The Daily - The Brief, Controversial Tenure of Kirstjen Nielsen

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out as secretary of homeland security, even after carrying out and defending President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. We look at why that wasn’t enough. Guest: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Secretary of Homeland Security was forced out of her job, even after carrying out and defending President Trump's most restrictive immigration policies. Why that wasn't enough. It's Tuesday, April 9th. Caitlin, describe what happened over the weekend. So on Sunday, Kirsten Nielsen, who's the secretary at the Department of Homeland Security,

she's the nation's highest-ranking immigration officer. She goes to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with President Trump. Kaitlin Dickerson covers immigration for The Times. And he, in recent weeks, has been very riled up publicly over an increasing number of people crossing the border, especially families who seek asylum, who have legal protections

that mean they have to be allowed into the country. So the secretary arrives at her meeting with a list of ideas for how to address this problem. And she thinks she and the president are going to come up with a way forward. But instead, a few hours later, the president sends a tweet announcing that she will be leaving her job. Breaking news here on CNN from the White House. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, has resigned. President Trump made the announcement via Twitter. In a tweet, the president said, quote, Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, will be leaving her position, and I would like to thank her for her service.

So it appears that the president is swinging the revolving door yet again, trying to install new people in his administration to carry out his bidding. That sounds like a meeting that went very poorly for the secretary. Clearly, they were not able to come up with a solution that both could agree on. And by tweeting her resignation, I think what we're politely suggesting is that he fired her. Fired her. Yes, exactly. that he fired her. Fired her. Yes, exactly. So what is the history between President Trump and Secretary Nielsen? So Secretary Nielsen takes her job at the end of 2017. She's replacing her former boss, John Kelly, who went to be President Trump's chief of staff. And she takes on this role as basically the person who has to approve any new policy that's going to be introduced along the border. And it's at this period of time when

I think the president is settling into his role. He's fired up about really coming up with some hard evidence that he can point to ahead of the midterm elections, for example, and say, like, look, I'm keeping my campaign promises and I'm lowering immigration really dramatically. So right away, she's faced with aggressive ideas for how to prevent people from coming to the United States. And the first one is family separation. And what do we know about how Nielsen responds to that very controversial policy when it is first introduced to her? She slow walks it. We reported in December of 2017 that a family separation policy had reached her desk for that final signature, and it took her four

months to approve it, during which time she and President Trump clashed quite a bit. She had questions about the legality of it. She had questions about the practicality and how the public was going to respond. And she had just a lot of reservations about moving forward. But ultimately, she agreed, and the policy was introduced in a formal way in April. Quit separating the kids. They're separating the children. Mr. President, don't you have kids? Don't you have kids, Mr. President? Shame, shame, shame. I don't believe in this.

This is not America. This is not our country. This is not what we should be doing. Shame, shame, shame. This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. Shame on everybody that separates children This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. Shame on everybody that separates children and allows them to stay at the other side of the border,

fearing death, and allow the secretary to come here and lie. Calling me a liar or fighting words, I'm not a liar. We've never had a policy for family separation. And let's be clear, if an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States, they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family. This is not a controversial idea. Internally, she's, if not resisting, she's certainly questioning and slowing down a lot of these policies. And then externally, to the public, she's having to defend them and really look like the face of them. And that ends up being something that she does actually over and over again in her job.

And remind us what ends up happening to the family separation policy. So President Trump stopped the practice himself by signing an executive order. I consider it to be a very important executive order. It's about keeping families together. But it didn't matter because a few days later, a federal judge intervened, deemed the practice unconstitutional. And he didn't stop there. He said that families who've been separated as a result of the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy be reunited within 30 days. The order says kids under five must be back with

their parents within 14 days from now. So sort of a resounding disavowal of this policy. By the legal system. Exactly. And so even though she'd pushed back against it, Secretary Nielsen ends up taking the blame. So what's another example of something that she expresses internal qualms about, but then goes out in defense publicly. So one of the next policies to be introduced was an idea to limit asylum pretty significantly so that people could only apply if they showed up at a legal port of entry. Whereas beforehand, people could and did very often show up anywhere along the border, present themselves to a border agency, ask for protection, and they were ushered

