Sunday, April 07, 2019

Committee Chair Celebrates resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen

Kirstjen Nielsen
It didn’t take long for House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) to celebrate the resignation of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — but he placed full blame for the “humanitarian crisis” at the border on President Donald Trump.
“Hampered by misstep after misstep, Kirstjen Nielsen’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security was a disaster from the start,” Thompson said in a statement issued by the committee Sunday. “It is clearer now than ever that the Trump Administration’s border security and immigration policies — that she enacted and helped craft — have been an abysmal failure and have helped create the humanitarian crisis at the border.” 
He accused Nielsen of being “unable to lead and stand up to the president for his misguided, wall obsessed anti-immigrant agenda.”
However, the congressman added: “We cannot allow her to serve as a scapegoat for the situation at the border. Let me be clear, President Trump is to blame for making the situation at the border worse. His terrible and cruel policies have broken families apart and have caused chaos in our immigration system.”
Thompson presided over an acrimonious Homeland Security Committee hearing last month when Nielsen was attacked for allowing the detention of migrant children in cages after they were separated from their parents during Trump’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy. (She also falsely denied such a policy existed.)
Nielsen denied children had been kept in cages, contradicting photos from detention sites. “Sir, we don’t use cages for children,” Nielsen told Thompson.  “I’ve seen the cages,” the congressman snapped. “I just want you to admit that the cages exist.”
ed. note. WE can expect that her replacement will be just as bad. 

Before Nielsen’s abrupt resignation, hardline Trump adviser Stephen Miller was reportedly handed total control of border policy. Insider: “US border and immigration policy is now said to be under the control of one of the most hardline anti-immigration members of the Trump administration, following the weekend’s abrupt resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. On Sunday, Politico reported that the White House adviser Stephen Miller was behind a government-wide bid to tighten migration policy. The site said he lobbied for the replacement of government officials with those who share his views and telephoned mid-ranking officials at several government departments to angrily demand that they do more the halt the illegal movement of migrants into the country. CBS News also reported that Miller was behind a planned overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security, where President Trump reportedly didn’t believe the outgoing Nielsen shared his anti-migration stance.”

47,000 Migrant Children Kept From Families, DOJ Admits


Trump administration revealed that it may need up to two more years to identify thousands of migrant children who may have been separated from their families at the southern border. The depressing acknowledgement, made a full year after the separation policy was originally announced, underlines the long-term impact of one of the Trump administration’s most shameful acts. It also demonstrates how ill-equipped the government is when it comes to dealing with the consequences of Trump’s reckless war on immigrants. In a Friday night court filing, the Justice Department claimed it would need at least a year, and as much as two years, to analyze the roughly 47,000 cases of unaccompanied minors taken into federal custody from July 2017 to June 2018, when U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered both an end to the separations, and that the children be reunited with their families.”

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