Two of the top ten Obama holdover bureaucrats Breitbart News reported in February President Trump could fire or remove are stepping down from their State Department refugee roles.
Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration Simon Henshaw is stepping down from that position, Reuters reported on Saturday.
“In an interview on Saturday evening, Henshaw told Reuters he was leaving his position in a routine professional move unrelated to the Trump administration’s policies, which have curtailed refugee admissions. A State Department spokeswoman also said Henshaw’s move was routine,” Reuters reported.
“On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Lawrence Bartlett, previously the head of the refugee admissions office at the State Department, had been given a temporary re-assignment in the State Department office handling Freedom of Information Act requests,” Reuters noted.
The FOIA office in the State Department is the bureaucratic equivalent of an exile to Siberia for someone with Bartlett’s background, sources tell Breitbart News.
As Breitbart News reported in December, Bartlett had been on a temporary assignment in Puerto Rico.
Henshaw was number 7 on Breitbart’s top ten Obama holdover bureaucrats list, and Bartlett was number 9.
Reuters continued:
The bureau will be run from Jan. 22 onward by Carol O‘Connell, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, according to her State Department biography. . .
Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has slashed the number of refugees allowed into the country, paused the refugee program entirely for four months, instituted stricter vetting requirements and quit negotiations on a voluntary pact to deal with global migration.
As Breitbart News reported on Tuesday, refugee arrivals for the first three months and two weeks of FY 2018 total 5,524, an 80 percent drop in the number of refugee arrivals during the same time period of FY 2017.