NIELSEN ENFORCED CRUELTY AT THE BORDER. HER REPLACEMENT COULD BE WORSE.
Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.
The terms of Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the Southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Trump said on Twitter that Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.” Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.
She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. The president grew impatient with Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.
It’s no secret that Trump had a problem with Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. In May, stories surfaced about Trump publicly berating her in front of the entire Cabinet for failing to stop the crossings.
Sadly, Nielsen’s response to her boss’ displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. This past summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.
Nor was immigration the only issue on which Nielsen floundered. On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.
Nielsen’s departure is seen by some as part of a broader restructuring of her department. Just two days before meeting with the secretary, the president withdrew his nomination for the next head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying that he wanted to go in a “tougher direction.” Presumably he plans to chart a similar course with Nielsen’s successor.
For now, Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies. It comes as the swell of migrant families across the border pushes the system toward collapse.
Within this leadership vacuum, it seems likely that more influence will be exerted by Miller, who inspires and reinforces Trump’s harshest ideas on immigrants and immigration.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said of Nielsen’s departure:
“It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”
If Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.