Focus on immigration enforcement

Ex-Aide: Trump told DHS secretary, 'Get your ass to the border'

Miles Taylor said the pressure from the White House to focus on immigration enforcement kept senior DHS officials from focusing on other issues.

By BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN

President Donald Trump personally ordered his secretary of homeland security to head to the border at least half a dozen times, taking her away from her focus on pressing national security matters, according to her former chief of staff.

Miles Taylor, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, told POLITICO that Trump often ordered former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to leave her post in D.C. and head to the southwest border.

“‘Get your ass on TV at the border, what are you doing, what the hell are you doing?’” the president told Nielsen, according to Taylor.

As Taylor described it, Trump was fixated on being able to watch his homeland security team in action. “He would order us to go to the border so he could see us down there doing work,” Taylor said. “Do you actually think Kirstjen and I are putting up the steel bollards? That was dispiriting, to say the very least.”

Taylor said the constant pressure from the White House to focus on immigration enforcement and border security kept senior DHS officials from focusing on other issues, including election security and cyber threats. The department’s leadership was “running in circles” for his time there, he said.

“Quite literally there would be threat streams that we would read about in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] and we’d be like, ‘Shit, we’ve got to spend the day on this!’ And the president would call and we’d be like, ‘Nope, not going to be able to spend the day on this because he’s focused on dah-dah dah-dah.”

Judd Deere, a White House spokesperson, said Taylor is only speaking out for mercenary reasons.

“This individual is another creature of the D.C. Swamp who never understood the importance of the President’s agenda or why the American people elected him and clearly just wants to cash-in,” he said in a statement. “President Trump has an unprecedented number of accomplishments in spite of government bureaucrats who are only out for themselves, not the forgotten men and women of this country.”

On Monday, Taylor endorsed Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. Numerous former Trump administration officials have criticized the president’s leadership and expressed hesitance about voting for him. But Taylor is the first former senior official in his administration to endorse his opponent. The former DHS chief of staff has appeared in a video cut by Republican Voters Against Trump, and also written a Washington Post op-ed and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America — all to denounce his former top boss.

Trump, meanwhile, tweeted that Taylor is “a former DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE” who he had never heard of. Taylor responded by tweeting a picture of him and Trump side by side, both giving the camera big thumbs-ups.

Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment.