ON THE EVENING OF Wednesday, March 27, Lou Dobbs, the seventy-three-year-old Trump intimate and anchor at the Fox Business Network, kicked off his 7 p.m. broadcast with a scathing takedown of the administration’s efforts to secure the border. For several minutes, Dobbs painted the picture for his viewers of a strong president who was demanding to get tough against illegal immigrants but had been stymied at every turn by a weak and ineffectual bureaucracy either unable or unwilling to execute on his orders.
“What has happened to our Department of Homeland Security, the department that slow-walks the president’s demands to secure our southern border, while simultaneously releasing tens of thousands of illegal immigrants into United States?” Dobbs asked, his voice dripping with disdain. “President Trump has declared a national emergency, sent the military to the border, yet DHS is paralyzed. The world’s only superpower now appears suddenly defenseless and on its knees before Central American and Mexican illegal immigrants. Has the Department of Homeland Security SOLD OUT AMERICA?” His top story, Dobbs told his audience that night, was “the Department of Homeland Security surrendering our border.”
“DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is whining about the inability of her department to protect the homeland despite the president’s best efforts to provide the department with every means necessary,” Dobbs said. He mentioned that the secretary had served in several staff positions in the administration of George W. Bush, a distinction that had sown suspicion with Trump from the outset. “The worsening border crisis makes it all too clear,” Dobbs added, “that Secretary Nielsen is in way over her head.”
CBP Commissioner McAleenan had been at the border in El Paso that day, and it was his comments that inspired Dobbs’s damning assessment. A Fox correspondent who reported on McAleenan’s appearance said that the commissioner had “basically raised the white flag, saying his agency is overrun and overwhelmed.” McAleenan had, indeed, painted a portrait of dysfunction and crisis at the border. “On Monday, we saw the highest total of apprehensions and encounters in over a decade with 4,000 migrants either apprehended or encountered in ports of entry in a single day. That was Monday. Yesterday, we broke the record again with 4,117,” McAleenan had said. The agency was on pace to apprehend or encounter 100,000 migrants in the month of March, he said, the highest since 2008. “The breaking point has arrived,” McAleenan reported. He said his agency would begin releasing more migrant families with notices to appear in federal court, and that he would divert 750 uniformed officers from ports of entry to help with the care and custody of migrants. That was described on Dobbs’s show that night by the Fox correspondent as “processing, baby-sitting, and providing a taxi service for migrants needing hospital care or rides to the bus station.”
Later in the broadcast, Dobbs invited Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who had long been whispering in Trump’s ear on immigration, to comment on what Dobbs called “failed leadership at DHS.” Kobach was equally scorching. “It’s shocking,” Kobach said. “We are on track to have the highest level of border apprehensions in twelve years—higher than anything we saw under the two terms of the Obama administration—and the great irony here is President Trump is the strongest president we have ever had on the issue of illegal immigration. He campaigned on it. He has made clear where his stands. Yet we have his DHS apparently sitting on its hands.” Dobbs and Kobach were now practically finishing each other’s sentences. “Why are we permitting these people to continue this charade?” Dobbs asked. “The Department of Homeland Security looks like a joke. They’re acting as a joke. Kirstjen Nielsen—in my opinion, she is utterly unqualified for the job.” What should Trump do? he asked Kobach. “He’s got to have an agency that is aggressively restoring the rule of law in immigration,” Kobach responded. “I don’t know what’s going on inside.”
Trump was mortified, and not for the first time. He had told Nielsen dozens of times before that, “Lou Dobbs hates you. Ann Coulter hates you. You’re making me look bad.” He had run on a hard-line immigration policy, put in place dozens of harsh orders and policies, declared a national emergency to execute a crackdown, and promised to keep immigrants out of the country at all costs, with nothing to show for his efforts but a giant spike in migrants crossing the border? The next day, before he left the White House for a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump summoned several officials for a meeting in the Oval Office. Nielsen, McAleenan, and Pompeo were there, along with Kushner, Mulvaney, Miller, Russ Vought, the acting budget chief, the strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp, and May Davis, the deputy White House policy coordinator. The president was as furious and unhinged as his inner circle had ever seen him. What had been planned as a thirty-minute meeting dragged on for two hours as Trump ranted and raved about the skyrocketing border-crossing numbers. “You are making me look like a fucking idiot,” Trump told the senior officials. I ran on this—it’s MY issue. How could the numbers be so high?
