A week after beginning his reelection campaign with promises of mass deportations, President Trump sent the agencies responsible for immigration enforcement deeper into disarray on Tuesday, replacing his interim border chief with a figure he plucked from cable news punditry last month.
Mark Morgan, who Trump installed as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in early June, will take over as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, replacing John Sanders, according to two Department of Homeland Security officials and a legislative staffer briefed on the move.
Trump ran for president promising a sweeping immigration crackdown and a monumental border wall, but he has presided over the worst migration crisis in at least a decade while dizzyingly hiring and firing DHS officials. The shake-up Tuesday comes after weeks of interagency squabbles and political knifings among agency officials who are struggling to cope with a record surge of migrant families and squalid conditions inside U.S. Border Patrol detention cells stuffed beyond capacity.
John Sanders, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, announced in an internal email Tuesday that he had handed in his resignation letter — effective July 5 — to acting director of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan on Monday.