Kevin we hardly knew ye

Kevin McAleenan will step down as acting Homeland Security secretary after serving a six-month tenure that often frustrated top officials in the Trump administration, including the president himself.

McAleenan's departure comes amid a rolling leadership shake-up at the department as President Donald Trump looks to make good on his 2016 campaign pledge to crack down on immigration as he faces a tough bid for a second term in office.
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In recent days, McAleenan gave an unusually blunt interview to the Washington Post in which he said he was frustrated by other immigration appointees and wasn’t able to keep the department from being used for a partisan immigration agenda.
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Six other top department officials have resigned or been pushed out since April, including former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. With McAleenan’s exit, Trump will have cycled through four DHS chiefs in less than three years. Many of the department‘s senior leadership positions remain vacant or filled by acting officials.

“Today's ouster of the acting secretary further highlights that President Trump continues to decimate the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security. "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.

Next in line to become acting secretary is David Pekoske, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, who has also been serving as acting deputy secretary at DHS. But acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner new to the administration who has direct access to Trump, appears to be the leading candidate to replace him, according to several people familiar with the situation. Cuccinelli, however, would have a tough time getting confirmed even in the Republican-led Senate.

"The choice is clear, he must elevate Ken Cuccinelli," said RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors immigration restrictions

But if McAleenan passed as a moderate steward of D.H.S. in the context of Trump’s Washington—a policy wonk and diplomat, who was data-driven and cautious—by almost any other standard, his tenure was marked by aggressive measures that have wreaked havoc on the lives of migrants. During the past six months, McAleenan has presided over two elaborate new policies designed to enlist foreign governments in the effort to take pressure off of the U.S. asylum system. The first, called the Migrant Protection Protocols (M.P.P.), came into existence while McAleenan was the head of C.B.P. It has since forced some fifty thousand Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their legal claims move through the backlogged U.S. immigration courts. Initially, the program was designed to handle the influx of Central Americans, but late this spring, under McAleenan’s leadership, D.H.S. broadened M.P.P. to include asylum seekers from any Spanish-speaking country in Latin America. McAleenan has defended M.P.P. as a necessary stopgap to allow asylum seekers access to U.S. immigration courts, while keeping them off American soil. In practice, however, hundreds of asylum seekers have been brutalized while stranded in notoriously dangerous Mexican border cities, and thousands of others, out of fear for their safety, have abandoned their asylum claims altogether.

Over the summer, I spoke to a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan named Deysi, whose asylum claim was promising even by the strictest legal definitions of the term. A lesbian who’d been raped and assaulted repeatedly in her home town, in southern Guatemala, she travelled to El Paso to seek relief at a port of entry, and was eventually returned to Juárez, under M.P.P., on the same day that McAleenan took over at D.H.S. She slept in a park because the city’s shelters were full. “I knew I had a court date,” she said in a subsequent affidavit. “But I had no paper with the date, the time, and what I need to do to get to court.” By the end of May, she’d missed her court appearance and run out of money. At that point, she tried crossing the border between points of entry and was arrested by Border Patrol agents. Since she’d missed her previous court hearing, she now had an order of removal. When we spoke, Deysi was back in Guatemala, desperate to leave but too scared to set out again for the U.S.

The other defining feature of McAleenan’s tenure has been a series of accords known as safe-third-country agreements, which, since July, D.H.S. has signed with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Each of these deals will bar migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they have first passed through one of these three Central American countries. Currently, more than ninety per cent of migrants apprehended at the U.S. border are fleeing these countries. They are far from “safe” for migrants, and none of them has a fully functioning asylum system.

The agreements are designed to send a message to the region’s asylum seekers that if they travel north, the U.S. will no longer be their ultimate destination, a senior D.H.S. official told me. It’s an unconventional version of a familiar argument: deterring migrants from travelling to the U.S. has been the through line of U.S. border policy for decades, linking Republican and Democratic Administrations. McAleenan, for his part, has insisted that there are other upsides to the agreements. They will open the door to tens of millions of dollars in aid to build up asylum infrastructure in Central America; in exchange for regional coöperation, the U.S. will increase the number of temporary work visas available to migrants as well. But ending asylum at the southern border requires rejecting the legitimacy of thousands of future claims. “Every person I’ve ever met at C.B.P. fundamentally believes that ninety-nine per cent of asylum claims are what a smuggler convinced people to say,” one Administration official told me, referring to the Secretary’s background. “McAleenan is comfortable with effectively ending asylum because he thinks a lot of these claims are fraudulent.”

McAleenan has defended the implementation of M.P.P., and the continued “metering” of asylum seekers at official ports of entry, by pointing out that no one else has yet managed to offer a holistic solution to the Central American exodus while preserving the key tenets of U.S. asylum law. But his initiatives have come with an irreparable human cost. “Again and again, under his leadership, the Department of Homeland Security has evaded U.S. asylum laws and policies designed to protect men, women, and children from persecution and comply with this country’s treaty commitments,” Eleanor Acer, of Human Rights First, told me. “Instead of a system that assesses whether people meet the requirements of U.S. refugee protection, the U.S. now has a system designed to evade U.S. refugee law, block as many as possible from asylum in our country, and terrify others into abandoning their requests for protection.”

One of McAleenan’s few regrets was his initial support for the zero-tolerance policy that gave rise to family separation. He co-wrote the memo recommending the policy to Nielsen, in the spring of 2018. He described his original rationale, in an interview he gave to the Washington Post. “How can we let these smugglers victimize these desperate families,” he said. “How can we let this flow continue to grow.” Family separation was supposed to have a deterrent effect. It didn’t work, and instead tortured thousands of families in the process. “When you see the impact in the six-week period on two thousand and five hundred or so families and understand the emotional pain for those children, it’s not worth it,” McAleenan would later say. “It’s the one part of this whole thing that I couldn’t ever be part of again.”