Elizabeth Holtzman is resigning in disgust over Trump’s immigration policies. And although she is resigning, she says it should be someone else who is leaving. In her letter addressed to Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, Holtzman says, “Although it is I who am resigning in protest against these policies, it is you who should be tendering your resignation instead.”
Holtzman’s letter gives Nielsen a reminder that “[t]here was a time that the U.S. welcomed refugees,” and immigrants, and how we are currently squandering that away in catastrophic fashion. Holtzman helped write the Refugee Act of 1980 and her letter is a blistering condemnation of Trump’s “zero tolerance” separation policy. The letter also illustrates “how the U.S. is abdicating its moral leadership on vital humanitarian issues at a time when we should be doubling down on doing the right thing”.
She says, “Under your administration and that of Donald Trump’s, DHS has been transformed into an agency that is making war on immigrants and refugees,” and then finishes her letter with a call for Nielsen to resign.
Just. Amazing.
Elizabeth Holtzman is still a bad ass… https://t.co/145wxCsi3Z
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) July 24, 2018
Holtzman was one of four Homeland Security Advisory Council members that recently quit in protest over the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which has seen over 2,000 migrant children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. The other members who quit alongside Holtzman include Richard Danzig, the Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton, David Martin, a former Department of Homeland Security deputy general counsel, and Matthew Olsen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre.
The four members wrote a joint letter to Secretary Nielsen, but Holtzman felt compelled to write one of her very own. And we all should thank her for it.
You can follow me on Twitter Mayme Barth
If you want us to read this letter then give us a link to the text so we can read the letter! Don’t write about what Holzman wrote: let people read it for themselves. An image of the letter is inadequate, the text is illegible. Transcribe it and put it in a link so people can read the source document. Dingbats. In this environment it is so important to have access to original sources.