Thursday, 28 Mar 2024

Trump: I’m the one running Homeland Security

President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that it didn’t really matter whom he picked to replace Kirstjen Nielsen as head of Homeland Security — because the one who really runs the show at DHS is him.

“Frankly, there’s only one person who is running it. You know who that is? It’s me!” he declared outside the White House before hopping aboard Marine One for a trip to Joint Base Andrews and then on to a fundraising trip to Texas.

He also praised his hardline immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, when asked if he had a shot at the powerful Homeland Security gig.

“Stephen is an excellent guy. He’s a wonderful person. People don’t know him. He’s been with me from the beginning. He’s a brilliant man,” he said.

And he once again excoriated Democrats, blaming them for not changing immigration laws in Congress the way he wants them to do, something the GOP failed to do when it controlled both chambers during the first two years of Trump’s term.

“Democrats in Congress [must] change these loopholes. If they don’t change them, we’re just going to be fighting,” he said, presumably referring to court battles over his policies.

He also touted work on his long-promised border wall — though the only work underway is previously planned replacement projects.

“The other thing, we built a lot of wall, a lot of wall and when we rip down an old wall and then replace it, it’s called a new wall. That’s what we’ve done. A lot of wall is going up. And every place we build a wall, it’s less and less” illegal immigration, he said.

Trump’s comments came a day after DHS reported that more than 103,000 asylum seekers — most of them Central American families — and other undocumented immigrants were apprehended at the border in March.

That’s double the number apprehended during the same month in 2018, and a level unseen in a decade.

The surge, expected to keep growing as the weather warms, has overwhelmed border personnel and facilities and enraged Trump, prompting him to oust Nielsen and threaten to close the border entirely.

Trump said Tuesday he would not relaunch his administration’s policy of separating children from their families at the southern border.

But even as he disavowed it, Trump argued the policy was an effective deterrent to asylum-seeking migrants.

“When you don’t do it, it brings a lot more people to the border. I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you have many more people coming. They are coming like it’s a picnic, like ‘Let’s go to Disneyland,’” Trump said.

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