Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen speaks at Donald Trump’s roundtable discussion with law enforcement officials (File/Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)

Bolstering his hardline anti-immigrant posture for the 2020 election, Donald Trump ousts Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen.

News of Nielsen’s imminent dismissal circulated soon before her 5 pm meeting on Sunday with Trump to discuss his sudden withdrawal of a nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement and wider issues around his anti-immigration policy and rhetoric.

Trump has reportedly designated Stephen Miller, his xenophobic White House advisor, to take charge of all immigration issues in the run-up to the November 2020 Presidential vote.

Last Thursday Ron Vitiello, the acting head of ICE, was told that his nomination had been pulled. He was supposed to accompany Trump on a PR trip to Calexico, California where Trump stood in front of an enhanced fence.

Nielsen did join Trump, but White House staff were already spinning that she was at fault for a surge in migration across the Mexico border, reversing a decades-long decline. They claimed that Trump was unhappy with Nielsen’s stay in London last week ahead of meetings with security officials of the G7 nations in Paris.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Nielsen convened calls with other Cabinet members and White House aides, asking them to help at the border and saying she would be giving specific requests to officials. The decision was then made to withdraw Vitello’s nomination, setting up yesterday’s showdown.

Officially, Nielsen’s departure was presented as a resignation by Trump:

Nielsen issued a subsequent statement that she had chosen to leave, saying it was the “right time” for her to “step aside”.

But both senior Administration officials and a source close to Nielsen said she did go to the meeting with the intention of resigning.

A Tenure Marked by Insults and Pressure

Despite doggedly serving as the face of the Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration — including the separation of children from their parents, placing them in detention up to thousands of miles away — Nielsen was assailed by White House opponents soon after she took office in December 2017.

Miller and hardline anti-immigration activists portrayed her as “weak”. Trump threatened to withdraw Nielsen’s nomination, in a heated Oval Office meeting, after Fox News commentators such as the hard-right polemicist Ann Coulter derided her. He backed away, but in spring 2018 humiliated her during a Cabinet meeting, saying she was to blame for the mythical invasion of the US by migrants from Central America.

Nielsen was persuaded to stay on by her mentor John Kelly — her precedessor as Director before he became White House Chief of Staff — but his departure last December stripped her of an ally. Meanwhile, National Security Advisor John Bolton joined her White House critics.

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Trump told aides last fall that he wanted to fire Nielsen, and he blamed her for a caravan of Central American migrants that approached border near San Diego, California.

The Director appeared to save her post after US Border Patrol agents used tear gas to repel a group trying to cross through a border fence.

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Nielsen and Mexican officials then agreed on the Migrant Protection Protocols, which required asylum seekers from January to wait in Mexico while their cases are submitted to the US court system. Last week she ordered a rapid expansion of the program amid a surge in families seeking asylum in the US.

But, with the numbers rising, Trump returned to blaming Nielsen, and the hardliners objected to the Director raising legal concern about Trump’s proclamations that he will bypass immigration laws and federal court orders.

Last month, Trump blindsided Nielsen by cutting off all aid to the “Golden Triangle” of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, even though the State Department, experts, and local governments said the programs — anti-violence, education, anti-poverty, and job creation — ease pressure for migration.

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Republican sources said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is being considered as Nielsen’s permanent replacement and has been at the White House. Other possibilities are Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Kris Kobach, former Kansas Secretary of State and a prominent anti-immigration hardliner.