Like flies

Kevin McAleenan, the acting Homeland Security secretary, is leaving President Trump’s administration, making the lawyer and former Obama official the latest departure in a long purge of leadership from the U.S. government’s third-largest department.

McAleenan leaves the Department of Homeland Security in turmoil, at war with the White House and itself over the Trump administration’s aggressive drive to restrict immigration, prioritizing it above the department’s other responsibilities, such as counter-terrorism and disaster response.

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The president [said] he’d be naming McAleenan’s replacement at Homeland Security next week. “Many wonderful candidates!”

  LA Time

Running smoothly! Things are great!

Actually, what he said was he'd be naming a new acting secretary. He doesn't want directors. They get in his way.

Despite withstanding months of public sniping from the administration and clear policy disagreements with the president, McAleenan also proved an effective implementer of some of Trump’s most extreme initiatives to crack down at the border.

In a tweet following Trump’s, McAleenan referenced these results, and thanked the president. He reportedly submitted his resignation earlier Friday.

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A close McAleenan aide confirmed his resignation [...] citing micromanagement from the White House, according to Axios.

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Ultimately, McAleenan’s efforts weren’t enough for Trump. This reality was recently underscored when Trump refused to back down from a misstatement on Hurricane Dorian, forcing McAleenan, whose department also oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to hold up a doctored chart forecasting the storm’s path for cameras in the Oval Office.

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Under McAleenan, Homeland Security has been beset by political infighting and frustration between border and immigration officials over the ever-changing directives from the White House and a surge in migrants at the U.S. southern border, current and former officials told the Los Angeles Times.

"Under McAleenan." Under anybody. It comes from the top.

A Border Patrol agent who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly said morale has suffered as the department struggles to respond to the surge on the border this year. He did not fault McAleenan.

Low morale is the byword for a number of agencies, and the White House itself.

As U.S. Border Patrol stops more migrants at the border than it has in almost a decade, the administration has pulled Border Patrol agents from front-line patrols to keep watch on migrants at hospitals and overcrowded detention facilities, and pushed for agents to be trained on how to screen asylum seekers.

McAleenan’s department has also reassigned Customs and Border Protection officers who support and screen billions of dollars in commerce at airports and ports of entry, and sent the officers to support Border Patrol on the southern border.

Under intense pressure from the White House, a number of asylum officers at Citizenship and Immigration Services are quitting or refusing to implement policies that have forced some 50,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico to await their U.S. cases.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and administration officials are also anonymously criticizing Homeland Security leadership in the press. They blame McAleenan in large part for being forced to cancel a nationwide operation in June targeting thousands of families for deportation, though it was Trump who tweeted about it first. ICE soon after conducted the largest single raid in the agency’s history, in Mississippi — without giving advance notice to the White House, so the operation wouldn’t be foiled.

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The Defense Department recently approved tapping into $3.6 billion among 127 projects to construct parts of the wall along the southern border. And yet, despite the president’s promises, Customs and Border Protection officials confirmed that no new miles of wall have been added to the roughly 700 total linear miles of existing border barrier since Trump took office.

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McAleenan is expected to ultimately be replaced by Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, or immigration hard-liner Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Vacancies Act prevents both from immediately stepping in to head the department ahead of other ranking officials.

Trump forced out Kiersten Nielsen, who was doing a great job of dehumanizing immigrants at the border because she wasn't mean enough. McAleenan has been doing Trump's - and Stephen Miller's bidding since then. If that's not mean enough, what are they after? Those aligators in moats? Shoot asylum seekers?

In recent months, as tensions between the White House and McAleenan rose, so did friction between the acting Homeland Security secretary and Morgan, Trump’s acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner.

Morgan worked his way back into Trump’s graces in large part due to Fox News appearances in which he praised the president and took a harder line on immigration and border security that surprised some former and current colleagues.

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For his part, Morgan acknowledged in an interview with The Times shortly after Nielsen’s ousting that Homeland Security secretary may be an impossible job in the Trump administration, given the heated politics over immigration.

“I think that anybody who takes on that role — especially in the border security arena — you’re in a no-win situation,” he said. “You’re not going to make anybody happy.”

You only have to make one person happy to keep that job.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.