Donald Trump has been livid about Kirstjen Nielsen’s performance as DHS secretary in what is potentially the biggest domestic crisis of his presidency. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Nielsen becomes face of Trump’s border separations The Homeland Security secretary has been seen as weak on enforcement, but on Monday she defended decisions that have left kids warehoused on the border.

Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, emerged on Monday as the face of the administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy — though internally, she is not seen as a supporter.

Nielsen made a rare and hastily arranged appearance in the White House briefing room on Monday afternoon, where she defended the separation of nearly 2,000 children from their parents. Sounding alternately animated and defensive, Nielsen said the administration would “enforce every law we have on the books,” even if it meant breaking up parents and their kids.


White House chief of staff John Kelly advised Nielsen against doing the news conference, but she charged ahead anyway, according to a senior administration official. She placed blame for some of the heart-rending scenes captured by the news media squarely on Congress and charged that kids are being warehoused because lawmakers have shirked their responsibility to close loopholes in current immigration law.

Inside the administration, Nielsen has argued that implementing a zero tolerance policy would prove tremendously difficult without this, but the administration has pressed ahead regardless. On Monday, she responded indignantly when asked whether she intended to create a situation in which thousands of children are caged in former big-box stores. “I find that offensive,” she said. “Why would I create a policy that purposely does that?”

Nielsen’s sudden ownership of the administration’s most controversial domestic policy to date came after senior administration officials pushed her to get on message over the weekend. Last month, she said in her Senate testimony that she shares lawmakers’ concerns about the monitoring of unaccompanied children placed with other family members or guardians.

“We were all wondering where she was and how long it would be until she got that talk,” said one Trump ally. “Everyone knew that talk was coming.”

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Trump has been livid about Nielsen’s performance in what is potentially the biggest domestic crisis of his presidency. He has told allies that he already felt “duped” that Nielsen, who was not a Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, was appointed to succeed Kelly, her close ally, in the first place, an adviser said.

And Nielsen has now found herself as the focal point of Trump’s wrath as he watches his administration trying to explain its way out of a policy that is being criticized by leaders of both parties as inhumane and immoral.

Nielsen came out swinging on Monday with remarks that reflected the fury of the president. “The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families,” she claimed. “They absolutely did.”

Internally, however, Nielsen has argued that the administration’s zero tolerance policy, which is supported by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, would be difficult to implement barring congressional action — an argument that she and the president have made over the past few days, blaming lawmakers for their inaction.

Over the past few months, Trump has called Nielsen and Sessions to account as the number of immigrants flooding across the southern border has spiked. Arrests on the border nearly tripled year-over-year, rising to 40,344 this past May from 14,519 in May 2017.

In private, Nielson and Sessions have pointed the finger at each other when pressed about the rising number of illegal border crossings, but Nielsen has borne the brunt of Trump’s frustration.

Sessions officially announced the zero-tolerance policy in early May, but the issue came to a head two days later in a Cabinet meeting at which Trump blew up at Nielsen. Convinced by whispers from Miller and his allies that Nielsen, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, is oatmeal-mushy on immigration, much like the former president, Trump berated the DHS secretary, pushing her to the brink of resignation. Several of those present at the meeting said it was the most uncomfortable scene they have witnessed in their professional lives.

A former administration official explained the president’s view: “Being a Bushie is worse than being a Democrat.” Tension with the Bush family has flared in recent days as both former Florida governor Jeb Bush — a Trump antagonist in the 2016 primaries — and former first lady Laura Bush emerged to publicly rebuke Trump’s policy of separating parents from their kids.

Knowing Nielsen is in a vulnerable position, and that her handling of the border crisis could give the president a reason to scapegoat and fire her, her detractors have tried to tar her with a connection to one of the Bush administration’s greatest failures: Hurricane Katrina.

At the time of the 2005 disaster, which drowned New Orleans, Nielsen was serving as special assistant to the president for prevention, preparedness and response. Trump allies who are trying to make the argument that the administration’s policy is not the problem — it’s the poor implementation and planning that are the issue — are pointing to this piece of her résumé as proof that it’s Nielsen who is the real problem.

But Trump’s chief of staff considers her a surrogate daughter — she spent last Christmas with his family — and helped her secure the DHS job last December.

The president made his own attitude toward her clear in the first Cabinet meeting she attended as an official member of the Cabinet shortly after her confirmation in early December of last year. Trump used the occasion to recount Kelly’s successes at DHS and, in particular, how border crossings were historically low under his leadership. “I sure hope Kirstjen’s tough enough,” Trump said, according to one meeting attendee.

But Kelly’s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment — at least this chapter of American history would come to a close.

In recent months, his Secret Service detail has often been spotted standing outside the gym in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the middle of the day — and White House officials who pass it on the way to meetings view his late morning workouts as an indication of him having thrown in the towel on trying to have any control inside the West Wing.

In a statement following that explosive Cabinet meeting in early May, Nielsen said the president was “rightly frustrated that existing loopholes and the lack of congressional action have prevented this administration from fully securing the border.”

That is almost exactly the message she returned to on Monday, when she said Trump is trying to “find a long-term fix.”

The president himself is showing no signs of backing down, either. “The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump told reporters. “If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something very quickly.”



CORRECTION: The timing of Kirstjen Nielsen‘s Senate testimony on immigration was misstated in an earlier version of this article.