Kobach: DHS is Trump’s ‘biggest impediment’ on immigration policies

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) said Monday night that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is President Trump’s “biggest impediment” in enacting his favored immigration policies.

“Leadership at that agency for the past two years has been unwilling to execute many of the plans,” Kobach, a close Trump ally, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. “I have been in the room when the president has given express orders to leadership at DHS and been assured that yes, those orders will be carried out, and a year later nothing has happened.”

{mosads}“It’s been really remarkable how badly the agency has been doing in executing what the president has asked,” Kobach added, saying that the department should deploy Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers to the border and establish processing centers rather than continue releasing asylum applicants. Kobach also called for a regulation barring undocumented immigrants from wiring remittance payments to their home countries.

Kobach’s remarks come shortly after the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Sunday evening. Nielsen’s departure was reportedly driven in part by her hesitance to reinstate the policy of separating asylum-seekers from their children at the border, which Trump reportedly insisted was the most effective deterrent.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, has reportedly been given increased influence over border policy and is pushing to remove more leadership from the department, including director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Lee Cissna, and the department’s general counsel, John Mitnick.

Kobach previously served as vice chairman of Trump’s election integrity commission, which was disbanded after it failed to produce evidence to substantiate the president’s claim that millions of people cast illegal votes in the 2016 presidential election. He has reportedly been in contention to serve as a possible “border czar” for the Trump administration to coordinate immigration policies across agencies.