Asa Hutchinson

ne Friday in January 2003, Asa Hutchinson called a group of leaders from U.S. border agencies into his office at the Homeland Security Department's headquarters in Washington. As officials from the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Border Patrol gathered around, Hutchinson told them that their agencies would be merged into two new bureaus: the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, to handle border inspections, and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to focus on law enforcement.

Combining the border agencies is just one of the tough decisions that Hutchinson has made as undersecretary for the Border and Transportation Security Directorate, DHS's largest. With oversight for the Transportation Security Administration and border agencies, Hutchinson is in charge of most of DHS's operational agencies and key security projects such as US VISIT, a program to track the more than 35 million visitors who enter the U.S. each year, and CAPPS II, a TSA project designed to flag airline passengers who are potential security threats.

Hutchinson has been at the center of several high-level policy decisions, including one in August to suspend the transit-without-visa program (which allowed foreigners to enter U.S. airports without visas).

Although Hutchinson prefers to let his subordinates run their agencies, he's willing to wade into policy. For example, he proposed creating a special-enforcement unit to track compliance with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, used to register foreign students studying in the U.S.

A lawyer by profession, Hutchinson, 53, was administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration before being nominated to DHS. Previously, he was a congressman from Arkansas. In 1982, when President Reagan appointed him U.S. attorney for Western Arkansas, Hutchinson became, at age 31, the country's youngest U.S. attorney.

Reared on a hog farm near Fort Smith, Ark., Hutchinson graduated from Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., and earned his law degree at the University of Arkansas.