By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
President Trump’s third Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen revealed Tuesday why she resigned from the department in April: Trump did not like the word “no.”
“What led me to resign is there were a lot of things that there were those in the administration who thought that we should do, and… it became clear that saying no and refusing to do it myself was not going to be enough,” Nielsen in an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington D.C.
Nielsen’s replacement in April, Kevin McAleenan, is resigning at the end of the month as Trump looks for a fifth Homeland Security secretary in less than three years.
When pressed about the controversial child separation policy, Nielsen defended her actions, saying her job was to “enforce the law, not to separate families.”
But Nielsen admitted the policy was enacted before determining how to reunite the migrant families.
“What I regret is that we haven’t solved it, and what I regret was that that information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place and that’s why the practice was stopped through an executive order,” Nielsen said.
Trump’s purported top picks for the next Homeland Security secretary – Mark Morgan, acting CBP commissioner, or Ken Cuccinelli, acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – are ineligible by a federal law governing agency succession, White House officials told the president.