Nielsen pushed back forcefully, arguing that the only way to deal with the crisis at the border was for Congress to close legal loopholes that created the incentives for migrants to reach the United States and allowed them to stay. We need you to push Congress, she said. We’re sending a bill to them, along with a supplemental spending request to deal with the border emergency. But Trump had no patience for it. How the hell did we get to this point? he kept asking. Turning to Pompeo, he began lambasting the deal with Mexico that had been painstakingly negotiated a few months before. “The worst fucking deal we’ve ever made. How stupid. You guys made me look like an idiot. All my friends think I’m an idiot!”
Miller attempted several times to get the meeting back on track. They were supposed to be discussing the legislation the White House was planning to send to Capitol Hill, along with a variety of other measures they were considering to get control of the border. But Trump was hearing none of it. That’s it, he finally said. We’re shutting down the border. Nielsen tried reasoning with him. We can literally close the whole thing, she said, and it’s not going to fix anything, because people can still claim asylum. She proposed closing just one port of entry so that the president could witness in real time what the effects would be. But in Trump’s mind, closing the border meant no one could come in—period. Kushner tried interrupting, echoing Nielsen’s point. This wasn’t going to solve anything. But Trump swatted him down. “All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” he told his son-in-law. I’ve had it—they’re full of shit. We’re going to start shutting down the border. I want it done at noon tomorrow. And then the meeting was over.
As Trump flew west on Air Force One to his rally in Michigan that evening, panicked officials at DHS and the White House swung into action, desperate to delay what they saw as a reckless and potentially catastrophic border shut down. There’s no way we can do this, DHS officials told their White House counterparts. We need to buy time to find him another alternative that will work. On the flight back, Miller and others convinced Trump to delay the border closing for one week. But Miller also picked up where Dobbs and Kobach had left off the night before, telling the president that he needed to completely overhaul DHS and purge senior officials there who were slow-walking measures aimed at blocking immigrants. They had dragged their feet on a whole host of regulatory changes, Miller said, from the public charge rule—his attempt to limit welfare benefits for immigrants—to one that would revoke work permits from certain immigrants. They were always citing legal hurdles to explain why they couldn’t deliver on what the president had promised. It was time for fresh leadership.
By now, Miller knew Trump was fed up with Nielsen, but he argued the problem went deeper than her. Cissna, the head of USCIS, had become intransigent. Miller kept telling Cissna that he needed to effect a “culture change” at USCIS, where Miller believed the asylum officers were a bunch of saps who would approve anyone. But Cissna would push back, saying that his people were just following the standards laid out in the law; he couldn’t just snap his fingers and make them start rejecting people. Miller had also turned against Ron Vitiello, a top CBP official whom Trump had nominated to lead ICE. In a meeting weeks before in the White House Situation Room, Miller had lashed out at Vitiello for failing to push through new rules that would gut court-ordered protections for migrant children, known as the Flores settlement for the young teenage girl whose case inspired them. “You ought to be working on this regulation all day, every day,” Miller shouted at Vitiello in front of other senior administration officials. “It should be the first thought you have when you wake up. And it should be the last thought you have before you go to bed. And sometimes, you shouldn’t go to bed!” John Mitnick, the DHS general counsel, was also on Miller’s list. In his view, they were all problems.
As Miller plotted a purge of their department, DHS officials scrambled to come up with a plan of action to divert Trump from his fixation with closing the border. They touted their effort to reassign border agents from ports of entry, which in turn would increase wait times and slow the flow of migrants without having all the negative economic effects of a full border closure. They leaned on Mexico to increase apprehensions of Central American migrants inside their own country so they could show Trump that the deal that had been struck was working as planned.
In frank telephone calls with their Mexican counterparts, DHS officials begged for cooperation. Look, we know we’ve cried wolf on this a thousand times, but this time it’s real, they said. The president is about to shut down the border, and you need to step up. The Mexicans understood the stakes. They had discussed the idea of creating what they called a “third border,” effectively detaining migrants in southern Mexico to keep them as far as possible from the U.S. border. The Mexicans figured it would take forty-five to sixty days to implement the plan, but now Trump administration officials told them there just wasn’t time. We need you to do this NOW.
With the week-long reprieve from the border shutdown quickly running down, senior DHS officials spent the next several days sending daily emails to Mulvaney, Kushner, and Miller showing that the Mexicans were apprehending more migrants and that wait times at U.S. ports of entry were getting longer. Print these out and show POTUS, the officials implored Trump’s team. Business executives and members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were enlisted to call Trump and impress upon him how horrific the effects would be for them and their businesses if Trump were to close the border.
