Kirstjen Nielsen is coming to Congress. Democrats can grill her on Trump’s ‘national emergency’ lies.

By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
February 15 at 4:06 PM

When President Trump declared a national emergency on Friday morning, he justified the move with multiple lies. He downplayed the idea that most drugs enter through ports of entry (they do). He dismissed the notion that illegal border crossings are at historic lows (they are). He suggested a wall would keep out asylum-seeking migrants (most of whom are turning themselves in at the border).

At one point during Trump’s press conference, he was directly quizzed on where he gets the numbers that form the basis for his claims. He replied: “I get my numbers from a lot of sources, like Homeland Security primarily.”

As luck would have it, the person who is in charge of “Homeland Security” is coming to Capitol Hill very soon. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is scheduled to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on March 6, at a hearing entitled, “The Way Forward on Border Security.”

This gives Democrats a major opening to press Nielsen on many of the claims Trump has been making about the border. And this has new relevance now that those claims are the basis for Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, which he’s using to appropriate the power to build large portions of his wall without congressional authorization.

If handled properly, questioning from Democratic members of the House Homeland Security Committee will put Nielsen in an exquisitely difficult position. That’s because Nielsen will have to choose between falsifying widely available facts, on the one hand, and undercutting Trump’s case for a national emergency on the other.

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