Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen abruptly resigned from the Trump regime last night after more than a year of doing virtually anything Trump told her to do, but what finally forced her out of the government was refusing to do what Trump told her not to do.
From the Associated Press:
“I have determined that it is the right time for me to step aside,” Nielsen wrote in her resignation letter. “I hope that the next secretary will have the support of Congress and the courts in fixing the laws which have impeded our ability to fully secure America’s borders and which have contributed to discord in our nation’s discourse.”
Though Trump aides were eyeing a staff shake-up at Homeland Security and had already withdrawn the nomination for another key immigration post, the development Sunday was unexpected.
NBC News reports that Nielsen resigned because Trump wanted her resume the practice of separating virtually every family that crosses the border.
The funny/not-funny thing about that is that Trump signed an executive order last year to end that policy.
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.
Trump has been pushing this policy since January, the sources said, when the numbers of undocumented immigrants crossing the border began to rise.
Nielsen supported Trump's policies from the very beginning so I don't believe she deserves credit now for refusing to place herself in a legally-incoherent and untenable position.
Nielsen has more or less resigned because her boss is a raging idiot, not because she disagrees with the policy of separating families at the border.
"I share the president's goal of securing the border," Ousted DHS Secretary Nielsen says in first public remarks since resignation https://t.co/QsImEiMAOd pic.twitter.com/UbtKuGiCsF
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 8, 2019
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan is now the acting secretary of DHS and I suppose we'll just have to wait and see if Trump is going to order him to violate his own executive orders.