A furious President Donald Trump is in the throes of his umpteenth tantrum on immigration. This won't end well.
The president, who is fond of saying that without strong borders, "we don't have a country," last week threatened to close the southern border imminently _ then flip-flopped days later as his own Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the obvious, that he was inviting economic catastrophe.
So after nonsensically proclaiming "our country is full," months after he had ad-libbed in his State of the Union that he wants legal immigrants to enter in "the largest numbers ever," Trump decapitated the main Cabinet agency overseeing immigration policy.
Sunday, he forced out Nielsen, naming the current head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection as acting secretary in her place. The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (in that position since June) saw his nomination to be permanent director yanked, with Trump demanding a "tougher direction."
Tougher how? Last summer, Trump called his own administration's policy of separating families at the border "so sad." Now, even as the feds tell courts it may take two years even to identify thousands of children severed from their mothers and fathers, Trump looks to reinstate the policy he eschewed responsibility for creating, then lamented, then abandoned.
It matters not who eventually is put in key immigration positions when the problem is the man doing the appointing.
