The White House communications team and the Department of Homeland Security’s acting secretary office engaged in a tense argument last month after acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan proposed traveling down to the U.S.-Mexico border on World Refugee Day to celebrate and welcome migrants, including those who entered illegally, two senior administration officials told the Washington Examiner.
A senior public affairs official at DHS asked the White House in early June for permission to go down to the southern border with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on June 20. One person identified the official as acting DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Andrew Meehan.
“The wildly off base proposal was met with immediate concern as not being thought through,” one official told the Washington Examiner Monday evening.
A second official said the White House was concerned about the “optics” if two Cabinet officials were welcoming people who had illegally crossed into the country when President Trump has taken a hard stance against any type of illegal immigration, including against those who are seeking asylum on the southern border.
The DHS official trying to advance McAleenan’s proposal refused to accept the White House’s decision and “sparred with” several members of the White House strategic communications team, including then-director Mercedes Schlapp, over “multiple contentious phone calls,” the first source said. The second official said the fight lasted “weeks.”
“The obvious glaring concern was that the border crisis was about migrants and asylums, not refugees, DHS disagreed,” the first official wrote in a text, suggesting the the appearance would seem supportive of the people abusing the system instead of legitimate refugees.
The same official said Azar was not supportive of McAleenan’s idea and was not planning to go along for the trip. The second official said Azar was on board, but added neither secretary “understood the ramifications” of such a trip.
The June 20 World Refugee Day celebration may not have been greenlighted but McAleenan did go to the border on that date. He flew with a Washington Post reporter on Thursday. It’s not clear if Azar traveled down separately. An HHS spokeswoman would only say: “In the past year and a half, Secretary Azar has visited numerous Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities and seen the quality of care provided to unaccompanied alien children.
DHS did not deny that McAleenan’s office requested a trip on World Refugee Day and instead shared a schedule of events he took part in while on the border that day.
“On June 20, 2019, Acting Secretary McAleenan hosted the first ladies of Guatemala and Honduras for a tour of the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector,” a DHS official wrote in an email Thursday. “The trip included an overview of how transnational criminal and human smuggling organizations pair adult aliens with children they are not related to with the intent of posing as family units to help secure release into the U.S.”
The day after, June 21, the Washington Post published a story leaking confidential details of a nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation, which five current and former senior administration officials charged to the Washington Examiner that McAleenan leaked because he did not approve of the raids and sought to sabotage them.
“This is a DHS leadership team who has been at odds with the administration from the beginning. It’s a difference of world view,” the first official said Monday.
The DHS Office of Inspector General has taken up the formal investigation into the leak of government information in late June, which forced ICE to call off a nationwide operation, the Washington Examiner was first to report.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
[Also read: Trump has not built a single mile of new border fence after 30 months in office]
