Members of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory council that conducts recommendations on policy have quit over the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, writing in a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that if they had been consulted over the policy in the first place, “we would have observed that routinely taking children from migrant parents was morally repugnant, counter-productive and ill-considered.”
The administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy has resulted in as many as 3,000 migrant children being kidnapped from parents at the border. The four members—including former secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig and former director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew Olsen—write that ”we cannot tolerate association with the immigration policies of this administration, nor the illusion that we are consulted on these matters."
Two other resigning members, former Democratic Congress member Elizabeth Holtzman and former DHS deputy general counsel David Martin, also sent separate letters condemning further hateful and racist actions and proposals from the administration, including the Muslim bans, the stupid border wall, and the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has left hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in limbo.
“DHS has been transformed into an agency that is making war on immigrants and refugees,” Holtzman wrote to Nielsen. “These actions,” Martin said, “have fueled polarization, alienated state and local governments, and moved us much further from a sustainable, effective, and strategically sensible immigration enforcement program.”
There is no honor in this administration, which failed to reunite all children under age five with their parents by Judge Dana Sabraw’s July 10 deadline, is fighting his ruling that prevents the deportation of these families while examining their asylum options, never had a plan in place to voluntarily return all children to their parents in the first place, and now wants to lock up migrant families together.
“I do think it's important for the American people to see,” Holtzman told The Washington Post, “that not everybody connected with the government is a brute, is a lawbreaker and that actually some of us do have a measure of conscience.” Still, it’s a shame that it’s the people of conscience who are the ones resigning when the ones who should be gone and held accountable for their criminality are the white supremacists and evildoers at the top.