President Donald Trump is reportedly set to fire hundreds of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees as part of his effort to purge the executive branch of potential ideologues who might stymie his agenda.
Several sources told NBC News that the administration has created a “centralized plan” and compiled a list of high-level individuals in various departments who will be terminated this week.
The firings will come on top of hundreds of more general cuts that began across DHS on Friday night, which targeted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Those firings were the latest in a governmentwide effort to reduce the federal workforce.
This week, the three sources told NBC News, career employees at high managerial levels, namely Senior Executive Service and General Schedule 15 employees, may be removed from agencies across DHS — not to reduce the size of the workforce but to remove employees whom the administration sees as potentially standing in the way of goals the Trump administration has for the agency.
DHS, which includes Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is the primary agency tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration law. Trump has relied heavily on CBP to secure the southwest border and on ICE to ramp up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
A former senior Biden administration official told NBC News that those targeted “are career people who have an influence on policy and strategy in those positions.”
An official in the current administration argued that the individuals who will be released “willfully grind things to halt” when it comes to enacting President Trump’s agenda – especially as it pertains to immigration policy.
This move appears to show that Trump has learned from his first term in office. Unelected bureaucrats motivated by politics commonly worked to counteract the president’s policies, making it harder for the administration to execute their plans.
One high-profile example came when Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff, wrote an anonymous op-ed that was published in The New York Times in 2018. The piece, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, detailed how Taylor was a part of a group of senior officials actively working to thwart Trump’s agenda.
Taylor’s op-ed revealed that there were multiple people in DHS seeking to prevent the president from enforcing immigration laws and other policies they disagreed with. If this was the case, how many more are there in other departments that will do the same thing?
Since medical science has still not produced a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome, it is reasonable to speculate that there are still people within the executive branch who might not be as keen on carrying out the wishes of the chief executive.
If this is the case, Trump is making a smart move here. Yes, it will make the pearl clutchers in the legacy media destroy even more pearl necklaces. But at the end of the day, a president cannot do his job when those under him are hellbent on stopping him.