According to a report in the Washington Post on Tuesday, four members of Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisory Council have abruptly resigned following the massive immigration fallout regarding family separations. The group tendered their resignations in a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Monday.
In the letter, the advisers cited Trump’s “morally repugnant, counter-productive and ill-considered” immigration policies and noted that no one in the administration had consulted with them before implementing the now-infamous “zero tolerance” policy that led to more than 2,500 family separations before the policy was ended:
Were we consulted, we would have observed that routinely taking children from migrant parents was morally repugnant, counter-productive and ill-considered. We cannot tolerate association with the immigration policies of this administration, nor the illusion that we are consulted on these matters.”
The members who resigned included Richard Danzig, the former Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Holtzman, a former House Representative from New York, as well as two appointees from the Obama administration, David Martin and Matthew Olsen.
The policy that led to their departure was introduced in May by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who made it clear at the time that it was intended as a method of deterrence or dissuasion for families considering fleeing violence in their home countries and seeking asylum in the United States.
After the President was forced by an international outcry against the practice to overturn the policy, Sessions followed up by simply making it harder for those families seeking asylum to come here by changing another rule — this time, deleting the part of US asylum policy allowing refugees to come to escape domestic or gang violence.
Former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who now serves as the Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, issued a statement following their departure — without actually speaking to the reason for the resignations:
Each of you was appointed owing to lifelong dedication to the nation and her people, and, indeed, I can appreciate that each of you sees this resignation as part of that dedication.”
Many Americans believe that after Trump’s borderline treasonous behavior in Helsinki during his summit with Vladimir Putin that more resignations from within his administration should be forthcoming.
Featured image via screen capture