into this legal process. The idea was to say, you can't do that anymore. You have to show up at a specific office, which is, of course, a pretty tall order for somebody who's coming from Central America with, you know, maybe a cell phone, maybe not, not a whole lot of resources. They don't always know exactly where these offices exist. You do not need to break the law of this country by entering illegally to claim asylum. If you are seeking asylum, go to a port of entry. But as Nielsen pointed out to the president, it was very hard to justify because immigration law explicitly says that you can request asylum regardless of where you enter. that you can request asylum regardless of where you enter. So again, Nielsen is saying inside the White House,

hey, this might not be legal. I have reservations about it, but it nevertheless gets implemented. And as you've said, she's the decider. So she signs off on it. Exactly. And it's important to point out that when Nielsen pushed back against President Trump, it wasn't a reflection of her being a liberal on immigration or having a more sympathetic view toward asylum seekers. She just happened to be the face of an entire agency full of people who work in immigration enforcement, but who still made clear to her that there were going to be legal and logistical roadblocks to putting these ideas into place.

And what happens to that port of entry policy that would limit the number of locations that people can apply for asylum? Very quickly after, it's blocked by federal courts, and it remains that way. A district court ruled that the ban conflicts with immigration law. So this was the executive branch trying to very clearly contradict laws that were approved by the legislative branch.

And now the Supreme Court has refused to step in to unblock the ban. So her legal reservations are well-founded. In other words, her advice to the president is correct, even if it's ignored. That's right. Her analysis is sound because each time she's pushed back, she's been right. And these ideas have been blocked. Do any of these policies that we're describing, family separation, limiting the locations at which people can seek asylum, do any of them succeed in curbing the flow of migrants, even for the very short period of time that they're in place before they are legally challenged. They don't. New numbers show a 400 percent, 4-0-0 that is, 400 percent increase over just last year. Last October, we saw a record number of families seek asylum in the United States. This is after family separation is introduced.

And every month since then, the numbers have gotten even higher. CBP officials say Border Patrol agents are on pace for apprehensions and encounters with more than 100,000 migrants in March. So not only are these policies being blocked in court for the very short period of time that they were ever in place, they're not doing their job of limiting the flow of migrants. They're not. The numbers keep going up. And some people would argue that maybe the policies weren't left in place for long enough to show any concrete outcome. And we can't know that for sure. But what we do know is that these policies that Nielsen was pushing back on saying they're not going to work, didn't work. And the numbers have continued to rise. And so what does that do to

the president's relationship to Nielsen? She's, in a sense, being vindicated, but the problem she's there to solve is only getting worse. That's right. She's simultaneously sort of being vindicated, if you look at it from a legal standpoint. But from a relationship standpoint, she's the face, you know, in President Trump's eyes of these failures. Christian Nielsen appears to be on shaky ground. That's according to a New York Times report. Nielsen told colleagues that she was close to resigning Wednesday after being berated by the president in front of the entire cabinet. Nothing sets him off more than immigration.

And I'm told that meeting on Wednesday in the cabinet room was very heated, was incredibly heated. She spoke back to him about it, tried to defend herself. So it's in this context of the policies that are being introduced being blocked in the courts, the number of people crossing the border rising, and Trump's relationship with Secretary Nielsen falling apart, that he comes up with his most aggressive idea yet. Another day, another threat from President Trump,

and today he is threatening to shut down the southern border. Where he wants to completely seal the border, 100 percent, not let anybody come into the U.S. And if they don't stop him, we're closing the border. They'll close it and we'll keep it closed for a long time. I'm not playing games. And how exactly would that work? Well, we shouldn't assume that the president had any particular policy in his mind when he tweeted that he wanted to seal the border. We can assume, though, that he wasn't talking about, for example, cargo moving back and forth or people with actual visas and permission to come into the United States,

but really that he's talking about shutting down asylum and shutting down the ability of people who don't previously have permission to come into the United States. And the policy that we know has come closest to achieving that goal, one that's been kicking around in Washington for some months now, would be to get rid of asylum as we know it. It would no longer allow anyone to apply for asylum in the United States. And instead, people who needed that status or wanted that status would have to stay in their home country, similar to the way that Syrian refugees apply to come to the United States, apply from home, wait many months, go through lots of vetting and background checks, and then only if they're approved, they would be allowed

