# Kirstjen Nielsen **Kirstjen Nielsen** was Secretary of Homeland Security from December 2017 to April 2019 and the public face of the **[[Family Separation Policy]]**. She is the vault's clearest case of a mainstream security technocrat who carried out a cruel policy, publicly denied it existed, and was still pushed out for not being harsh enough. ## Before DHS A lawyer and homeland-security consultant, she was a special assistant for disaster preparedness in the George W. Bush White House during [[Hurricane Katrina]], a response widely criticized afterward. She came into the Trump administration as chief of staff to DHS Secretary [[John Kelly]]. She followed him to the White House as deputy chief of staff when he became chief of staff, and he pushed her nomination to succeed him at DHS. The Senate confirmed her in December 2017. ## Family separation The Justice Department's "zero tolerance" policy, announced by Attorney General [[Jeff Sessions]] in April 2018, required prosecuting every adult caught crossing illegally. Because children can't be jailed with their parents, it separated thousands of families. The groundwork was laid inside DHS: her chief of staff, [[Chad Wolf]], had sent the Justice Department a December 2017 options list that included separating families. On **June 17, 2018**, with the separations under way and audio of crying children playing on the news, Nielsen tweeted: "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period." The next day she defended the practice at the White House podium. Trump ended the policy by executive order on June 20, 2018, under bipartisan pressure. More than 2,800 children had been separated by then, and reunification took years. ## The exit She was never trusted by Trump's inner circle, and [[Stephen Miller]] pushed for a harder line. Trump reportedly berated her for not stopping crossings, including over demands she said were unlawful. She resigned on **April 7, 2019**. Her departure started a chain of acting secretaries. The GAO later found that chain was legally broken, because her own succession order had not made her successor lawfully acting. That ultimately invalidated Chad Wolf's tenure. See [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]]. No public role for her in the second Trump administration was found. ## Why she matters Nielsen shows that a policy's cruelty didn't depend on true believers. It was carried out by a competent insider who publicly denied it while it was happening. Her ouster also marks the point in the first term when the immigration apparatus shifted from institutionalists to loyalists. That shift was completed in the second term. ## See also - [[Family Separation Policy]] · [[Chad Wolf]] · [[John Kelly]] · [[Stephen Miller]] · [[Jeff Sessions]] - [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]] · [[Homeland Security Investigations]] - [[Trump 1.0 Cabinet Hub]] · [[First Trump Administration]]