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, deputy assistant to president Trump.

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 from 1996 to 2008, after marrying Sebastian Gorka in Sopron, Hungary in 1996 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.