Leading Homeland Security Under a President Who Embraces 'Hate-Filled' Talk
WASHINGTON — Elaine C. Duke, then President Donald Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, arrived at the Roosevelt Room, down the hall from the Oval Office, on a steamy August afternoon in 2017 expecting a discussion about Trump’s pledge to terminate DACA, the Obama-era protections for young immigrants. Instead, she said, it was “an ambush.”
“The room was stacked,” she recalled. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other White House officials demanded that she sign a memo ending the program, which they had already concluded was illegal. She did not disagree, but she chafed at being cut out of the real decision-making.
“President Trump believes that he can’t trust,” Duke, now a consultant, said in a wide-ranging interview about the 14 months she spent working for him and the consequences of the president’s suspicion of what he calls the “deep state” in government. “That has affected his ability to get counsel from diverse groups of people.”
A veteran of nearly 30 years at the departments of Homeland Security and Defense, Duke was the deputy secretary of homeland security in the summer of 2017 when John F. Kelly, Trump’s first secretary, left to become White House chief of staff. Duke served in the top job at the department until late 2017, when Kirstjen Nielsen was confirmed as Kelly’s permanent successor.
A lifelong Republican who describes herself as “a kid from the Cleveland, Ohio, area,” Duke said she supported tougher enforcement of immigration laws, as long as it was tempered by a sense of humanity that she tried to exhibit when she volunteered to teach naturalization classes. But she described an administration that is often driven by ideology instead of deliberation, values politics over policy and is dominated by a president who embraces “hate-filled, angry and divisive” language.
“We get distracted by slogans, by maybe words we heard like the president allegedly saying ‘Haiti is a shithole,’” Duke said from her home overlooking the Occoquan River about 25 minutes south of Washington. “So we get only spun up in that, and then we never get to the issue.”
Duke is the latest in a series of senior officials who have gone public to describe — often in vivid, behind-the-scenes detail — their discomfort and sometimes shock at the inner workings of the Trump presidency.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/leading-homeland-security-under-president-154723059.html
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