her B.A. from Villanova University and J.D. from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. In her free time runs marathons, hangs out with her nieces and nephews and her adorable golden retriever puppy, Eleanor Roosevelt!