New DHS Secretary Embraces Conservative Immigration Reforms
Will Racke, Daily Caller, December 12, 2017
Newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen sounded right at home among the Trump administration’s immigration hawks on Tuesday, calling for major policy changes during one of her first public addresses as DHS chief.
Appearing alongside Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Baltimore, she laid out several border security priorities for the department in the wake of another terrorist attack in New York City, but it was her remarks on structural immigration reform that stood out.
Nielsen backed two significant changes to the U.S. immigration system — curtailing family-based immigration and doing away with the diversity visa lottery.
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Nielsen’s remarks Tuesday morning are likely to assuage, for now, some conservative immigration reformers who have expressed concern about her previous remarks on amnesty for DACA recipients and the need for the border wall. Nielsen has also been criticized for her connections to homeland security officials in the George W. Bush administration, such as Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, who pushed for amnesty while in office and were prominent members of the “Never Trump” contingent.
In her first press conference as DHS chief, though, Nielsen sounded like a disciple of Sessions’, the administration’s leading immigration hawk. She backed the border wall, saying it was needed to “stem the tide of illegal crossings,” and called on Congress to tighten rules on asylum claims and the resettlement of so-called unaccompanied children.
Nielsen also joined Sessions in connecting the immigration system to the spate of gruesome killings by MS-13, which has seen a resurgence in several U.S. metro areas including Boston, Long Island and Washington, D.C. The transnational gang has been able to thrive, she said, in part because it can recruit young illegal immigrants who have been resettled in the interior of the country by U.S. authorities.
The growth of MS-13 is a “deadly consequence of unsecured borders and failed immigration policies,” Nielsen said.