to come here. And I guess what could be a more extreme version of limiting asylum than literally telling people you cannot come to this country and apply for asylum? I don't think there is a more extreme version because I think this idea means eliminating asylum. It goes away. And as best we understand it, what was Secretary Nielsen's response to this idea? From what we know, it's been very similar to the way she reacted to family separation, to that idea to significantly limit asylum to the ports of entry, which is that this is going to be challenged by the courts immediately. It's going to be a huge lift to get a policy like this introduced to work out the logistics, and all of it will be for naught

because it'll be enjoined by the courts. And it's that oppositional and resistant stance that she's in when she walks into the White House for her meeting with the president. It's unclear who threw up their hands first or second or whether they both did it. But what we know is that the president did not leave her with an option, that he at least decided this isn't going to work. You're out. And she was by the end of that night. And so what that means is the Homeland Security Secretary who oversaw some of the most controversial and aggressive immigration policies this country has ever seen, even she wasn't aggressive enough for President Trump, and so now she's gone. And he's looking for a replacement who will go even further.

We'll be right back. So, Caitlin, who is the president turning to to replace Nielsen as he looks for somebody to go further than she was willing to go? He's turning to Kevin McAleenan, who's currently the head of United States Customs and Border Protection. That's the agency that oversees both the customs officers who you meet at the airport when you've gone on vacation abroad, and then the Border Patrol. Those are the police, the boots on the ground along the border. And McAleenan is known as sort of a policy wonk, really smart and reasonable guy who's willing to work with Democrats, and somebody who served under President Obama as well. He's got more than 10 years of experience at the agency. People know him as this reasonable guy, but when you dig a little bit deeper, you know, McAleenan was inspired to get into Homeland Security work right after 9-11. And at CBP,

especially most recently when he was overseeing this agency, it really became known as a sort of policy engine with him at the center of it coming up with ways to turn President Trump's ideas into actual policies that could be carried out. You know, if DHS is this agency run out of Washington that's overseeing all of this work, it was McAleenan staff members that were actually physically taking children away from their parents, that were physically turning asylum seekers away at the border or telling them to go elsewhere or to wait in line. So now he's moving into this role where he's got even more power.

But I think we can expect that he'll continue to do what he was doing before, which was take President Trump's ideas that are sort of extreme and that aren't necessarily encumbered by the immigration laws, norms, history, and he'll try to translate them into something that's practical and that can be introduced on the ground. So even though he might seem moderate at first glance, he's actually someone who the president trusts to put these more restrictive, maybe even extreme policies into practice. And he's been involved in doing that already. Now he's being elevated to do it at an even higher level. Exactly. And I guess that all makes sense. If Nielsen is seen as too reluctant

to put these policies into practice, then the president would turn to somebody who is willing to do that. That's right, who's willing to try. But remember that McAleenan is going to run up against the exact same legal framework and logistical challenges that anybody else in that role is going to. Right. So if these policies are going to run into legal trouble in the courts, regardless of who is leading the agency. What does it matter in the end if the leader of the Department of Homeland Security is gung-ho about the president's policies or is reluctantly saying yes, as Nielsen was? I think you can look at that question a couple of different ways. On one hand, you're right that it's not going to make a huge difference who's

sitting in the office at the head of the Homeland Security Department, because no matter what they introduce, if it violates the immigration law, they're going to wind up in court. But another way of looking at it is, you know, family separation only existed as an official sort of policy for, what, 45 days under zero tolerance? Not a very long period of time before it had to end. zero tolerance, not a very long period of time before it had to end. But still, I don't think that very many people are going to argue that family separation was a small thing or something that didn't affect very many people. I mean, I think it had a huge impact. So I do think that if you have a hawk running the Homeland Security Department, even when they're sort of encumbered by the existing legal framework, they can make some pretty big changes, even if ultimately those changes wind up in court. I think that Kevin McAleenan has two things going for him in President Trump's eyes. The first, like we said, is that he knows the policies and he knows

the situation on the ground like the back of his hand. And the second thing is that he's shown a willingness to follow President Trump's lead. And so he may be the person who's best positioned to come up with the most legal ways to achieve President Trump's goals. And even if the policies that he comes up with don't remain in place in the long term, they might at least exist long enough to give President Trump something to point to and show his supporters when they ask, where are you on these campaign promises? Where are you on this idea of, if not sealing the border, significantly decreasing the number of immigrants coming to the United States? So even if these policies are ultimately blocked by the courts, it feels like it's important to this president to have someone at the Department of Homeland Security who is willing to try them. And that may be enough. I think in President Trump's heart of hearts,

