A day after Kirstjen Nielsen’s abrupt departure as Homeland Security secretary, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach essentially auditioned for her old job by showing up on one of President Trump’s favorite cable news programs for an interview.
During Monday night’s appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Kobach—who previously vice-chaired Trump’s now-shuttered voter fraud commission—began the interview by telling host Tucker Carlson that the Department of Homeland Security has been the “biggest impediment” to enacting the president’s immigration policies.
“Leadership for the past two years has been unwilling to execute many of the president’s plans,” Kobach declared. “From direct personal experience, I have been in the room when the president has given express orders to leadership at DHS and been assured those orders will be carried out. Then a year later nothing has happened.”
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After Kobach was done throwing Nielsen under the bus, Carlson asked the one-time Kansas gubernatorial candidate what he would do first if he were “running DHS tomorrow.”
Kobach detailed a three-part plan he unveiled last week during an appearance on Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, another of Trump’s favorite programs. Stating that he would create a regulation making it legal to detain children “as long as necessary,” Kobach moved on to the second part of his proposal—placing entire migrant families in camps for processing.
“I would deploy the thousands of FEMA trailers, either to border cities or to military bases in Texas and Arizona and set up processing centers,” the Republican politician asserted. “Instead of just turning loose these bogus asylum applicants on to the American streets never to be seen again.”
“Let's put them in mobile homes, lets process their claims, ship the immigration judges in, have the claims processed right there, and as soon as their claim is denied, put them on a passenger plane and fly them right back home. Word will get out it in the villages back home, ‘Hey it doesn't work to get in these caravans anymore, you're not going to be released into the United States.’”
Kobach went on to explain the third portion of his plan would consist of threatening Mexico with a regulation that would prevent immigrants from sending wire remittances from the United States to Mexico.
“That regulation is going to take effect and become final unless you sign the third country, safe third country agreement like we have with Canada so that any asylum applicant, the first safe country they step foot in, namely Mexico, they have to apply there for asylum,” Kobach added.
The right-wing news site Breitbart, meanwhile, has recently begun selling Kobach as a possible “immigration czar” for the Trump administration. Kobach just so happens to write for Breitbart.
