In the wake of Donald Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, critics have raised concerns about the agency tasked with carrying out the president’s mass deportation effort: the Department of Homeland Security.
Even those who were once among the agency’s staunchest defenders have started to question its very existence. That includes Miles Taylor, former chief of staff for DHS during the first Trump administration. He now thinks it’s time for the department to be dismantled entirely.
On Wednesday, Taylor sat down with MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on “Deadline: White House” to explain how he reached that conclusion and why he believes Trump has caused irreparable damage to the agency.
“I resisted saying this,” Taylor told Wallace, explaining that he came to the conclusion only recently after “years” of discussions with his wife, who also previously worked for the department.
“She has argued that DHS needs to be totally reconstructed. She has argued that it was ripe for abuse, all of those things, that it needs to go,” he said. “And I resisted that because, you know, in the Bush administration, I went into government to help build DHS. I believed that DHS was one of the solutions to preventing another 9/11.”
Taylor said he has now, however, “fully come around to her viewpoint.”
The former Trump official said the president had “fully hijacked the department to act as his pocket police.”
“Those critics for years have been right,” he said. “And I think a lot of us never imagined the greatest threat to our democracy would come from the inside until Donald Trump arrived on the scene.”
When Wallace asked Taylor what it is about DHS that makes it so “uniquely corruptible,” he replied that the agency, which was established in 2002, was “young” and had not yet developed “mechanisms to resist.”
“That’s in part — in very large part — because Stephen Miller knows that agency inside and out,” he added. “He knows it lacks oversight, he knows it lacks the ability to resist and he’s personally micromanaging these offices and, according to reports, down to micromanaging individual operations. And that’s something DHS was never, ever prepared to resist.”
Despite Trump’s immigration crackdown drawing national attention, Taylor also made clear he thinks the problem wasn’t just with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“We can talk a lot about ICE and CBP,” he said, but Trump has “co-opted all of the agencies of the department.”
“They’re sending USCIS to take away visas from students who write op-eds they don’t like. They’re using FEMA money as a cudgel to punish blue states and to reward red states,” he added, referring to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“You can go through the entire department and see how Donald Trump has remade it into a political machine and a revenge machine. And we got to make sure no president is ever able to do that again, and that starts with deconstructing the department.”
You can watch Taylor’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”