Kirstjen Nielsen Ate at a Mexican Restaurant After She Defended Locking Up Children at the Border
On Tuesday night, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen took a break from explaining why splitting up families and sending children to desert "tent cities" is fine, regrettable, someone else's fault, and still something that her department does well and shouldn't apologize for, thanks for asking. So with apparently no self-awareness, she went to what a DHS spokesman described as "a work dinner" at MXDC Cocina Mexicana, a posh Mexican restaurant not far from the White House.
But it doesn't seem like she managed to get much work done: Protesters from the metro D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (full disclosure: I am a member of the Pittsburgh chapter of the DSA) started protesting inside the restaurant, chanting "shame" at Nielsen and carrying signs reading "no one is illegal." Nielsen and her security fled shortly thereafter.
A rep for DHS, Tyler Q. Houlton, gave the protest a weak spin, saying, "While having a work dinner tonight, the secretary and her staff heard from a small group of protesters who share her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border." While this is a poor take on the protest—they were chanting, "End child separation" and explicitly calling out Nielsen's complicity—Houlton actually hit the nail on the head when referring to the disaster unfolding at the border: It's an entirely manufactured crisis created by bad policy and bad laws, not by any surge in immigrant-related crime (which is lower than the crime rate for native-born people), an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants (that number is going down), or negative economic impact (immigration has a mostly positive effect on the economy). It's entirely driven by the hardline anti-immigrant positions of Donald Trump and the people he surrounds himself with.
This encounter is reminiscent of June 2017, when Nikki Haley complained on Twitter that she was booed and taunted while trying to get brunch during a gay-pride event. As Trump's ambassador to the UN, Haley had just made the news for voting against a measure that would condemn the death penalty for "same-sex relations." To be fair, that resolution broadly condemned the death penalty, and the U.S. tends to always pull support for such condemnations since as a country we are extremely on board with the death penalty. But regardless, Haley has chosen to work with an administration that is more openly anti-gay than we've seen in decades. That she felt comfortable getting the gayest meal at the gayest time of year speaks volumes about how little shame she can feel.
And this is exactly how members of the Trump administration should be received in public. Working for Trump's White House isn't some normal nine-to-five job that they can leave behind at the office when they go home or try to order guacamole at a restaurant—they're complicit in actively destroying people's lives. They deserve to be pariahs, not rewarded with prestigious fellowships at Harvard.
