BY THE SUMMER, THE Trump Effect had already begun to evaporate.
Despite Trump’s repeated claims that his mere presence in the Oval Office had helped reduce illegal immigration, border crossings had begun to increase again in May 2017, and continued rising in June and July. By August, the number of people attempting to enter the United States from Mexico illegally had grown by nearly 20 percent from Trump’s first full month in office. In public, Trump largely ignored the upturn, continuing to brag for months about decreases from previous years. But privately, he was furious. And among the aides most responsible for his immigration policies—Miller, Hamilton, Sessions, and Kelly—the turnabout created a sense of panic as they sought to find new and more aggressive ways to reduce the flow of immigrants.
Hamilton, who was a senior adviser at DHS and a key advocate for Miller’s agenda in the department, tried to light a fire under his colleagues. He gathered the department’s top leadership for an urgent brainstorming session in the conference room at the Nebraska Avenue headquarters. To Hamilton, it was no different from what executives at a widget-making company might do to find better ways to make widgets. The government needed to do more to stop the flow of immigrants, Hamilton told them. He directed them to come up with a memo for the secretary detailing ten new things the government could do to discourage illegal crossings by Mexicans and Central American migrants and enforce the rule of law. The list included many of the hard-line ideas that Trump had long advocated: zero tolerance at the border, restricting asylum claims, detaining families, sending Central American migrants to Mexico. Take forty-eight hours, Hamilton told them. One participant described Hamilton as seizing the meeting “by the scruff of the neck.”
Calling a meeting was one thing. Forcing action was another, and Hamilton quickly ran into obstacles. Among the top officials at the table for the meeting was Jim Nealon, the assistant secretary for international affairs and the acting head of the department’s office of policy. Nealon was a lifelong diplomat who had served as the ambassador to Honduras in Obama’s administration. But he was also a friend of Kelly’s, having served as his deputy and foreign policy adviser when Kelly was the commander of forces at the U.S. Southern Command. When Kelly became DHS secretary, he had asked Nealon to join him. Philosophically, Nealon was anything but a true Trump believer. And when Hamilton demanded that his office quickly draw up proposals for limiting the flow of immigrants into the country, Nealon balked.
He thought some of the ideas that Hamilton was proposing were illegal and others were unethical or immoral. In some cases, as Nealon’s staff began contacting experts throughout other parts of the government, there were practical concerns. Nealon’s policy office refused to sign off on some of the memos. Others were sent to other offices at DHS for approval and never returned. Days stretched into weeks and Hamilton’s fury deepened. It was exactly the kind of resistance that the White House suspected was at work to frustrate the president’s agenda—a “deep state” comprised of bureaucrats from previous administrations who were working secretly behind the scenes to frustrate the new president’s agenda and embarrass Trump. To Hamilton, the lack of urgent action from Nealon and the other bureaucrats at DHS was outright obstinance that bordered on insubordination. But there was little that he could do to force the issue, even with Miller calling repeatedly from the White House, demanding to know what more could be done at DHS to turn the numbers around.
One of the items on the list that Nealon opposed was a proposal to routinely separate all adults from their children when they crossed the border illegally. It had been considered, and rejected, long before Trump was elected. Top Obama officials held similarly urgent meetings during migrant border surges in 2014 and 2016. Migrants were increasingly exploiting existing immigration laws and court rulings and using children as a way to get adults into the country, on the theory that families were being treated differently from single people. In a meeting in the Situation Room with Obama, Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, had presented some of the more extreme options, including building detention facilities to hold teenage children. But he warned that options like that carried risks. Obama’s legacy could be building “Gitmo for kids,” Johnson warned, referring to the infamous prison for terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. Johnson and Cecilia Muñoz, the domestic policy adviser, knew that cleaving families might discourage migrants from trying to enter the United States. But they told Obama that having law enforcement agents separate families would become a logistical nightmare and a certain political disaster. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ ” Muñoz recalled later. “We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear—that’s not who we are.”
The feeling had been shared across the bureaucracy, including by those who would have been charged with carrying out the family separations. During one White House meeting in 2014, officials pressed ICE’s Homan to order his agents to round up unaccompanied children who had exhausted their appeals and been ordered deported by a judge. “You realize what you’re asking me to do?” he said to the officials seated around the table. “You are asking me go to a home in the United States and remove a child from the home. You want me to buy a bunch of car seats and transport children?” Later, Homan told colleagues that he never wanted to be in the position of having to outfit his ICE vehicles with toddler seats.
