By Simon Hankinson, The Daily Signal | November 22, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump is now picking his Cabinet and appointing key executive officers. Nowhere will these picks be more important than in keeping his promise to the American people to secure the border and reestablish the rule of law in immigration matters.
Many Americans have heard of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian warrior-king who conquered the ancient world before dying at only 32.
But few have heard of his generals, without whom he would never have succeeded. Ptolemy founded the Egyptian dynasty that ended with the famous Cleopatra, baby-momma to Julius Caesar. Seleucus founded the city of Seleucia and his very own dynasty. Like Alexander, successful American presidents need excellent and committed “generals” to fulfill their visions.
A United States president gets to pick a few thousand appointees to carry out the policies on which he was elected. For the early presidents, exerting control over the federal government was easy. With under 6,000 employees in the 1800s, even the head of the staunchly small government organization Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, would have been satisfied with the relatively small size of the federal government.
But starting with the Civil War, through two World Wars, a Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Great Society of the 1960s, the federal government has grown massively in personnel, scope, and power. There are now over 2 million civilians in the federal government, and 82,000 were added last year alone.
At the same time, the executive branch of the federal government has grown less maneuverable by, and accountable to, the president. That makes the political picks even more vital.
One thing Trump will need is a string of competent ambassadors stretching from Mexico through South America, along the route illegal immigrants from all over the world now take to get into the United States.
The U.S. ambassador to Mexico will be the most important of these. He or she will need to convince a reluctant, leftist Mexican government that it is in its best interest to prevent illegal migration flowing from Mexico’s southern borders to ours.
One powerful tool our new envoy can use is the 2026 review and renewal of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. Cooperation among our nations to prevent mass illegal migration must be a top U.S. goal in these discussions.
Trump will also need ambassadors, especially in Central and South America, who can convince both our friends and our adversaries to take back their nationals who will have been ordered deported from the U.S. Every lever must be used to get countries to do what the U.S. does—accept the return of all their citizens, on demand, with no conditions.
To direct his enforcement agenda, Trump has named Tom Homan (who is also a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow) as his “border czar.” Homan has the right background and commitment to manage the effort.
Starting as a Border Patrol agent and ending as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no one knows more than Homan about the problems—and solutions—to the chaos President Joe Biden unleashed on the southern border. He is respected, from the incoming president down to the field agents, as a man who gets things done.
But it is Department of Homeland Security staff who will do the work both at the border and with interior enforcement. Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, will have the misfortune to follow Alejandro Mayorkas, who I’ve argued has done more harm to U.S. national security than any appointed official in our history.
Noem, a former member of Congress and current governor of South Dakota, supported tough action for immigration security in Trump’s first term, resisted federal attempts to foist released illegal aliens on her state, and sent National Guard soldiers to help Texas control the border when the federal authorities were absent.
Rather than look upon Mayorkas’ rotten works and despair, to paraphrase Shelley, Noem has to get on with the Herculean task of managing a massive bureaucracy that includes three agencies that were merged into DHS from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service: Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Noem has a tough job ahead and needs a competent, dedicated staff.
Biden peppered his DHS with pro-illegal immigration or anti-enforcement ideologues from the activist nongovernmental organization world. One Biden Citizenship and Immigration Services official wanted to abolish ICE. Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to cut ICE funding, “critically reexamine” it, and “think about starting from scratch.”
A senior ICE appointee was reportedly more interested in helping illegal immigrants than detaining them and was allegedly involved in questionable contracts for migrant services which enriched former colleagues, according to a congressional investigation. And among some of the worker bees in the Biden White House, the social media hashtag #Abolish ICE seems as popular as Free Palestine.
Rather than concentrate on enforcing the law, Biden’s key staff tried to evade it, ignore it, or subvert it in pursuit of their agenda. That agenda was, in brief, to merge legal and illegal immigration by declaring all unlawful aliens “noncitizens” and “asylum-seekers” and creating bogus “lawful pathways” for them to get into the U.S. and give them work authorizations—contrary to congressional authority or intent—knowing so many would be difficult to remove.
Now, thanks to Biden’s parole and catch-and-release of unknown, unvetted aliens, thousands of Americans have been victims of preventable crimes. Thanks to his handpicked team, the Ibarra brothers were let loose on Americans, and one of them was just convicted of the brutal murder of Laken Riley. They are just a couple of the thousands of associates of Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua who are causing havoc from Texas to Montana.
As Trump’s Cabinet and executive branch shape up, we need to ignore the Left’s intended distraction over a few contentious appointees—which will eventually work out one way or the other—and let him select his people as the Constitution provides. Then we can judge them on their performance.
Trump deserves a leadership team that will effectuate his mandate, and in turn, that team deserves a federal bureaucracy that will do its job. Any career civil servants who contemplate protesting in public or via social media, creating red-tape resistance, or making subtle attempts to spike the president’s agenda should remember their sworn oaths to protect and defend the Constitution.
They followed orders in assisting the Biden-Harris team to open the borders and eliminate most consequences for law breakers. Now, these public servants must with equal alacrity follow orders to undo that damage and restore the rule of law.
Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
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