Former officials predict Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to be shown the door as head of the Department of Homeland Security now that Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly is leaving.
“I don’t expect her to stay long after Gen. Kelly departs,” said a former senior DHS official who worked in the agency during President Trump’s first year in office.
John Sandweg, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2013 to 2014, said he’s long expected that any change to Nielsen’s status would happen when President Trump named a replacement for White House chief of staff John Kelly.
“I would suspect that they may package this with the chief of staff decision,” Sandweg said in an email. Nielsen and Kelly are close. She prepped Kelly for his confirmation hearing to lead DHS at the beginning of 2017, and after Kelly was confirmed, she went to work for the department.
Kelly left DHS for the White House last summer. Nielsen followed him and served as principal deputy chief of staff since the summer before being nominated at Kelly’s recommendation and confirmed to head DHS in late 2017.
Nielsen’s survival in the Trump administration was not expected after Trump said last weekend he was going to replace Kelly, reportedly because of a falling out between the two men.
Hours after Sandweg’s prediction, Trump announced in a series of tweets that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney would serve as his acting chief of staff, but there was no additional word on Nielsen.
Sandweg said Nielsen may choose to stay in her job through the confirmation of her predecessor, if one is named. But that could depend on who Trump picks to succeed her.
“If she was to leave, I wouldn’t be surprised if they named [Kevin] McAleenan as Acting since he has already been Senate confirmed,” Sandweg said about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner. “Kevin would make a fantastic secretary and is one of the most competent people I have worked with.”
McAleenan oversees 60,000 personnel at CBP, one of the largest law enforcement organizations in the world, and was cited by officials in a recent list of likely contenders to temporarily or permanently head DHS.
“It’s a reasonable temporary fix,” the first DHS official said. “But how long will it take to find and confirm the right person? And it would cause CBP to have to shift several people around to make up for the loss of its commissioner. They already lost Ron Vitiello, their deputy commissioner, to ICE.”
“That said, the administration still has the problem of no confirmed deputy secretary at DHS to step in when she leaves, and no obvious candidates to replace her — one who could be easily confirmed,” the official added.
McAleenan has been described as “brilliant” by multiple current and former DHS officials in conversations over the past month, but this official warned he may not be the “immigration hawk” the White House wants.
Regardless of the next secretary’s tone or intentions, he or she is likely to run into the same problems Kelly and Nielsen did with the legislative branch.
“[T]here is only so much that can be done under current law, and even the measures taken thus far haven’t stemmed the flow. Arrests are up, detention space will continue to be an issue, and the backlog of cases is only getting worse,” the official said.
Crises within DHS are complicating Nielsen’s anticipated exit. One former DHS official told the Washington Examiner last month he expected her to be let go in late 2018, but the formation of a caravan of Central American migrants forced Trump to keep her on.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl had died a week earlier in Border Patrol custody, prompting questions of why the department had not publicly reported the incident and raising more questions for Nielsen and McAleenan.
On Friday, Nielsen ignored a question about her status in the administration when asked about it on Fox News.
“We talk almost every day,” she said of President Trump. “We are aligned on the need for border security, the need to ensure the safe and orderly flow. It’s my privilege to work on behalf of the American people, and I’ll continue to do it and make sure that DHS has the support, tools, and resources they need to do this job,” she said.
