Letter of Resignation to DHS Kirsten Nielsen

In Memory of Harrison Bergeron*

If (“Fire any son of a bitch who takes a knee!”) you can (“I really meant to say wouldn’t instead of would..., but there’s lots of others out there too.”) avoid all (“Don’t believe all the crap that those people out there put in their fake news!”) the dazzling (“I am going to invite President Putin to America for a summit.”) distractions (“NATO is obsolete, really.”), you might just remember (“Our biggest enemy is actually the European Union.”) the centerpiece of his administration is (“NEVER EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER…”) its immoral and callous cruelty to children and families in need of protection.    

Former DHS Advisory Member Elaine Holtzman

Thank you, former Congresswoman and member of the Department of Homeland Security Elizabeth Holtzman for writing your incensed letter of resignation to Kirstjen Nielsen.              

Ms. Holtzman was one of four members of the Homeland Security Advisory Panel who resigned in protest of the policies and their anger at not being consulted about the “zero policy idea” before it was implemented by the Trump administration.  A policy designed without any specifics to separate children and babies from families during deportation procedures without record keeping or any plan to reunite them.   

From Elizabeth Holtzman’s letter of resignation to Head of HHS Kirstjen Nielsen:

“As an author of the Refugee Act of 1980, along with Senator Ted Kennedy, I believe the treatment of refugees by you and President Trump violates the law and our treaty obligations to refugees.  The 1980 Act created a framework for the treatment of refugees, which it viewed as an integral and important part of US policy.  The Act was adopted against the background of the Holocaust, in which the US took only a tiny handful of refugees from the Nazis, leaving untold numbers to perish at their hands.  The Act was intended to prevent any repetition of that.  It was also passed in response to the massive exodus of boat people from Vietnam.  There was a time that the US welcomed refugees.  We readily accepted and absorbed more than 600,000 refugees from Cuba, 750,000 refugees from Vietnam and more than 100,000 Jews from the Soviet Union.  Considering that history, the thought that the US government is afraid today of 2,000 children and their parents is both laughable and appalling.

“Under your administration and that of Donald Trump’s, DHS has been transformed into an agency that is making war on immigrants and refugees.  The ethnically and religiously motivated travel ban, the refusal to provide relief to the Dreamers and the new mass deportation program that does not prioritize the removal of undocumented aliens with serious criminal records (thereby harming American citizen children and spouses by removing a parent and a breadwinner from the family and hurting the country by removing productive people who have been living here for decades) are malign and ultimately self-destructive policies.

“The final straw has been the separation of children from their parents at the Southwest border.  This is child kidnapping, plain and simple.  Seizing children from their parents in violation of the constitutional rights of both is bad enough (mentally harmful to the children and infinitely painful to both parents and children), but doing so without creating proper records to enable family reunification shows utter depravity on the part of government officials involved.

“Although it is I who am resigning in protest against these policies, it is you who should be tendering your resignation instead.”

According to Snopes, the other three members resigning were

• ·     Richard Danzig , Navy Secretary under former president Bill Clinton and a national security advisor to former president Barack Obama.
• ·     David Martin, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Virginia, and a former Department of Justice and State Department official under the Clinton and Obama administrations. 
• ·     Matthew Olsen, a Harvard Law lecturer and former federal prosecutor who was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Obama administration, and has held several other national security-related positions.  

Mr. Martin penned a separate letter, just as intelligent and damning, which can be accessed here. 

Keep (“I’m rescinding all their security clearances!”) your eye (“I’ll place a tariff on all Chinese goods.”) on the ball, (“Really, I think I’m a very stable genius.”) my friend.  

*”Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut is a darkly satiric vision of our nation today.