Kirstjen Nielsen nearly quit last week after Trump excoriated her during a Cabinet meeting over what he views as insufficient border enforcement, a senior administration official previously told POLITICO. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Nielsen: ‘I didn’t threaten to resign’

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied Tuesday that she threatened last week to resign after receiving a reported tongue-lashing from President Donald Trump over an uptick in illegal immigration.

"I have not resigned,” Nielsen said in response to a reporter's shouted question as she left a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “I didn't threaten to resign."


A DHS spokesperson last week denied that Nielsen considered resigning, as first reported by The New York Times and later confirmed to POLITICO by a senior administration official.

But in her own initial statement last week about the matter, Nielsen neither confirmed nor denied that she'd weighed resigning. White House chief of staff John Kelly later told a Fox News reporter that he called the secretary after the Cabinet meeting and implored her to remain on the job.

Lawmakers didn’t mention the resignation reports during the roughly two-hour hearing.

In her appearance before the committee, Nielsen urged Congress Tuesday to tighten standards for asylum, which she portrayed as “loopholes” that encourage illegal immigration.

“Asylum is for people fleeing persecution, not those searching for a better job,” Nielsen said in her opening remarks. “Yet our broken system — with its debilitating court rulings, a crushing backlog, and gaping loopholes — allows illegal migrants to get into our country anyway and for whatever reason they want. This gaming of the system is unacceptable.”

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Nielsen also expressed support for the administration’s recent decision to refer for prosecution all people suspected of crossing the border illegally, which will likely lead to an increase in families separated at the southwest border.

“[Attorney General Jeff Sessions] has declared that we will have zero tolerance for all illegal border crossings,” she said. “And I stand by that.”

Trump touted a precipitous drop in border arrests during his first year in office, but numbers have climbed steadily in recent months to more closely resemble levels during the Obama administration. In April, arrests on the southwest border were more than three times the number during the same month one year earlier.

The president has fumed publicly about the need to halt rising illegal immigration, particularly when a caravan of Central American migrants traveled last month through Mexico toward the United States. At least 150 members of the caravan ultimately sought asylum in the U.S., according to a report in Reuters.

Nielsen, as the top homeland security official, shoulders responsibility to execute Trump’s border security agenda, although many components of the White House plan to combat illegal immigration require legislative action — and Congress appears unlikely to pass a sweeping bill before the November midterm elections.

Nielsen on Tuesday rejected the notion that a rise in recent years in the percentage of Central American families and children arrested at the border was attributable to poverty and violence in their home countries.

“Some say these increases are the result of spreading crime or failing economies in source countries,” she said. “But in those places, we are actually seeing economic growth and lower homicide rates.“

During the secretary’s opening remarks, roughly two dozen women and children rose and exited the room in protest of policies that increase family separation.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) grilled Nielsen about whether the administration intended to use the threat of family separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

Nielsen said she hadn’t been directed to split up families as a method of deterrence.

“My decision has been that anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted,” Nielsen said. “If you’re a parent or you’re a single person or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. You’ve broken U.S. law.”

