Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf denied accusations made about the Trump administration by a former department colleague.
Last week, Miles Taylor, a former senior official who served at the DHS from 2017 to 2019, wrote an op-ed last week in the Washington Post, referring to President Trump as “dangerous” for the United States. He also endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Taylor’s timing, Wolf said, should tell voters all they need to know about his motivations.
“While Mr. Taylor was at the department, he was a fierce advocate for the policies that we pursued at DHS every day, left over 14 months ago and decided 75, 80 days before an election to start speaking out,” Wolf said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “So, I think most reasonable Americans understand what that is. It’s politics and nothing more.”
Taylor laid out a number of accusations about the Trump administration’s oversight of the DHS, claiming the president made “absurd executive requests” about border security at all hours of the day and night to DHS officials and was obsessed with building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president,” Taylor wrote in his op-ed. “His first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.”
Wold denied Taylor’s claims that Trump encouraged officials to run the department under the guidance of news personalities and tried to reinstate the zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy that separated migrant children from their families.
“The description that you outline there is nothing that I have specifically heard,” Wolf said, adding, “We have not instituted any policies, any programs since, I believe, June when that ended back in 2018, the zero tolerance, and so this idea of somehow resurrecting this has never been on my radar.”
