Biden's decision to nominate Anthony Blinken to serve as the next secretary of state is a clear break from the Trump era in that Blinken is an actual expert and humanist, not another power-hungry sycophant, but Biden's choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security is even more stark.
Trump's Homeland secretaries have been among the worst members of his cabinet from the very beginning and that certainly includes current acting director and literal "Chad," Chad Wolf; a man who couldn't be formally confirmed even by a Republican-controlled Senate because he's too toxic.
Biden's choice to lead the agency, Alejandro Mayorkas, is an actual immigrant.
Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the U.S. as a political refugee, would be the first immigrant secretary and first Latino to lead the department, a bureaucratic juggernaut with more than 240,000 employees responsible for border and transportation security, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity, natural disaster response and other law enforcement functions.
"When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge. Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones," Mayorkas said on Twitter.
The Trump regime's biggest focus for the past two years -- or more specifically the focus of Trump's top adviser Stephen Miller -- has been to shut down as much of the legal immigration system as they possibly could.
They largely closed the border to asylum seekers. They rewrote the rules of asylum so that very few people even qualify. They forced people to stay in Mexico while their claims for asylum were slowly processed and ultimately denied. The Trump regime also turned their attention toward other parts of the world, even denying asylum to Iraqi and Afghani translators who worked with American forces before we abandoned them.
To select an actual political refugee to lead the agency is a sharp rebuke of Trumpian immigration policy and a clear signal of where things are headed under Biden.
Conservative are going to screech that Biden is "opening up the borders," or whatever, but who gives a shit?
Outside of immigration policy, I think this is also a clear signal that there will not be another Hurricane Maria in which the island of Puerto Rico was largely left to fend for itself by an incompetent and disinterested Trump regime. Mayorkas will oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
If Trump and Stephen Miller had their way, Mayorkas never would have been allowed into the country in the first place.