President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security today downplayed the importance of his election-winning, pro-American immigration agenda, including the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“There is no need for a wall from sea to shining sea,” Kirstjen Nielsen said during her November 8 confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Nielsen said of building a border wall:
First of all, I would just like to, if I could, quote something Senator [Claire] McCaskill said at the beginning. The president has stated as have my predecessors at DHS, certainly something that I share, “There is no need for a wall from sea to shining sea.” What we need to do is work with the operators, should I be confirmed, I would look forward to speaking with state and local officials, those on the ground, both law enforcement and Federal law enforcement to include CBP to understand where we need some sort of physical barrier.
Nielsen comment referred to a statement by Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, who also downplayed the effectiveness of a border wall.
During the hearing, Nielsen touted “technology” along the southern border as being just as necessary to stop illegal immigration. The technology-based “virtual-wall” narrative is often used by Democrats and Republican establishment to fake sympathy for the public’s insistence on a border wall.
“It’s not just people, it’s not just barriers, but it’s also technology and it is the policies and procedures that enable us to sense and quickly respond,” Nielsen said. “Something seemingly as simple as a road along a piece of physical barrier enables us to actually monitor and respond should a threat be able to get past.”
“It’s not just physical barriers,” Nielsen said. “It is personnel, it is training, it is technology, it is working with state and locals.”
As Breitbart News reported, Nielsen’s nomination to head DHS has been praised by the cheap foreign labor lobby, open borders advocates, and the Washington, D.C. national security establishment – which allied itself with the failed “Never Trump” movement during the 2016 presidential election.
In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by Breitbart News, Nielsen explained how she would be “ready to work with Congress” on a plan to give amnesty to the nearly 800,000 DACA illegal aliens in the U.S.
Likewise, Nielsen chaired a committee at the World Economic Forum that promoted mass immigration to Europe and the U.S., claiming Western nations did not have a choice and needed to accept millions of migrants. That report, as Breitbart News reported, was co-authored by executives from multinational corporations and world banks.
Additionally, Breitbart News reported on Nielsen’s involvement with the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when more than 30,000 illegal aliens and foreign workers were able to come to the U.S. to take American blue-collar jobs which those devastated by the natural disaster had hoped to get.
Following Hurricane Katrina, 1.5 million Americans were displaced by the storm, and easing of labor laws by the Bush administration left many looking for work outside of the Gulf Coast because illegal aliens and foreign workers quickly dominated the clean-up effort.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.