Three years later inside the Trump administration, officials had similar concerns, but the pressure was mounting to do something dramatic. Despite what Kelly had told lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration continued to actively consider the idea. But given the resistance inside DHS, little happened quickly.
Only one thing made Trump feel a little better about the pace of his immigration agenda: a rally. On June 21, the president boarded Air Force One at 4:39 p.m. for the two-hour flight to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and another campaign-style rally at the U.S. Cellular Center arena. Trump slipped past the Planned Parenthood protesters and was greeted with chants of “USA! USA!” as he entered to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Large blue signs behind the stage declared “Promises Made. Promises Kept.”
“Yes, we will build the wall. We’ve already started planning. It will be built,” Trump told the enthusiastic crowd, which roared to life: “Build the wall! Build the wall!” they chanted, just as they had during the campaign. Two days earlier, Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, had mentioned an offbeat proposal by a company that said it could finance part of a border wall if it included solar panels. At the rally, Trump decided to take credit, calling it “an idea that nobody has heard about yet.” He went on to add that “we’re talking about the southern border, lots of sun, lots of heat” and patted himself on the back for the idea. “Pretty good imagination, right? Good? My idea.” After an extended rant about the dangers of gangs like MS-13, Trump returned to his favorite topic. “When they’re gone, our now very strong borders, especially with the wall, will never allow them back in. So, we’re doing a lot of things. We’re very proud of what we’ve done.”
The applause got even louder.
Trump knew the truth, whether he was willing to admit it to himself or not. Almost none of his wall had been built yet, and the money for it was at that point mostly a pipe dream. The Mexican president continued to insist that his country would never pay for it and the United States Congress, even under Republican control, had not yet been willing to provide the $25 billion that it would cost to build the wall across the entire two-thousand-mile southern border. In fact, Congress had added language to its spending bills barring any money from being spent for the construction of a brand-new border barrier of the kind the president talked about. The wall that he had promised again that night was largely stalled.
The same could be said about other parts of his immigration agenda. At the rally, he talked about legislation to prohibit immigrants from using public welfare services for five years after they enter the United States. But no such legislation had yet been proposed. The “extreme vetting” that Trump had announced five months earlier was still stalled in the courts, blocked by judges even after the president gave in to demands for what he considered a watered-down version of the travel ban. Sanctuary cities were still operating across the country, largely with impunity. The new judges on the border had made little dent in the backlog of asylum cases. And perhaps worst of all in his eyes, the numbers of apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the southern border—which he continued to brag were historically low—were increasing again. The number of families and children arrested trying to cross the border illegally had more than doubled since March. Overall, more than 20,000 migrants had been arrested at the border in June, up from the low of about 16,000 in March.
Two days after the rally, Miller visited Trump for a private moment at the residence early in the morning. He told the president that members of his own administration and Obama holdovers were conspiring to thwart the “extreme vetting” Trump had promised. Trump’s demands for a tough immigration enforcement were being ignored. He showed the president the documentation—a country-by-country breakdown of foreign entrants that were still flooding into the United States.
They’re making a fool of you, Mr. President, Miller said.
“They all have AIDS!” Donald Trump bellowed.
The president was sitting at the Resolute Desk and screaming at his top advisers as he clutched a sheaf of papers that Miller had given him in the residence that same morning. The documents made clear that despite the recent declines in illegal immigration, tens of thousands of immigrants were still streaming into the United States. Many of them, in Trump’s mind, were terrorists and criminals.
The June 23 meeting had been listed on the president’s public schedule as a routine, 10 a.m. briefing, and the officials who had been summoned were told only that they were being brought into the Oval Office to discuss “immigration.” But by the time he arrived, Trump was already furious. Ticking down Miller’s list of visa entry numbers since his inauguration, Trump unleashed a racist, nativist rant. Look at all these Afghans—they were terrorists, he said. Forty thousand Nigerians? the president scoffed. “You’re telling me they are going to come to the United States, see all this, and go back to their huts?” Trump questioned, making a spectacularly uneducated reference to the population of the wealthiest country on the African continent. “They’re not going back to their huts!” And if we aren’t careful, he yelled at his aides, we’ll become just like Brussels—overrun with Muslims. It used to be a great place, he said ruefully, but look what had happened since foreigners had immigrated en masse: It had become, he said, a “fucking hellhole.”
