Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.
The terms of Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Trump said on Twitter that Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.” Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.
She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. The president grew impatient with Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.
It’s no secret that Trump had a problem with Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. In May, stories surfaced about Trump publicly berating her in front of the entire Cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. Nielsen was said to have drafted a resignation letter at the time.
In her resignation letter released Sunday, Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”
This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.
Sadly, Nielsen’s response to her boss’ displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. This past summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.
“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border,” she said on Twitter in June. “Period.” She repeated as much to Congress as recently as March.
Nor was immigration the only issue on which Nielsen floundered. On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.
Nielsen’s departure is seen by some as part of a broader restructuring of her department. Just two days before meeting with the secretary, the president withdrew his nomination for the next head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying that he wanted to go in a “tougher direction.” Presumably he plans to chart a similar course with Nielsen’s successor.
For now, Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies. It comes as the swell of migrant families across the border pushes the system toward collapse.
Within this leadership vacuum, it seems likely that more influence will be exerted by Miller, who inspires and reinforces Trump’s harshest ideas on immigrants and immigration.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said of Nielsen’s departure: “It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”
If Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.
Cows on Mars!
Scientists have finally confirmed something they had doubted, that Mars does occasionally emit puffs of methane into its atmosphere. That doesn’t necessarily mean what you presume it means, that the Red Planet is or once was home to alien cows or other forms of life. But it could.
Most of the methane on Earth is pumped out by microbes and other living creatures — most notoriously cows, which emit vast clouds of the greenhouse gas (though largely by burps, contrary to popular lore). So while sniffing methane may not be so thrilling on Earth, discovering that Mars is burping up the stuff — following confirmation that there is water below its rusty surface — fits a critical piece in a most intriguing puzzle.
Searching for life on Mars, or getting there, has obsessed earthlings ever since telescopes enabled them to spy on the neighboring globe. The passion persists. The methane report last week, from scientists working for the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, was followed by a statement from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine that the agency hopes to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. One way or another, the rusty dot of twilight is getting awfully lively.
The notion of Martian life gained popularity and respectability when Percival Lowell, a well-regarded scientist who founded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, spent 15 years gazing at Mars at the close of the 19th century and came up with detailed maps of canals and oases, positing that they had been built by a civilization desperately tapping its last source of water as the planet dried up. That helped spur a rich Martian sci-fi literature, including such classics as C.S. Lewis’ “Out of the Silent Planet,” in which a dying Mars is populated by intelligent species that choose to become extinct rather than invade Earth.
Sadly, science eventually quashed the Lowellian vision of intelligent life-forms digging ditches to delay their end, though it’s something earthlings might ponder as they relentlessly accelerate their planet’s doom by pumping carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases (including methane) into the atmosphere. But if there are no canals or oases on Mars, there is liquid water, the sine qua non of life as we know it, and something burping up methane, a signature, though not a proof, of life.
The former was confirmed in July when Italian scientists working for the Mars Express mission reported that they had detected a 12-mile-wide underground liquid pool near the Martian South Pole. And now the same team of scientists has confirmed earlier readings of wafts of methane by measurements from the Mars Express orbiter and from NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Neither is proof of life. The lake was probably too salty to freeze, and therefore too salty for life, and methane can be produced by geological processes, or it could have been produced eons ago and trapped under ice. So the search goes on. But at least scientists have pinpointed where the gas is coming from, which is within the Gale Crater, near the Martian equator, where the Curiosity rover is still actively sniffing and sifting for microbial life.
That might be a good spot for NASA’s astronauts to start their explorations, perhaps scoping sites for the canals and oases desperate earthlings will need when they flee their overheated planet. In the meantime, the European Space Agency invites all “citizens of planet Earth” to compete for a 30-second audio file that will be played on Mars in an experiment planned for the ExoMars 2020 mission. The file will also be broadcast on Earth, so the Czech organizers urge a message “valid for the world today.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.