“STEPHEN WON’T ACCEPT THAT,” Andrew Veprek, an immigration adviser at the Domestic Policy Council and a Miller loyalist, would often say.
In the spring of 2017, as White House officials began negotiating the joint statements—known as communiqués—that Trump and other world leaders would issue at the conclusion of the Group of 7 and Group of 20 summits later that year, Miller tried to seize control of the talks. He ruled out what had previously been considered boilerplate references to global cooperation and the benefits of migration. When officials began circulating drafts with their counterparts in the other six countries, Veprek weighed in to remind everyone of the unmentionable items, calling them “red lines” that Miller had said must not be crossed. Immigration policy is a matter of national sovereignty, he would say, and not subject to negotiation or review. Besides, he would argue, these are just veiled references to the Global Compact for Migration.
The compact was an agreement that world leaders had committed to develop and adopt as part of a historic United Nations declaration reached in New York weeks before Trump was elected. As one of his last acts as president, Obama had hosted a meeting on the global refugee crisis at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016. He had called for world leaders to come together to address the refugee and migration crisis facing the world by doubling the number of refugees they resettled and providing them more aid, jobs, and educational opportunities. Obama never mentioned Trump in his speech, but his words were laden with references to the then-Republican presidential nominee. The outgoing president rejected the idea of turning refugees away because they were Muslim and called the refugee crisis “a test of our common humanity—whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another.
“Just as failure to act in the past—for example, by turning away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany—is a stain on our collective conscience, I believe history will judge us harshly if we do not rise to this moment,” Obama said. He had ended his speech with a counterpoint to the callousness of Trump’s suggestion that the United States bar Syrian refugees. Obama quoted from a letter he had received from a six-year-old New York boy named Alex who had seen a viral video taken in Aleppo of Omran Daqneesh, a five-year-old boy sitting bloodied and stunned in an ambulance following a bombing of his war-torn city. “We will give him a family, and he will be our brother,” Alex had written. By the end of Obama’s meeting, the assembled nations had signed on to the New York Declaration, pledging that the international community would step up its efforts on behalf of refugees and meet again in 2018 to develop and ratify a global migration agreement. The declaration was a worldwide statement of support for the rights of refugees and migrants, a promise to treat them humanely, and a reaffirmation that refugees have the right to seek asylum and would not be forced to return to countries where they would face persecution.
But with Trump in office, the United States was sending a very different message to the rest of the world. On Air Force One in May, as the president returned to Washington from a G7 meeting in Taormina, Italy, Miller bragged that American negotiators had successfully infused Trump’s “America First” philosophy into the communiqué. “This is language we fought really hard for: ‘We affirm the sovereign rights of states, individually and collectively, to control their own borders and establish policies in their own national interests and national security.’ Now, that’s a major statement inside the G7 communiqué that America pushed for and was successful in getting into it,” Miller said as he briefed reporters in the section of the plane reserved for journalists. “It shows the influence that the president of the United States is having on the global dialogue in a very profound way.”
In Washington, Miller told White House officials, and indeed representatives of governments throughout the world, that the United States was not even willing to mention the Global Compact, or the New York Declaration that paved the way for it.
It was one early indication that what was once standard procedure for multilateral diplomacy at the United Nations was often seen by Miller and Veprek as a politically motivated affront to Trump and his agenda. One afternoon in early spring, Veprek stormed angrily into Garry Hall’s directorate, enraged to have learned that administration officials had been asked to prepare an extensive report on racism in America for the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, an international body of human rights experts. How dare they question us on this? Veprek demanded to know. The report was going to be an anti-American screed and a hit job against Trump, he said, sputtering with anger, and it would consume the valuable time of senior administration lawyers who would have to spend precious hours responding to it, hosting a visit from the committee, and consulting with outside groups. Instead, Veprek wanted the White House to skip all those steps and produce a terse report. Hall’s staff explained that participating in the effort was part of the normal functioning of the U.N. It was important for the United States to be seen as taking part, they explained, so that when it came time for a similar international bodies to investigate bad behavior by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea—work that was often the foundation of U.N. resolutions to hold countries accountable—the process had credibility. Well, we don’t have to open our doors to them, Veprek said. It’s nothing more than a kabuki show designed to tag us as racist. The committee can just read our Constitution and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as well as our civil rights laws to see that we’ve addressed racism in our society, he said. Hall’s staff was shocked. Ian Moss, an NSC lawyer who was one of the few remaining African Americans at the White House, launched into a lengthy history of racial discrimination in the United States, and all of the ways in which it was still alive and well. Veprek did not want to hear it. The American people voted for this president, he said, and they explicitly rejected this internationalist approach.
