Leadership Quote by Janet Napolitano

The line is a lesson in how border politics gets narrated: reassure the home audience, displace the danger. Napolitano’s phrasing turns “violence” into a geographic substance that can “spill over,” like a chemical leak held back by vigilance and infrastructure. That metaphor does quiet work. It treats Mexico as the container for the problem and U.S. border towns as vulnerable recipients, even while acknowledging that the “violence that people are worried about” is partly a product of fear, headlines, and electoral pressure.

The intent is managerial: calm residents and lawmakers by promising containment. But the subtext is sharper. “Mostly in Mexico itself” draws a line between “there” and “our communities,” a rhetorical fence that mirrors the physical one. It signals empathy for American anxieties without having to litigate the deeper drivers of cross-border crime: U.S. demand for drugs, U.S.-sourced firearms, and the binational economics that make the border less a wall than a circulatory system.

Context matters here. As Homeland Security chief in an era of rising cartel violence and relentless cable-news framing, Napolitano is performing competence under scrutiny. The sentence is built to be quotable and defensible: it concedes concern, avoids panic, and affirms state capacity (“we want to make sure”). What it doesn’t do is grant Mexico equal rhetorical citizenship; Mexico appears as a site of disorder, not as a partner. The result is a policy posture that prioritizes preventing contagion over confronting interdependence.