Homeland Security Turns to Defending Statues Amid Questions Over Priorities

“This is exactly what the president has wanted,” said David Lapan, a former spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, “putting people in positions that will be completely beholden to him and do whatever he wants, whether or not it’s in the best interests of the agencies they’ve been tasked to lead.”

Early this year, two days after the president used his State of the Union address to criticize so-called sanctuary cities, Mr. Wolf surprised the public — and some of his high-ranking Customs and Border Protection officials — when he barred New Yorkers from enrolling in programs that allowed travelers to speed through borders and airport lines.

The move was meant to pressure the New York state government to change a law that prevented homeland security agencies from gaining access to the Department of Motor Vehicles’s database records and that provided driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security has also increased the pace of lawsuits against private property owners in South Texas to speed up construction of Mr. Trump’s border wall before the election.

The president has effectively sealed the border to asylum seekers, most recently with a plan that would allow asylum officers to deny protection to nearly every migrant by citing any disease outbreak as a public health emergency.

And now Mr. Wolf has turned his attention to American citizens.

“Any city that is having increases in violence, is burning, is having the rioting and looting, it’s by choice at this point,” Mr. Wolf said this week on “Fox & Friends.” “Those local elected officials are making a choice to keep their cities very unsafe and dangerous.”

His department is responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, usually considered to be power grids and river dams but also iconic national monuments like the Statue of Liberty. In 2010, the Departments of Homeland Security and Interior jointly outlined protection plans for national heritage sites, not against protesters but against “the consequences of terrorist attacks and other natural and man-made hazards.”