President Trump will name Chad Wolf, the former chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen, as acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary.
Axios confirmed on Thursday that Trump will name Wolf to the top job at DHS as an acting secretary, as he did with the sitting Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan months ago after Nielsen’s departure.
Wolf, a favorite of White House adviser Stephen Miller, previously served as Nielsen’s chief of staff during her more than two-year tenure at the agency.
A handful of officials had seen the need to fill the DHS Secretary job as a choice between Wolf and Dave Pekoske, the current Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Those officials favored Wolf for the position.
Critics, though, have said Wolf is unqualified for the job because of his former lobbying on behalf of NASSCOM, a leader in the American job outsourcing industry that seeks no restrictions on the H-1B visa program to ensure employers can outsource an unlimited number of U.S. jobs to imported foreign workers.
At stake is DHS’s commitment to constructing more than 400 miles of border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border before the 2020 presidential election next year — a task that Trump and DHS officials have routinely promised to execute.
Thus far, the Trump administration has built 74 miles of border wall at the southern border, with the process moving exceptionally slowly throughout 2017 and 2018 as Nielsen repeatedly failed to secure funding for the project. Today, nearly 160 miles of updated border wall is under construction.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.