4/9/2019

BORDER/CHILDREN/DHS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “Kirstjen Nielsen’s image makeover has already begun — but it may be a hard sell. Just days after she announced plans to resign as Homeland Security secretary, Nielsen and her allies are working to rehabilitate her reputation, arguing that she’s not the heartless villain depicted by liberal critics already pressuring big companies not to hire her. Almost as soon as word of her resignation under pressure leaked, Nielsen’s allies began spinning a narrative of her tenure that casts her not as an enabler of President Donald Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, but as a guardrail against even more extreme action. In particular, they stressed that the policy for which Nielsen is most fiercely reviled — separating detained migrant children from their parents — gave her no pleasure, and that she slow-walked or resisted other Trump demands on border security…But it will likely prove difficult for Nielsen to shed her unsavory image. Ultimately, she implemented the child separation policy and other controversial Trump moves rather than resign in protest, as many critics argued she should. And Democrats and their liberal allies plan to continue making her the face of what they view as one of the most outrageous periods of the Trump presidency.”

Andrew Restuccia and Daniel Lippman, “Nielsen’s allies trying to rehab her image for life after Trump,” Politico April 9, 2019 6:50 pm