Stephen Colbert compares Kirstjen Nielsen to Pennywise the demon clown

Donald Trump's secretary for homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, stepped down on Sunday after the president lost patience with her efforts to address the "crisis" of illegal immigration he insists is taking place along the US-Mexico border.

Nielsen was reportedly "regularly berated" by Trump in the early hours of the morning, according to The New York Times, as the president became increasingly obsessed with immigration statistics and getting his wall built, declaring a widely-disputed national emergency to get his hands on the $5.7bn (£4.4bn) in federal funds required to realise his "big, beautiful" dream to keep out the "bad hombres" of Mexico.

Nielsen took the job in December 2017 and reluctantly backed some of the administration's most extreme "zero tolerance" policies towards impoverished asylum seekers, including the separation of migrant children from their parents in border detention centres.

Her departure was broadly welcomed by Democrats but the professional obituaries were far from kind.

Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker was particularly brutal on CNN:

For the rest of her life people will look at her and think, ‘Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages'.

The recirculation of this appearance before Congress from last month also did the outgoing secretary few favours.

But the most devastating line on Nielsen surely came from satirist Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.

Colbert told his audience:

Sure, she puts kids in cages, but Trump was upset because Nielsen hasn’t enacted stricter immigration rules.

So, he just needs someone who can be crueller to children then Kirstjen Nielsen.

Get ready for secretary of Homeland Security Pennywise!

Chilling and, with this administration, far from impossible.

Since Andres Muschietti's film of the classic Stephen King horror novel It became the box office hit of summer 2017, the evil clown demon Pennywise has become something of a cultural touchstone.

Incredibly, this isn't even the first time the sewer-dwelling child-snatcher has been likened to a member of the Trump administration.

In October 2017, Saturday Night Live parodied the movie's notorious opening, with Kate McKinnon starring as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, rising up out of a storm drain to haunt CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (Beck Bennett).

More: Trump's Cabinet now has just three women in it