Allies to President Trump are furious with acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan for how they say he threw his boss and department officials under the bus in a recent interview.
“At a time when President Trump is facing the most partisan attacks of his administration, one of his own Cabinet-level officials aired his grievances with the president in the court of public opinion,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council. “Regardless of your readers’ political leanings: Left, right, or in the middle, the airing of grievances by a Cabinet-level official must be considered dishonest and unforgivable.”
McAleenan tried to distance himself from Trump, acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, and acting Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli in the Washington Post piece. Judd was widely rumored to be interested in the CBP job when McAleenan got it in 2017, but told the Washington Examiner he had not applied for it. He said he was surprised at how the acting secretary publicly described the 240,000-person department.
“Mr. McAleenan is responsible for the security of this nation from attacks by bad actors both foreign and domestic; yet he announced to the world that he is unhappy with his job and that he doesn’t have the authority he was promised. He further implied that the department was in disarray,” said Judd. “What better time would there be for a terrorist attack? Acting Secretary McAleenan’s public comments would be akin to a battle field general informing a hostile military that he and his troops weren’t prepared for battle.”
Trump has remained silent about McAleenan since the publishing of the story Tuesday. A second person who is familiar with the White House’s strategy said, “Right now, everything is impeachment.”
The story credits McAleenan with having “guided the United States out of a crisis at the southern border.”
In March and April 2017, roughly 16,000 migrants were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border each month. Over the next two years, that number rose and, in May, surpassed 144,000. Judd said McAleenan did not do enough, including the lobbying of Congress to pass immigration reforms, starting in early 2017 to maintain the low levels. “Those numbers led to the deaths of multiple individuals in our custody including an 7-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy,” Judd said. “By anyone’s assessment, Mr. McAleenan’s time as commissioner must be seen as a failure.”
A former senior CBP official who worked with McAleenan described being “surprised” to read he felt isolated in the Trump administration.
“Ever since Mr. McAleenan became the Acting Commissioner at CBP he insured that he alone had access to DHS and then the White House, on behalf of the Agency. His isolation was self-imposed,” the official wrote. Since April, 17 White House political appointees have left Homeland Security.
Former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan said he did not agree with McAleenan’s statement that DHS responsibilities go unchanged despite changes in administration.
“I’ve done this job 34 years. Enforcement of immigration law has always been controversial, has always been emotional, has always been political,” Homan said. “Our job has always been to execute the mission within the framework provided us.”
Administrations have different priorities, he added, noting Obama’s prioritized arrests inside the country of illegal immigrants with serious criminal histories, instead of any person found to be in the country illegally and charged with smaller crimes. The Obama administration walked back Bush-era policies, while Trump brought some back.
A senior administration official who asked to remain anonymous challenged McAleenan’s description of himself as “apolitical.”
“What kind of cabinet head sits down with the Washington Post to openly grieve his boss, ding his own agency heads, and then self-proclaim he’s the missing link separating an immigration utopia between two parties? Someone who has exclusively donated to Democrats his entire life isn’t apolitical, it’s someone who is of fundamentally different ilk than those who put him there,” the official wrote.
Homan, rumored to be on the short list for DHS secretary or White House immigration czar, also said McAleenan’s refusal to use the term “illegal alien” was “demeaning to every Border Patrol and ICE agent out there enforcing the law as the laws are written.”
“To try to say you’re not going to use legal terms is a slippery slope that we go down that makes enforcing the law a choice rather than an obligation,” Homan said, adding he was not out to replace McAleenan. “Kevin’s done some good things, but he needs to understand that we are in a fight for this country because the Left wants open borders. The Left wants to abolish ICE and they want to end immigration enforcement. And it’s a political fight whether he likes it or not.”
McAleenan’s office did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment.
