We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its takedown of DHS Secretary Nielsen’s record:
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 berating her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. [...]
This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, rather weak. [...]
If Ms. Nielsen is inclined to perform one last act of public service, she should come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and a 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 agenda.
Michelle Goldberg calls on corporate boards and universities to hold Nielsen accountable for her willing role in the administration’s disastrous immigration polices:
What happens to Nielsen now can serve as an example to other people in the administration as they decide whether to just follow orders. By this, I don’t mean that people should scream at Nielsen in restaurants. Rather, those horrified by family separation should do whatever they can to deny Nielsen the sort of cushy corporate landing or prestigious academic appointment once customary for ex-administration officials. The fact that she evidently didn’t go as far as an erratic and out-of-control Trump wanted is immaterial; she should be a pariah for going as far as she did.
Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families. On Friday, the Trump administration said it could take up to two years to identify thousands of separated migrant children.
Stephen Collinson at CNN points out that when you work for a president who does not value the rule of law, you have a choice to make:
Sooner or later, many of the President's subordinates face the same dilemma. They can respect the law or they can work for Donald Trump. It's often just not possible to do both. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen became the latest Cabinet member to pay the price for not letting Trump do what he wants -- and on the issue he cares about more than any other -- when she was forced to resign on Sunday. It was a case of the Trump revolution eating one of its own, since Nielsen, an immigration hardliner, was seen as insufficiently doctrinaire despite becoming the face of the zero-tolerance immigration policy that led to child separations and caused outrage last year.
Dana Milbank:
It ended badly. It always does. Trump publicly mocked Attorney General Jeff Sessions before firing him. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reportedly fired while sitting on the toilet. Trump changes Cabinet secretaries like suits and will soon have temporary appointees in half a dozen Cabinet-level jobs. An honest help-wanted ad for a Trump Cabinet position would go like this:
“Flailing administration seeks Cabinet secretary willing to sacrifice dignity for employer’s vanity. No relevant experience needed. Successful candidate must be morally flexible. Familiarity with abusive personalities a plus. Willingness to be publicly humiliated required. Employee will be fired in about 12 months and thereafter be permanently unemployable. Non-disclosure agreement mandatory. Interested candidates should contact the prison warden.”
Meanwhile Josh Gerstein and Stephanie Beasley at Politico explain how Trump may have violated the law in naming CBP head McAleenan to the acting DHS Secretary role:
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and several legal experts are questioning President Donald Trump’s authority to bypass a senior Homeland Security official in order to install a hand-picked acting head of the Cabinet agency that oversees immigration enforcement. [...]
in a letter to Trump on Monday, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote that “the law of succession at the Department is clear” that upon Nielsen’s departure the temporary duty to lead the agency would pass to Undersecretary for Management Claire Grady.
The legal hitch could lead Trump to fire Grady, since she appears to be an obstacle to McAleenan being able to assume the top role at the agency.
Justin Glawe at The Daily Beast:
It’s unclear whether Trump will nominate McAleenan to serve as permanent Homeland Security secretary as the White House “purges” the department. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates and attorneys are waiting to see what happens next. One thing is certain: McAleenan’s actions at CBP under Trump and Obama do not portend a softening of immigration policy at DHS.
On a final note, writing at USA Today in a response to the president’s claim that America is “full,” J.D. Scholten (who ran against Rep. Steve King in Iowa’s 4th), explains that the opposite is true:
One of the biggest limits to growth in our Iowa economy is simply that we don’t have enough workers. So when President Donald Trump told prospective immigrants the other day that “our country is full,” I don’t see that. To me, it sounds like a wealthy New Yorker now living in the bubble of Washington, D.C., who hasn’t spent a lot of time in America’s heartland. [...]
In Greene County in 2017, I was told the grain elevator needed about 40 seasonal workers to help with the fall harvest. Those hiring were unable to find even one U.S. citizen to apply for the job. When I used that on the campaign trail, I saw a lot of head nodding, and I heard similar stories in small towns across the district. [...]
Iowa is not full. We’re a place to grow. Iowa’s state slogan is “Fields of Opportunity.” In order to grow, we need to revitalize our rural communities. To do so, we need a labor force, most likely dependent on immigration. If President Trump gets his way and closes our borders because of this misguided belief that our nation is full, it will limit our economy and devastate my beloved heartland.