Sitting in chairs before Trump on the gold-hued carpet were some of the men charged with carrying out his immigration crackdown. Miller, his top domestic policy adviser, nodded in agreement at the emotional outburst he had engineered. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, sat stoically, listening to the president vent. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, fumed in his seat, feeling unfairly blamed. H. R. McMaster and Tom Bossert, the soft-spoken but loyal homeland security adviser, took in the president’s racially charged rant in stunned silence, as did several aides who were seated on the floral couches behind them. Kelly’s deputy Kirstjen Nielsen sat with other aides on a couch behind the more senior advisers.
As his team sat, slack-jawed, Trump singled out Haiti, the island nation that had been devastated by earthquakes and floods during the last ten years. The document Miller had given him showed that 15,000 Haitians had obtained visas to enter the United States. As he blurted out that Haitians had AIDS, staffers looked at their shoes and surreptitiously exchanged incredulous looks. Trump was apparently harking back to a widely discredited theory from the 1980s that Haitians were responsible for the spread of HIV. Back then, the belief led the Food and Drug Administration to ban blood donations from Haitian immigrants, but the policy was decried as racist and unscientific, and abandoned in 1990. But Haiti was not all bad, Trump said to his aides, his mood apparently brightening suddenly. “I love that island,” he said. “They all voted for me anyway.”
His aides were baffled. Haiti is a sovereign country in the Caribbean and its citizens—95 percent of them black descendants of African slaves—could no more vote for Donald Trump than Russia’s could. Was he thinking of Haitian Americans? He had campaigned in Miami’s Little Haiti in September of 2016 and told Haitian Americans he wanted to be “your greatest champion,” but they did not see him that way. He lost the Haitian American vote that year.
By now, Trump’s inner circle had become accustomed to hearing him speak in crude ways about immigrants. He had done it during his presidential campaign, tapping into the anger and grievances of white working-class voters. He had done it in the months since he became president, defending his travel ban by invoking fears of uncontrolled migration. Here, though, was a moment of clarity about the new commander in chief. He understood virtually nothing about how foreigners came and went from the United States, and yet he had a visceral antipathy toward them. In his mind, they were a teeming mass of infiltrators that was changing the face of the country for the worse. Trump was not a policy expert, nor an ideologue with well-formed views. He was a real estate executive and reality TV star who spoke and acted from his gut, and his outburst revealed the racially tinged stereotypes that moved him. He had surrounded himself with people like Miller, who were singularly focused on the evils of immigration and had learned to play to the ego and instinct of a president who could not bear to be seen as weak. And although he was the privileged grandson of a German immigrant and husband of a Slovenian one, Trump understood keenly the political power of blaming migrants for the ills and dangers facing the country.
No aide or adviser spoke up to the new president to tell him he was wrong. It was futile, they knew, and potentially dangerous to their careers to challenge the president on immigration. Miller turned his ire on Tillerson, blaming him for the influx of foreigners and prompting the secretary of state to throw up his arms in frustration. The whole meeting had been an ambush. Tillerson objected to the numbers that Miller had presented to the president. If he was so bad at his job, maybe he should stop issuing visas altogether, Tillerson said. Tempers flared, and Kelly asked that the room be cleared of the more junior staff members. Even after they left the Oval Office, the junior aides could still hear the president loudly berating his most senior advisers through the heavy, closed door. Afterward, Kelly complained to Bannon that the meeting was a “shit show” and an “ambush.” You can’t have all those people in there when Trump is over-the-top like that, Kelly said. It’s like “Grand fucking Central Station” in there.
Inside the room, the president’s eye found the line for the number of arrivals into the United States from Mexico, the country that, more than any other, had come to symbolize Trump’s opposition to immigration. He veered off topic, regaling his advisers with a description of the rally two days earlier in Cedar Rapids. The crowd was chanting “Build The Wall!” and roaring with adulation, he recalled with pride.
Now he demanded to know when he could give the people what they had chanted for, and he had repeatedly promised he would deliver.
“Where is the goddamned wall?”