Teaching our nation’s top military
Luke P. Bellocchi ’95 has never shied away from interesting opportunities.
That approach has taken him around the world—with particular expertise in Taiwan, where he once lived—and into influential U.S. government positions dealing with immigration and border security and foreign affairs.
It started with his upbringing as the dependent of a career Foreign Service officer, living at postings in six countries, mostly in Asia. The idea of serving where it is needed most has stayed with him.
“I’m used to moving around,” Bellocchi says. “A lot of people in government service tend to stay in one agency for most of their career, if not their entire career. But I’ve always been willing to take chances.”
Most recently, he’s drawing on a career’s worth of real-world experience as a professor at the Joint Advanced Warfighting School of the National Defense University. Run by the Department of Defense, it is the nation’s top military staff college. Bellocchi’s students include senior officers—colonels and lieutenant colonels—from the U.S. armed forces, as well as some high-ranking foreign military officers.
He’s focused on the fraught relationship between China and Taiwan, and its implications for U.S. national security, and advocating for better coordination between government agencies and the military in formulating a strategy for averting conflict in the region.
“It’s a great opportunity to think in public about how government could work better,” Bellocchi says. “I’m hoping to instill some interagency understanding. It’s a changing world; we can’t count on simply having overpowering military force like we had in World War II. It’s important that strategists are taking a whole-of-government approach, as opposed to simply military solutions.”
His teaching and publishing in academic journals build on his long and varied career in government service.
Early on, Bellocchi served as an attorney adviser for the State Department, handling visa, passport and citizenship legal issues brought through U.S. embassies and consulates abroad, and writing advisory opinions about issues in citizenship and visa law. He also addressed situations in which it became dangerous to maintain an embassy and staffers and their families were ordered to leave the country. “It happens a lot more often than you would think,” he says. He helped manage the embassy fallout of conflicts in Eastern Europe including Kosovo, and in Indonesia and Africa.
He then moved on to Congress, working first for the House Judiciary Committee and its Immigration Subcommittee. “The chance to be on Capitol Hill and have real influence on legislative changes was a real opportunity,” he says. The committee was conducting hearings on immigration policy reforms and Bellocchi helped prepare for those hearings, drafted some legislation, and worked on Congressional oversight and investigations.
“This was after 9/11,” he says, “and they were wondering how 19 terrorists managed to get visas to the United States. They wanted someone with State Department experience and visa law experience to see if there was some sort of reform that could take place, so this didn’t happen again.” One result: a more uniform interview process for those seeking visas, and an enhanced terrorism watch list.
When there was a big push for comprehensive immigration reform, he moved to the Senate side as committee counsel to work on legislation under consideration. It didn’t pass, despite, he says, “enormous support from the president and many senators.”
He has served at the Department of Homeland Security in a series of roles: as assistant commissioner of Customs & Border Protection, managing Congressional relations; as deputy ombudsman for citizenship and immigration services, where he advocated for immigration policy on issues involving immigration processing; and later as DHS’ first statutory ombudsman for immigration detention.
It was a time of intense media focus on immigrant detention at the southern border. “I was at the border a lot,” Bellocchi says, “going to detention facilities around the country and trying to resolve some of these issues and make sure everything was a humane situation.”
Bellocchi’s career also included a stint at the Department of Transportation and as an immigration lawyer at both large and boutique firms.
In addition to his UB School of Law degree, Bellocchi earned a master of laws degree from Georgetown University, a master’s degree from the Joint Military Intelligence College and an MBA from the University of Virginia. Having been in a lot of classrooms, he’s finding his own way now at the head of the class.
“I have a lot of experience to share with up-and-coming mostly military officers,” he says, “and I think they appreciate what I’ve gone through.”