With Nielsen Out and
Stephen Miller Driving Immigration Policy, Critics Fear 'The Worst Is Yet to
Come'
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"The
worst is yet to come."
So wrote Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce on
Monday following the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—and
as signs that senior White House adviser and xenophobe Stephen
Miller is exerting more control over immigration policy.
As Common
Dreams reported,
President Trump announced Sunday that Nielsen would be leaving her position.
During her time as Homeland Security secretary, she oversaw widely condemned
policies including the forcible separation of families and the caging of
children at the southern border.
Commenting on her tenure, the ACLU tweeted Sunday: "From the family
separation crisis she created and defended, to restricting immigrants' rights
to seek asylum, to relentless and pointless efforts to build Trump's border
wall, Nielsen's department served as the key to Trump's unconstitutional and
anti-immigrant agenda of fear."
With such a record, progressive
lawmakers like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) welcomed her
departure.
"Nielsen will go down in history as
presiding over an exceptionally cruel regime that separated families and
violated human rights," Jayapal said. "I welcome her resignation and
believe she should be held accountable for the abuses that happened under her
watch."
At the same time, reports that the Trump team
is reportedly eyeing a successor with an even more hard-line approach to
immigration triggered alarm.
"When even the most radical voices in the administration aren't radical
enough for President Trump," said Sen.
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, "you know he's completely lost touch with
the American people."
EDITOR’S
NOTE: In my view, Trump’s obsession with the border and hatred for immigrants
takes us on an inevitable course to Border Patrol or US troops
opening fire on immigrants, either en masse or individually.
They might even
receive orders from Trump to do so. After all, he is already telling them to
violate court orders to block immigrants from seeking asylum and to take
children from their parents. Is it such a leap that he would order immigrants
to be shot down? Who would stop him? Certainly not Stephen Miller.
- Will Collette
It's no secret that Mr. Trump had a
problem with Ms. 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. Last May, stories surfaced about Mr. Trump publicly berating
her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings.
CNN also reported:
A source familiar with Nielsen's
thinking told CNN Nielsen is
taking this as a relief. Nielsen "believed the situation was becoming
untenable" with Trump "becoming increasingly unhinged about the
border crisis and making unreasonable and even impossible requests," a
senior administration official told CNN on
Sunday.
One such request that proved to be a
point of contention, according to new reporting
by NBC News, was over Trump's
desire to reinstate the policy of family separations. The outlet reported:
According to two of the sources, Nielsen
told Trump that federal court orders prohibited the Department of Homeland
Security from reinstating the policy, and that he would be reversing his own
executive order from June that ended family separations.
That wasn't the only apparent roadblock.
From the Times:
The president called Ms. Nielsen at home
early in the mornings to demand that she take action to stop migrants from
entering the country, including doing things that were clearly illegal, such as
blocking all migrants from seeking asylum. She repeatedly noted the limitations
imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements, and international
obligations.
A likely force behind such impossible
requests was Miller. In a separate story, CNNreported that
Miller "played key a role in Nielsen's ouster," and his
"heightened influence within the West Wing has been aided by the
president, who recently told aides in an Oval Office meeting that Miller was in
charge of all immigration and border related issues in the White House,
according to a person familiar with the meeting."
Given this backdrop, Pierce concluded:
[I]t is something of a national crisis
that even as loyal an apparatchik as Nielsen wasn't cruel enough to suit this
administration*, which, in a tragic misallocation of resources, cages children
and not Stephen Miller. But this is the administration* she had chosen, and
nothing more becomes her public service than her leaving of it. The worst is
yet to come.
Nielsen may be just one of the people
Miller has targeted for ousting. According
to Politico, the White
House adviser has been "telephoning mid-level officials at several federal
departments and agencies to angrily demand that they do more to stem the flow
of immigrants into the country, according to two people familiar with the
calls," the outlet reported.
Miller was also behind withdrawal of the
nomination of acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Ronald
Vitiello to lead ICE—a move taken so that the White House could take the agency
in a "tougher direction," Politico reported.
As for Nielsen's job, Trump announced
that Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan would serve as
acting DHS secretary. With one senior DHS official saying McAleenan
is "not an ideologue or fire breather" on immigration and Miller now
formally holding the reigns on the matter, however, it's unclear how long he'll
stay in the role.
