Monument Policy announces hires

Monument Policy Group recently made a pair of high-level hires, including Kate Christensen Mills, a former congressional liaison for the Obama administration’s immigration agency.

Mills joined the firm as a principal on Monday after more than a decade in the public sector, most recently spending five years as the assistant director for congressional relations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security.

“I think it had to be the right opportunity at the right time to make me want to leave public service,” she told The Hill. “I saw Monument as an opportunity to work on immigration and mobility issues from the private sector. … Their range of clients and the work they’ve doing fit with the work I had been doing and the work I want to be doing I the future.”

The firm is working on immigration or visa issues for clients including Starbucks, the United States Olympic Committee, the NAFSA: Association of International Educators and FileRight, a company that helps with immigration paperwork.

Mills also served as a senior legislative counsel to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) from 2007 to 2009.

“Kate’s DHS experience, combined with her background working with a Silicon Valley Member, is a perfect fit for our growing national security, technology, immigration and trade practices,” said partner Jessica Herrera-Flanigan in a statement.

Monument earned $4.63 million in lobbying fees during 2014 and whose client roster includes Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Shell, Boeing, PhRMA, Eli Lilly and Company and the Entertainment Software Association.

The firm also hired T.A. Hawks, who most recently served as the staff director for the Senate Agriculture Committee. He begins as a principal at Monument Policy next week.

“I’ve been approached through the years from different groups – but when I saw Monument’s client list, it’s an interesting group of companies,” he said. “The small group of people working on a lot of different interesting things was appealing to me because it mirrored my experience on the Hill.”

Hawks has also served as chief of staff to powerful Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran and has spent more than 14 years on Capitol Hill.

“T.A. Hawks has consistently demonstrated outstanding commitment, hard-work, effectiveness and good counsel in various capacities on my staff.  These traits, which he has used to serve the people of Mississippi and the nation, will benefit him greatly in his career,” said Cochran in a statement.

Ethics rules bar him from lobbying members of the Agriculture panel, or for agriculture clients, for one year.

However, Hawks’s strengths extend beyond agriculture politics and policy, says Stewart Verdery, a founder and partner of Monument Policy.

“We expect him to be working on a lot of different issues … and we decided we needed somebody who could help across a wide range of our clients,” he told The Hill.

“Firms like ours that have very diverse client rosters understand that the new Senate brings a whole new set of challenges — new chairmen, new priorities and an very large group of members still in their first term. We thought that someone who had succeeded with this group of Republicans was critical to our firm’s success,” Verdery said.