Acting Homeland Security Secretary Stepping Down, Trump Says
“Kevin McAleenan has done an outstanding job as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security,” Trump tweeted while heading to Louisiana.
(Bloomberg) -- Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan is stepping down, President Donald Trump said on Friday night.
“Kevin McAleenan has done an outstanding job as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security,” Trump tweeted as he headed to a rally in Louisiana. “We have worked well together with Border Crossings being way down. Kevin now, after many years in Government, wants to spend more time with his family and go to the private sector.”
Trump added that he would announce his replacement next week, and that there were “many wonderful candidates.”
McAleenan became the acting secretary only in April, after Trump forced out his predecessor, Kirstjen Nielsen. He had been commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, part of Homeland Security.
But like Nielsen, McAleenan had to balance Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda and bellicose rhetoric on the issue with what the laws and the courts allowed him to do. Trump had repeatedly promised to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and to deter undocumented migrants from entering the country. But the number of border crossings were rising fast when Nielsen resigned and the wall remained unbuilt.
McAleenan also had to contend with fierce opposition from advocacy groups and scrutiny from Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Unlike Nielsen, he remained in an acting capacity.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement late Friday night that McAleenan’s exit “is the latest sign of this administration’s failed leadership, which has worsened the humanitarian situation at the border, injected pain and tragedy into countless lives and done nothing to improve the situation at the border.”
The president wanted a strong, law enforcement-type figure in charge of Homeland Security because he associated the sprawling department -- created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- mostly with border issues and not with its other missions such as cyber security, airport screening and natural disaster response, people familiar with the matter said after Nielsen’s resignation.
In an interview with the Washington Post earlier this month, McAleenan said he found himself isolated in the Trump administration and that he did not have the authority he needed within his own department.
Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee called McAleenan’s departure an “ouster.”
“This will only add to the chaos for a department where there are chronically too many leadership vacancies and positions held by unconfirmed, ‘acting’ officials,” Thompson said in a statement.
Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, said McAleenan “was dealt an incredibly tough hand when he took on the role of acting secretary this spring — we were in the midst of a humanitarian and security crisis at our southwest border. Fortunately, he was up to the task.”
In August, McAleenan became the target of intense criticism over the timing of immigration raids at food processing plants in Mississippi that took place days after a gunman in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people at a Walmart store, and apparently had singled out Latinos.
Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he wished the raids hadn’t happened after the mass shooting, McAleenan said “the timing was unfortunate.”
He added that the operation “was done with sensitivity” -- with caseworkers on hand, and agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, at local schools as liaisons.
McAleenan, a lawyer who practiced in California before taking a series of government jobs, issued a statement that he posted on Twitter shortly after Trump’s announcement on Friday night, thanking the president.
“With his support, over the last 6 months, we have made tremendous progress mitigating the border security and humanitarian crisis we faced this year, by reducing unlawful crossings, partnering with governments in the region to counter human smugglers and address the causes of migration and deploy additional border security resources,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Harney in Washington at jharney2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Shepard at mshepard7@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Linus Chua
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