another one bites the dust

Alas, yet another member of the president’s cabinet bids us all a fond farewell – maybe not fond, but definitely farewell.

Kirstjen Nielsen, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, evidently felt it was the right time for her to step aside according to an article in the Business Insider today. Nielsen became the pretty face for the president’s ugly “zero tolerance” immigration policy of 2018 and she continued to defend the detainment of refugee children taken from their families – assuring Congress (and I heard this with my own ears) none of the refugee children were living in cages. Alrighty then. Clearly none of us have seen those conditions with our own two television eyes.

Ms. Nielsen attended Georgetown University’s school of foreign service and studied abroad in Japan. She worked for Senator Connie Mack of Florida before going to law school at the University of Virginia. During Dubya Bush’s first term who’s surprised  she worked for the White House Homeland Security Council during Hurricane Katrina and had a hand in the less than stellar response by the Bush team in that tragedy. And still she moved on up.

In one of her Congressional appearances I heard her answer she had no idea how many asylum seekers had died during their internment in our camps. I could have helped her with that one. Two children died within one month of each other in December of 2018. Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal of Guatemala died on December 8th. Eight-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo died on Christmas Eve. We can start the death count with those two.

Now the courts have determined we may have to wait another two years to identify thousands of children still separated from their families at the border because of a policy Secretary Nielsen administered for a man with no concern for the welfare of anyone other than himself. Shame on him, shame on her and shame on all of us for a lack of moral outrage as a nation.

In Vision of Reality – a Study of Abnormal Perception and Behavior, author Alberto Rivas quotes Heinrich Himmler,  another Minister of the Interior in a country across the pond during the Nazi regime:

“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”

So farewell to you, Secretary Nielsen. Don’t let your twisted lack of conscience hit you on the way out the door.

Stay tuned.