Days after ousting Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen for not taking an even more evil approach to dealing with asylum seekers than she already was, Donald Trump has made clear that he plans to take a significantly more brutal approach to immigration moving forward. After purging D.H.S. of a slew of officials who didn’t pass Stephen Miller’s white-rage smell test, the president reportedly wants to axe current U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Francis Cissna and potentially replace him with a woman who once ran an anti-immigration organization that has been labeled a hate group.

Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which pushes for lower levels of immigration, is being considered as an option to lead the agency, the sources said. She had also been considered for the deputy director role in recent weeks. . . . Kirchner’s potential move will likely infuriate Democrats and immigration activists. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate watchdog, labeled FAIR a hate group “because it promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones.”

FAIR, which Kirchner led from 2007 to 2015, was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, who has espoused a reduction in immigration in order to protect “an ethnic white majority” and is a proponent of eugenics. According to the S.P.L.C., some of FAIR’s backing has come from the Pioneer Fund, which, among other things, reportedly funds studies on the “‘science’ of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities.” A former staffer on the Minnesota House Judiciary Committee, Kirchner was “considered a key legislative strategist in FAIR’s advocacy of state-level anti-immigrant measures,” according to a 2017 New Yorker report. When she was first hired at D.H.S. in 2017, as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner, former C.B.P. head of internal affairs James Tomsheck warned that “bringing someone like her into the agency will only validate the distorted view of immigrants at the border that too many agents already have.” In other words, she’s the perfect person to lead Trump’s immigration “services.” (D.H.S., U.S.C.I.S., and Kirchner did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.)

The one potential speed bump would be the vocalized horror by Republicans over Trump’s D.H.S. purge. Although Politico says White House officials expect Cissna to be pushed out in short order, one conceded that Senator Chuck Grassley’s opposition to firing Cissna “could complicate things, potentially causing the president to keep Cissna on the job.” Even restrictionist immigration groups want him to stay, in a sign of how extreme Kirchner would be.

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