They crossed their fingers that it would all work. In the meantime, Trump was getting anxious. On Friday, March 29, the day after the Oval Office blowup, Trump made public what he had threatened behind closed doors the day before. “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week,” he said in a pair of tweets from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. Later in the day, while touring Lake Okeechobee, he announced he had halted $500 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three Central American countries who were sending the most migrants. The timing was, as usual, inopportune. Nielsen had just concluded a painstakingly negotiated regional agreement with the three countries in which they had agreed to try to help stem the flow of migrants to the United States. And as was so often the case, Trump’s abrupt decision contradicted his own government. As he spoke, several State Department officials were on Capitol Hill briefing senators on the department’s fiscal 2020 budget request, which included $484 million in aid to Central America. Now the president was saying those countries were cut off. We need to get off the Hill as soon as possible, one of the officials told his colleagues when he saw news reports about what Trump had said. Before somebody asks us about this.
Days later, in the wee hours of a Monday morning in London, Nielsen was asleep in her hotel room when a call came through from the White House. It was Trump looking for his homeland security secretary, who had arrived there late that night for several days of meetings on counterterrorism and cybersecurity. A military aide traveling with Nielsen in London asked the White House operator whether it was an emergency. No, the operator said. Later Monday, Nielsen was at the U.S. embassy when she returned the president’s call. Trump was furious. “I called you, and you didn’t answer!” he snapped. She apologized, explaining that she had not been aware he had tried to reach her until she had woken up that morning. “I don’t know why you’re there—we’re in a crisis,” Trump said. “You have to get back here.” Instead of finishing her meetings and continuing on to Stockholm and Paris, where she was due to have additional talks, Nielsen headed back to the United States. She stopped to survey the situation on the border in Texas and Arizona, then planned to join Trump in Calexico, California, where he was scheduled to pose in front of a section of completed wall and meet with Border Patrol agents.
Nielsen and her staff kept up a steady drumbeat of emails to the White House to lobby Trump against closing the border. Members of Congress and more executives were weighing in privately as well. This is a terrible idea, they all said. We will take an enormous hit, and it won’t get you the results that you want. By midweek, the president was getting cold feet, clearly looking for ways to avoid following through with his threat. Nielsen was in El Paso when she heard from Trump: Maybe there’s another way to do this, he told her. How about if I impose tariffs on the Mexicans, or threaten to impose tariffs? Tariffs are great! Trump said. We’re doing it with China, and we don’t lose money, but they lose money. That wasn’t quite the way tariffs worked, but Nielsen and her staff were relieved. Maybe they had succeeded in talking the president out of closing the border.
The same day, a baffling thing happened. A contact on Capitol Hill called Nielsen to ask her why she had pulled the nomination of Ron Vitiello to be the director of ICE. The odd part was, she hadn’t. Vitiello had gotten wind of a rumor earlier in the day that he was being ousted, but when he had called over to the White House, Miller and Sean Doocey, the head of presidential personnel, had played dumb. It’s just a paperwork screwup, they said. Vitiello thought he was fine. Nielsen placed a call to Doocey, and never got a callback. Late that night, though, he informed her staff that there had, in fact, been a paperwork mix-up—Doocey never said what it was—but it was too late to fix it. Vitiello was out.
The next day, as they boarded Nielsen’s plane to fly to Yuma, an issue of USA Today was on a seat bearing a headline that so thrilled one of her top aides that he pulled out his iPhone and took a picture of it. “President Trump Says US May Never Close the Mexico Border, Would Try Tariffs First.” Until that moment, the secretary of homeland security had not been completely sure whether the president of the United States actually intended to follow through with the order he had given the previous week to seal the border with Mexico. She and her team heaved a sigh of relief. They had lived to fight another day.
Their celebrations were premature. As Trump made his way to Calexico aboard the presidential aircraft on Friday, he turned to McAleenan, his CBP chief. I want you to stop letting migrants cross the border—no exceptions, the president told him. If you get into any legal trouble for it, I’ll pardon you. If Nielsen was not going to shut the border, Trump was determined to find somebody at DHS who would. Once on the ground, Trump and his entourage met up with Nielsen, who had flown in from Arizona, and as they all gathered in a hallway at the Border Patrol headquarters to begin a roundtable with agents and other personnel, Kushner and Miller both did something out of the ordinary: they each gave Nielsen a big hug. It would be the first indication that her days as secretary of homeland security were numbered.
