Katie Tobin is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a member of Carnegie’s American Statecraft Program. She also serves as a strategic advisor to companies and non-governmental organizations on crisis management, geopolitical risk, aviation and border security, and migration response, and is a press contributor.

Prior to joining Carnegie, Tobin served as President Biden’s top migration advisor in the National Security Council for three years. 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. 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 the Afghan humanitarian evacuation in August 2021, the largest humanitarian evacuation in U.S. history; the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program (April 2022), the Venezuela Enforcement Initiative (October 2022), 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 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. Tobin started her career working at Annunciation House, an organization that runs migrant shelters on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tobin grew up in Chicago, Illinois and earned her and her B.A. from Villanova University and J.D. from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.