Homeland Security Chief’s Senate Testimony Was a Complete and Total Disaster

‘I Have Never Met With a DACA Recipient’ • Just Can’t Remember What ‘Tough Language’ Trump Used, or Even if Norway Is a Majority White Country

For several hours on Tuesday Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her responses to questions from Democratic Senators were both disrespectful and disturbing. Overall, her “performance,” as President Trump likes to call his scenes before the cameras, was a disaster.

For example, when discussing Dreamers, many of whom are DACA recipients brought to the U.S. as undocumented children by their parents, Secretary Nielsen repeatedly called for a “permanent solution.”

On Twitter, several noted her language sounded frighteningly familiar:

Secretary Nielsen clearly had decided to battle the Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee, so much so that she wouldn’t even admit that Norway is a majority-white country. “I imagine that is the case,” was the best she could offer Senator Patrick Leahy, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 1975.

By the afternoon, when it was Senator Cory Booker’s time to question her, Nielsen likely was not prepared for what she was about to encounter.

First, he got her to admit that even though she’s in charge of managing the deportation of undocumented immigrants, she’s not once met a Dreamer. Just this week Nielsen’s DHS deported a 39-year old man who has been in the U.S. since he was ten. Nielsen also insisted on calling Dreamers “DACA recipients,” and seemed uninterested in the 39-year old man’s plight. He has a wife and two teenaged girls. 

“I have not met with DACA recipients as Secretary of Homeland Security, no sir,” Nielsen told Booker in a very well-crafted sentence. Booker broke right through it.

Secretary Nielsen just couldn’t seem to remember a single swear word President Trump used during the Oval Office meeting in which he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.”

Later, Booker read her the riot act for refusing to remember Trump’s remarks. 

“When ignorance and bigotry is allied with power, it is a dangerous force in our country. Your silence and your amnesia is complicity,” he told her.

Nielsen also defended Trump’s insistence on “merit-based” immigration, saying what he meant by people from Norway is that he wants hard workers, she told Sen. Leahy.

In fact, however, looking at the list of average hours worked per year, Mexico ranks first. Norway, number 36.

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