Ms. Colleen Piccone serves in the Senior Executive Position of Associate Chief Counsel, New York, which is responsible for providing legal services to the northeast region of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Ms. Piccone has over 30 years of experience in the Office of Chief Counsel. She began her federal career in 1990 at the U.S. Customs Service. Ms. Piccone served as a Staff Attorney in New York before she spent two years as a Special Assistant United States Attorney, in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, where she exclusively prosecuted border violations, including the first prosecution of a company for importing goods made using prison labor in China. In 1998, she was selected as the Deputy Associate Chief Counsel, New York and in 2016 she was appointed to her current role as Associate Chief Counsel, New York
After the destruction of the New York office on September 11th, Ms. Piccone was part of the management team that moved the office four times, most recently back to the new One World Trade Center earlier this year. As a charter employee of the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2003, she led the northeast team in its new trajectory to advance robust legal services to all of the merged components within the newly formed CBP. In addition, in 2004, she completed a detail to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of the
Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), where she created and led the first Customs Enforcement Legal Division, which was the precursor to the current Criminal Law Section, Homeland Security Investigations Law Division of OPLA.
Under Ms. Piccone’s leadership, CBP’s northeast legal staff has earned an outstanding reputation for being client-oriented, for excelling in all areas of CBP’s broad legal portfolio, and for fully engaging in CBP’s important mission.
Ms. Piccone is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Brooklyn Law School. She recently completed the program at CBP’s Leadership Institute. Her exceptional service has been recognized through awards from the Secretary, the Commissioner, the World Customs Organization, and the Attorney General.
