Campaign Action
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s role in the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy cannot be forgotten. It has been her mass deportation agents that have carried out the physical manifestation of this policy by ripping kids as young as one from the arms of weeping parents. Yet, at one point, Nielsen tried to claim this policy didn’t even exist.
“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” she tweeted in June. “This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border,” she followed up. Lie, and even bigger lie. This policy was the creation of the Trump administration, resulting in as many as 3,000 kids being torn from parents at the border. Now, under court order to reunite families by today, Nielsen continues to blatantly lie to our faces.
“Nielsen told lawmakers that the Trump administration is on track to meet a court deadline to reunify families,” Politico reports. But the administration has taken upon itself to deem some families are “ineligible” for reunification. How convenient. Possibly hundreds of others will not be reunited because parents may have already been deported. Outraged lawmakers from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) called her out during their meeting with her this week.
“It’s impossible,” said Congress member Juan Vargas of California. “She said that they would all be reunified by the court-mandated time, which is [Thursday]. That’s absolutely impossible. They still have hundreds of parents—they don’t even know where they are. They’ve deported them. How in the hell are they gonna reunify them by [Thursday]? They don’t even know where they are.”
“Nielsen is burying her head in the sand and denying they have a problem,” tweeted Congress member Ruben Gallego of Arizona.
If this hasn’t been infuriating enough, “Gallego said Nielsen also told members that DHS was cutting 1 percent from other departments to pay for family separations and detentions.” So, money that should perhaps be going to, oh, government arms doing work that’ll actually keep America running and safe are paying for terrorizing vulnerable families seeking asylum. MAGA.
“Most Americans would be very surprised to know that this mistake that this presidency has done in terms of separating families is actually costing us some real money and manpower when it comes to coming after the real criminals that we do find at the border,” Gallego said. Meanwhile, “Nielsen described the conclave in a brief exchange with reporters as ‘very productive’ and ‘very frank,’ a rosy outlook members disagreed with.”
A fairytale, much like the notion that Nielsen’s role leading Homeland Security has done anything to keep the homeland secure. What Nielsen has done is to help perpetrate human rights atrocities on American soil. She should resign, she should be forever shamed, and she should not be let off the hook, not now, tomorrow, or ever, for the trauma she helped inflict on families who came to our border for a chance to live.