Once inside, Trump worked the room, greeting Border Patrol agents with attaboys for the great job they were doing, and repeating to them what he had told McAleenan on the plane. They should start turning away migrants at the border. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Okay? Every single one of them. Turn them around. Can’t come. When reporters were led in for the public portion of the visit, Trump took his place at a long, narrow table covered with a forest green cloth, flanked by CBP and Army Corps of Engineers officials, and delivered a similar refrain. “This is our new statement: The system is full,” the president said. “Can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, it’s illegal immigration. We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around. That’s the way it is.” Later, Trump singled out Dave Shaw, the ICE special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in San Diego, who had described for the president how the influx of migrants was overstraining his agency. “You know, Dave, you were mentioning before about, you know, people coming in, and they come in and they come in. You don’t have to take them in,” Trump said. “You can’t take them? You can’t take them. There’s nothing you can do, okay?”
Trump continued schmoozing with the border agents after the media had been led out, and he repeated his advice. That’s it—just start turning these people away. Once the president had left the room, McAleenan and other top DHS officials did a frantic round of cleanup. All that stuff he said about turn everyone away? That was not a direct order, they told the agents. Don’t do it. You absolutely do not have the authority to simply stop processing migrants altogether.
As Nielsen flew back to Washington on her Coast Guard plane Friday evening, she called Trump. “Sir, I know you’re really frustrated,” she told him. “Let me come in and talk to you about what we can do.” Trump was surprisingly magnanimous. “It’s not your fault,” he told Nielsen. “You’re great.” Come see me on Sunday in the Yellow Oval Room, he told Nielsen. “They call it the Yellow Oval,” he said again, as if it were the name of a secret clubhouse. “It’s in the residence.” She spent much of the flight back huddling with aides to put together a point-by-point plan to show the president—a Hail Mary pass—scrawling it on a sheet of notebook paper that she would tear out and bring to the White House forty-eight hours later. She called it the “Six C’s”—Congress, Courts, Communications, Countries, Criminals, Cartels—and it was a multifaceted strategy for getting control of the border. Her staff quietly started work on another document: Nielsen’s letter of resignation.
The afternoon of her meeting with Trump, Nielsen was led into the Yellow Oval for what she thought would be a one-on-one meeting. But Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, was there to greet her as well, a sign that this would not be the conversation she had envisioned. Nielsen launched into her presentation, touching on her extensive negotiations and the deal she had reached with the Mexicans to decrease the flow of migrants by 50 percent. “You see what I mean, Mick?” Trump said, turning to his chief. “That’s ridiculous. I told them 100 percent.” It was clear the two had talked about Nielsen before the meeting—and not in a good way. That’s just not possible, Nielsen replied. The Mexicans could not physically stop 100 percent of the migration flow even if they were willing to, which they weren’t. Trump grew exasperated. “Why do you always fight me on this stuff?” he asked. She tried to get through the other items on her list. They needed a legislative push that would actually make a dent in the problem, Nielsen said. Well, Trump said, Jared’s been working on a whole plan for comprehensive immigration reform. Maybe you should have done that. And another thing, Trump said. We need a cement wall.
Nielsen looked at the president, whose dreams of a wall had morphed from cement to steel slats to bollards to trenches and now back to cement. Two years into his presidency, he was back where he had started, bent on keeping immigrants out of the country, determined to take the toughest, most extreme measures regardless of whether they were legal, moral, or even possible, torn between feuding advisers giving him conflicting advice on what policies to embrace, and obsessing over a beautiful, hulking, concrete wall. They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Nielsen told Trump. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed. Work was under way in some places. “Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.”
It was too late anyway. It was clear the president had already made up his mind to get rid of her. “Kirstjen, I want to make a change,” he told her. This is not going to work. We’re just not going to be able to do it. Then I’ll resign, Nielsen said. In an interview months later, Trump recalled that moment as a “sad meeting, because she worked so hard.” Nielsen had a “very hard job,” he acknowledged, especially doing it for him. “I’m demanding a lot on that job, because I understand what I want.” She did not know it yet, but a purge of her agency’s senior staff was already underway. In the coming days, Trump would also fire Claire M. Grady, the undersecretary for management, who by statute was designated to take the top post in the event the secretary’s position became vacant. Trump wanted McAleenan instead, so Grady, an acquisitions specialist who had spent her entire career in government, was unceremoniously pushed out. Within two months, Cissna would also be out, replaced by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who had pushed for an end to birthright citizenship and allowing police officers to investigate the immigration status of anyone they stopped who they suspected might be undocumented. The purge was just beginning.
By the time Nielsen emerged from the thirty-minute meeting in the Yellow Oval, before she had left the White House grounds or had time to sign a resignation letter, Trump’s aides had already begun leaking that she was out.
“Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position,” Trump wrote on Twitter, “and I would like to thank her for her service.”