“Is there anyone here who really believes that the Global Compact for Migration serves the interests of the United States?” Miller demanded one November afternoon in the Situation Room, where H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, was presiding over a meeting that included top officials from the State Department, DHS, and the Justice Department, as well as Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador, who was joining by teleconference. Everyone fell silent. “Speak up!”
For weeks, Miller and Veprek had been quietly laying the groundwork for pulling the United States out of negotiations on the compact, which were set to begin in a couple of weeks in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Under normal circumstances, it was common practice for American officials to take their seat at the table for talks on such documents, even if the United States later decided not to sign. But these were not normal times. Miller was determined that American diplomats not have any role in shaping a document that ran so counter to Trump’s agenda. The very concept of the agreement—the nations of the world banding together to take on a global refugee crisis by mapping out an ambitious collective response—offended Trump’s sensibilities. It oozed globalism, and was the polar opposite of the “America First” posture the president was putting forward.
If they were going to prevail in pulling the United States out of the talks, Miller and his allies knew they needed a policy reason for doing so. Veprek found one in an obscure article posted on the blog of the Harvard Law Review, in which the author argued that even though the Global Compact would be nonbinding, it could shape the behavior of the countries that signed on, “which will create new norms that will eventually become entrenched as international law.” With Hamilton’s help, Veprek and Miller argued that the essay proved that the migration compact could take on the weight of “soft law” and be invoked by individual litigants who could then claim protections under the agreement that the United States would be forced to provide. If that happened, they argued, the United States could be forced to accept waves of migrants from around the globe. Legal scholars and national security experts considered the possibility so remote as to be almost laughable, and in any case, argued that the government would have all sorts of means to beat back any such legal challenge. But Miller and Veprek, repeatedly citing the essay that made their case, insisted on the point. Eventually, Hamilton conceded that it was highly unlikely that the United States could be successfully sued to enforce the terms of a nonbinding international agreement, but he insisted that the mere possibility that the Department of Justice might have to expend resources to defend against such litigation was too much to tolerate.
In the Situation Room that day, Jeff Sessions bolstered Miller’s case. “In my forty-year career, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said of the compact. “It will open the floodgates to our courts!”
The compact didn’t even exist yet. Negotiating teams hadn’t so much as put pen to paper on what was called their “zero draft,” the baseline for developing what would ultimately be a painstakingly negotiated document. And yet here was the attorney general of the United States warning grimly about a possible onslaught of litigation. As evidence that the agreement ran counter to the president’s policy, Veprek had even added to the discussion paper a copy of the president’s immigration principles, which had been hastily compiled by Miller the month before, calling for stricter asylum standards and fewer refugees in the United States. “Limit the number of refugees to prevent abuse of the generous U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and allow for effective assimilation of admitted refugees into the fabric of our society,” was the final recommendation.
Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador, who had joined from New York via videoconference, was the sole voice in the meeting pushing back against Miller and Sessions. She argued that the United States should at the very least attend the negotiations on the compact, present its views, and try to shape the outcome. If the end result wasn’t acceptable, they could always walk away and refuse to sign on. This is what we do at the U.N., Haley said. We take on tough problems all day long, we represent the national interest. So I’m all for engaging, I’m all for seeing what this thing looks like. “We can handle this,” she insisted. “It’s not the end of the republic as we know it.”
This had been the State Department’s position at a meeting earlier that month, when John Sullivan, the deputy secretary of state, had argued that negotiators should go to Mexico and see what came of the talks. But now Brian Hook, the head of the State Department’s policy office, who was attending the meeting in Tillerson’s place, sided with Miller, and others around the table were mostly silent. Jennifer Arangio made a brief attempt to challenge him, saying that the United States could better influence the outcome of the agreement by sitting at the negotiating table than by shunning it outright. But Miller was hearing none of it. This compact would be disastrous for the United States, he said, and the Trump administration wanted no part of even talking about it.
His dramatic words hung in the air inside the Situation Room as Haley could be seen on the videoconference screen rising and walking out. It was clear the meeting had come to an abrupt end, and Miller had gotten his way.
“Well,” McMaster quipped from his seat at the head of the table. “That was fun.”