Trump Loyalists Across
Homeland Security
Could Vex Biden’s
Immigration Policies
President Biden and his new secretary of homeland security are already facing resistance from immigration agents empowered by Donald J. Trump to take their gloves off.
Mr. Biden and his secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, are already encountering their own pockets of internal resistance, especially at the agencies charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, where the gung-ho culture has long favored the get-tough policies that Mr. Trump embraced....
Liberal immigration activists and former Trump administration officials rarely agree on much, but both parties say Mr. Mayorkas will struggle to get buy-in for Mr. Biden’s immigration agenda from the thousands of border and immigration agents in his sprawling, 240,000-person department.
“There are people in ICE that agree with Trump’s policies.,” said Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner who served as Mr. Trump’s ICE director. “They want to do the job they took an oath to do.”
...
Mr. Biden...is already facing a daunting challenge in overhauling a department that was unmatched in how closely it aligned with Mr. Trump.
Videos celebrating Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful” border wall are still featured on the Customs and Border Protection website. A fictionalized video by the agency that shows Mr. Trump’s depiction of migrants as feared criminals is still on the Border Patrol’s official social media channels. And the union representing ICE agents — whose top leaders were enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Trump — has signaled that it does not intend to accept all of the new administration’s reversals of his policies.
[It is the enemy within. I have never liked this department, starting with its name. It's like Fatherland. This agency needs to be abolished.]
“They are not going to be able to get people to change their deeply held convictions,” Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, said of many career officials at the Homeland Security Department. “They are going to make painfully clear to the politicals what the consequences are going to be if their advice is not followed.”
[That is a threat! "Pain" is produced by violence.]
The emergence of an emboldened resistance inside the Biden administration is not limited to the homeland security agencies. Pockets of government employees loyal to Mr. Trump and his agenda remain ensconced in other parts of the bureaucracy.
Still Mr. Miller noted, “It’s going to be most intense at D.H.S.”
[They are the main state arm of American fascism.]
Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner who served as Mr. Trump’s ICE director...said morale at the agency had been “flushed down the toilet” since Mr. Biden began issuing executive orders in the past two weeks, and he predicted that some in the bureaucracy would seek to undermine the new president.
“That’s the way everybody attacked the Trump administration, by leaking things,” Mr. Homan said. “People now are taking a page out of that playbook. I think turnaround is fair play.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy counsel the American Immigration Council, which advocates on behalf of immigrants...said it would be critical for Mr. Mayorkas and Mr. Biden to ensure that their directives were actually followed by the rank and file in the department.
“The next month or two are really going to be formative for the administration,” he said.
...
“It’s going to take time until the administration comes down and does a top-down examination"--a lawyer representing a detained immigrant who faces deportation
