Fox News host Lou Dobbs raged Friday against leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, calling them “absolute morons” and declaring that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen should be fired for what he sees as their inability to stop immigration that he claimed is “going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.”
Dobbs opened Friday’s Lou Dobbs Tonight talking about President Donald Trump’s statements earlier in the day that he might close the border to Mexico, including legal ports of entry, in the very near future.
“DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is flailing,” said Dobbs, “and her department appears utterly paralyzed under ineffectual leadership.”
The host also took issue with the recent reports that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been releasing some detained immigrants into the general population to alleviate overcrowding.
“Are they also dumping deadly drugs at the same time?” asked Dobbs. “Sex traffickers have wide-open access to the United States. The cartels, frankly, are winning. The CBP’s Commissioner Kevin McAleenan is actually whining instead of acting and crying out for congressional help of all things. Commissioner, Congress is the problem, not the solution.”
Dobbs, who has been known to communicate directly with President Trump outside of TV interviews, then called on the president to “fire these incompetents and the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and Customs Border Protection. They can’t act effectively, they can’t create, and they can’t innovate. They only react, and then only to call on Congress.”
Later in the program, Dobbs continued in this vein, calling CBP leaders “absolute morons” who are “sitting there waiting for orders, waiting for somebody to hand them a solution.”
“If this is what we have come to, if the quality of people in leadership in DHS from the secretary of the department on down I mean lets, you know, just literally put out welcome wagons,” said Dobbs before adding on this doom-and-gloom take. “Pile them high because we’re just going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.”
Earlier in the week, CBP’s McAleenan revealed that, for the first time in more than a decade, the agency was performing “direct release” of detained migrants, meaning that instead of an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement official deciding on whether an individual can be accepted into custody or needs to be released pending a court hearing, that decision will now be made by a CBP agent and the release “will happen more expeditiously and directly.”
“That is not something we want to do,” explained McAleenan. “It is something we have to do given the overcrowding in our facilities.”
