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.