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DHS Chief Kirstjen Nielsen Got Heckled Out of a Mexican Restaurant in DC

She fled after they chanted "shame," "abolish ICE," and "if kids don't eat in peace, you don't eat in peace."
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photos (L) via Twitter user Osita Nwanevu and (R) by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images.

While hundreds of immigrant children continue to be forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, Trump's Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, decided to spend her Tuesday evening dining at, of all places, a Mexican restaurant. And let's just say it didn't go so well.

Tipped off that Nielsen was eating dinner at a DC Mexican restaurant, Metro DC's branch of Democratic Socialists of America (the same group that chanted Milo Yiannopoulos out of a Manhattan bar this year) decided to pay her a visit—chanting "shame" at the DHS chief until she got up from her table and left, the Washington Post reports.

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"How dare you spend your evening here eating dinner as you’re complicit in the separation and deportation of over 10,000 children separated from their parents?" one protester shouted at Nielsen. "How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people who come here seeking asylum in the United States?"

For more than ten minutes, Nielsen sat there in silence while protesters shouted "end family separation" and "abolish ICE" at her, breaking into chants like "if kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace." A few people who just happened to be eating at the restaurant reportedly joined in as well, with one diner telling the Post "a lot of people were very happy to see her shamed." Eventually Nielsen paid her check, got up from her table, and left.

Just the day before, Nielsen held a press conference at the White House on the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy where she said that—despite audio of the children crying and images of them locked in cages—they're "being well taken care of."

"We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care," she said Monday. "There is videos, there is TVs, I visited the detention centers myself."

In response to the protest, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security tweeted that Nielsen had been disrupted by "a small group of protestors who share her concern with our current immigration laws."

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