Nielsen Out at Department of Homeland Security

Kirstjen Nielsen has been escorted out of her position as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary for DHS.

As heinous as Nielsen is — and she is truly terrible, with children being caged and multiple migrants (the exact number of which I fear we do not yet know) having died in U.S. custody on her watch — I can't even be glad about this, because whoever replaces her is going to be even worse. If she stays, it's bad. If she goes, it's bad. It's all bad.

[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link.] Paula Reid at CBS News reports:

Nielsen tweeted late Sunday that she has "agreed to stay on as secretary through Wednesday, April 10th to assist with an orderly transition and ensure that key DHS missions are not impacted." Her departure is a part of a massive DHS overhaul engineered and directed by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to a senior U.S. official. It's unclear whether Nielsen is deciding to leave voluntarily, or whether she has been pressured to resign.

...Nielsen's announced exit comes two days after Mr. Trump announced he wants to go in a "tougher" direction in his nomination for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, after originally announcing Ron Vitiello would head ICE. Nielsen's departure also means acting heads will soon be running DHS, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Emphasis mine. Stephen Miller is a hardline nativist, white supremacist, anti-immigration extremist. That Nielsen, who has vigorously defended Donald Trump's vile, Miller-authored immigration policies, isn't considered to be extremist enough for Miller is an indication of just how ugly this is going to get.

In August of 2017, I tweeted: "Be wary of people who advise shutting down the borders to keep people out — b/c soon enough they'll be explaining why they're keeping us in."

This has always been my greatest fear about the Trump Regime's plans for the southern border: The war on immigrants is despicable and cruel on its face, and it is also a manufactured crisis the endgame of which is justification for imposing strict authoritarian regulations, including control of our movement, on the entire population.