right, he would hope that he would find not only somebody who's willing to try, but somebody who's going to succeed. He wants aggressive policies to be instituted in the long term. But I think it's better in his mind than nothing to have somebody who's willing to try. And as we know, politically, it's better than nothing because then the president can point to these policies that he tried to introduce if only it wasn't for the courts who had blocked him or if only it wasn't for Congress who blocked him. Right. My intention was there. Somebody else is at fault for not working. Exactly. He has at least an attempt to meet these campaign promises

to point to when voters ask, why haven't you made a significant change? So I think that having a more aggressive leader in place who's more willing to introduce these policies when they get stuck in the courts, it allows Trump to blame the courts rather than his own administration for getting in his way. He can say, look, I tried, but these judges are blocking me. stuck in the courts, it allows Trump to blame the courts rather than his own administration

for getting in his way. He can say, look, I tried, but, you know, these judges are blocking me. Whereas it wasn't just the judges blocking him with Secretary Nielsen, it was her too. If Congress is not going to change the law, and I think the assumption is that they are not going to do that anytime soon when it comes to basic immigration law, they are not going to do that anytime soon when it comes to basic immigration law. Is the president right to suggest that the current system is broken and the only way to fix it is to test these new ideas, even if they push the boundaries of the law? I would say yes to the first part of your question. Most people agree that the system is broken. But when it comes to fixing the problem, I think, you know,

what are you trying to fix? In the president's mind, the problem is the vast number of people coming here to seek asylum. His idea of a fix would decrease that number. But other people see the problem as not that people are coming here to seek asylum at all, but the ways that we're dealing with them. You know, we don't have space to place people physically in custody when they enter. We don't have judges to hear their cases for years and years. So if you see that as the problem, then— He's not really addressing those. He's not addressing those problems.

And I think that's because a lot of people who agree with the president are concerned that if we come up with better systems for processing asylum seekers, we make it more organized and efficient and in some cases comfortable, that all that will do is encourage more and more people to come. And again, if the numbers themselves are what you see as the problem, then making the system better only makes it worse. the system better only makes it worse. Kaitlin, what does all of this tell us about where President Trump plans to go on immigration? I think it shows that President Trump is going to continue full steam ahead to achieve his immigration goals. And that, you know, if there are people, even informed career officials who want to stand in the way of that, they're going to be pushed out because he's very committed to the goal of limiting the number of people who come to the border, regardless of the many legal challenges he's already faced, those that

are sure to come, the public reaction, all these other things notwithstanding, we're not seeing any signs of slowing down. I think this week is actually an indicator of a ramping up of these goals. In other words, the gloves are coming off, even though in a lot of people's minds, they thought the gloves were already off. That's right. It's like another set of gloves are coming off. Kaitlin, thank you very much. Thank you. On Monday, the Times reported that President Trump plans to push out more officials from the Department of Homeland Security,

including the department's general counsel and the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as he seeks to carry out his harder-line approach to immigration. A few hours later, in the latest legal setback to that approach, a federal judge blocked a Trump administration policy that required those seeking asylum to wait in Mexico rather than in the U.S. while their cases made their way through U.S. immigration court. The judge found that the policy violated federal law. Here's what else you need to know today. Today, the United States is continuing to build its maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian regime.

I am announcing our intent to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including its Quds Force, as a foreign terrorist organization, in accordance with Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. On Monday, the Trump administration said that it was designating a powerful arm of the Iranian military as a foreign terrorist organization, the first time that the U.S. has classified part of any country's government as such a threat. We're doing it because the Iranian regime's use of terrorism as a tool of statecraft makes it fundamentally different from any other government. The move was debated at the highest levels of the administration, with top officials at the Defense Department and the CIA opposing the designation, arguing it could justify Iranian attacks against the U.S. and its allies. But the president's

national security advisor, John Bolton, and his secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, advocated for the decision, arguing the designation would further isolate Iran by discouraging businesses from working with its military. This historic step will deprive the world's leading state sponsor of terror, the financial means to spread misery and death around the world. In response, Iran's government said it was designating the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, as a terrorist organization as well. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.