Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs has called on President Trump to fire the “flailing” and “overwhelmed” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen after she dared to warn of a “system-wide meltdown” amid the president’s immigration crackdown.
In a letter to Congress earlier this week, the DHS secretary requested volunteers to assist with the “dire” situation at the border, noting that “DHS facilities are overflowing” and “agents and officers are stretched too thin.”
Dobbs, whom Trump occasionally patches in via speakerphone in Oval Office meetings, did not take kindly to Nielsen’s apparent admission that Trump’s immigration authorities are unable to cope with migrants at the border. He began his Friday broadcast by applauding the president for standing up to Mexico and threatening to close the southern border if they didn’t “use their strong immigration laws to help the United States.” (Of course, it was Dobbs who just a day earlier had urged Trump to shut down the border while a guest claimed Americans were “getting raped by all of the expense” of immigration.)
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The pro-Trump Fox host then turned his ire on Nielsen.
“The Border Patrol unable to do its job despite the president’s national emergency declaration and calling up the U.S. military to back up the Border Patrol,” Dobbs huffed. “DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is flailing and her department appears utterly paralyzed under ineffectual leadership.”
He continued: “So desperate that she’s trying to raise, it seems, a posse of DHS employee volunteers to help secure the border, and the Border Patrol responding to the border crisis by releasing illegal immigrants on to American streets. Are they also dumping deadly drugs at the same time?”
After railing against Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, Dobbs demanded that Trump “fire these incompetents in the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection,” asserting they “can’t act effectively” and “can’t innovate.”
During a subsequent interview with former border patrol chief Mark Morgan, Dobbs continued to blast Nielsen for her “ignorance,” claiming that her inability to control the border will “consign tens of thousands—perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.”
As Morgan agreed with Dobbs but said the rank-and-file need to take their orders from their leaders, the Lou Dobbs Tonight host went off the rails, complaining about how “sick of bureaucrats” he was before once again demanding Nielsen’s ouster.
“The president needs to fire her,” he shouted. “Because she is nothing but a roadblock on creativity, innovation, adaptiveness, and responding to the situation we have instead of the one that she apparently wants to dream about, I don’t know! She is absolutely overwhelmed!”
