STEVE BANNON WAS DETERMINED to save Donald Trump from himself.
The president’s take-no-prisoners approach on immigration, his unapologetically ugly rhetoric on the issue, and his refusal to back down even in the face of public revulsion were the core elements of his appeal to his ardent supporters. They were the ultimate source of his political power, his chief strategist believed, and Trump’s unique form of genius was in instinctively understanding and finding ways to stoke that dynamic. But Trump had a blind spot, and it terrified Bannon. Trump had a weakness for the Dreamers, Bannon knew, and if he gave in to it, it could ruin him. Brought into the United States as children by their parents, this particular group of undocumented immigrants had tugged at Trump’s heartstrings since he first found out they existed during his meeting with several of them at Trump Tower in 2013. Raised in American schools and churches and towns, they were high school valedictorians and military enlistees—promising young people who epitomized the American dream. When Trump made sweeping generalizations about immigrants bringing filth and poverty and crime into the country, he didn’t mean them.
As a presidential candidate, Trump had denounced Barack Obama for ignoring Congress and acting on his own to protect the Dreamers from deportation, vowing that if he won the presidency, he would end what he branded an “illegal amnesty.” On Day One, Trump promised, he would scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program known as DACA that Obama created in 2012 to shield the Dreamers from deportation and allow them to work legally in the United States. But Bannon knew that Trump didn’t really want to do it, and he was surrounded by people who were telling him he shouldn’t. Ivanka was among them. “You can’t let this happen,” she would say, deploying a potent blend of plaintiveness and melodrama that she had honed for maximum effect over the years in conversations with her father. You have to figure out a way for the Dreamers to stay.
What was worse, Bannon believed that supporters of the Dreamers were scheming to lure Trump into a disastrous deal to legalize the recipients of DACA protections by trading it for his border wall. Senator Lindsey Graham, the conservative South Carolina Republican who had been at the center of bipartisan efforts to overhaul immigration policies for years, approached Bannon one day with just that idea. “How about this?” Graham said to the president’s chief strategist, sitting in Bannon’s West Wing war room, which was filled with whiteboards displaying Trump’s campaign promises. “DACA. We do the DACA thing, because that’s got to get done—and he’s soft on it anyway—for your crazy wall. You can build your wall!”
Bannon was incredulous. “Lindsey,” he said. “DACA is amnesty. We will never do amnesty for a wall. We’ll build a hundred miles of wall, and then you’ll stop funding it!” Besides, he told the senator, the wall is “not the paramount thing”—it wasn’t enough, in and of itself, to compensate for a move that would undermine Trump’s entire immigration message. A deal like that would destroy Trump’s credibility with his hard-core base, trashing his central promise—that illegal immigration would never be tolerated or forgiven—and with it any chance of a successful presidency. But Bannon was nervous. Trump was extremely persuadable, especially on this issue. The president loved to make a good deal, and he was desperate for a way to avoid hurting the Dreamers. Bannon needed a way to get the decision off of the president’s plate, a forcing mechanism that would allow him to see that ending DACA was the only option.
Bannon called in Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who had built a national profile around defending hard-line immigration policies in court, to help devise a strategy for killing DACA. Kobach, an archconservative with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a doctorate from Oxford, and a law degree from Yale, was the architect of his state’s strict voter ID law that required proof of American citizenship to vote. But his influence extended far beyond Kansas; he had helped draft, and then defend in court, an Arizona law that allows local law enforcement officers the right to check the immigration status of people they suspect are in the country illegally. He had also pushed, without success, for a measure to bar undocumented immigrants from receiving in-state college tuition. More recently, Kobach, who had met Donald Trump Jr. through a mutual hunting buddy and then befriended his father during the New Hampshire primary, had become a favored adviser to Trump during his campaign and transition.
Kobach had an encyclopedic knowledge of immigration law, often spewing out statutory citations down to the letter-heading subsection of the United States Code where they could be found. He had represented a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the state of Mississippi in 2012 when they had challenged DACA in federal court, trying to block its implementation. They were unsuccessful; a judge ruled in 2015 that neither the agents nor the state had standing to contest the program. But Bannon was certain that Kobach would have a legal strategy for figuring out how to eviscerate the program, or at least for getting the decision out of the White House and over to the Justice Department, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions was eager to end it.
As it happened, Kobach was already working with a coalition of like-minded attorneys general from around the country who were looking for an opportunity to challenge DACA, and he told Bannon about them. Kobach still held out hope that Trump would listen to reason and act on his own to end the program, and had spoken to the president several times about his belief that DACA was illegal and had to be terminated at once. But he was dismayed to find that Trump seemed to be listening to the conflicting advice he was getting from DACA advocates inside the White House, including his daughter and son-in-law. I don’t have to end DACA, Trump would say, parroting the arguments of those who wanted to save the program or delay its termination. Kobach and Bannon knew that they had to make sure that Trump understood that from a legal perspective, there was only one right answer: DACA had to go, and go quickly.
Kobach came up with a plan to make that clear. The group of attorneys general would threaten to bring a lawsuit calling the program unconstitutional, in an effort to strike it down. The courts had already blocked a similar executive action Obama had taken in 2014 to extend DACA to more Dreamers and grant legal status to their parents. All Sessions would have to do was decline to defend DACA against the promised legal challenge, and it would be clear the program was dead. Trump would have no choice but to end it.
From the start, Trump was being pulled in opposite directions by vying members of his inner circle and other influential voices.
On the morning of November 10, two days after Trump won the election, he traveled to Washington for a face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, which was planned as a short meet-and-greet to fulfill a long-standing tradition in which a sitting president makes a public gesture of welcoming his newly elected successor. Instead, the meeting lasted ninety minutes, and Obama later told a confidant that much of that time had been taken up discussing DACA and the Dreamers. While he had Trump’s attention, Obama made the case for preserving the program and the protections it extended, explaining that DACA recipients were as American as any native-born kids and should be treated as such. Trump was sympathetic and gave Obama the impression that he was not inclined to abruptly yank their protections.
But ten days later, Trump invited Kobach to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort, where the president-elect was auditioning candidates for cabinet positions and beginning to formulate his agenda. On a long list of restrictionist immigration proposals that Kobach brought with him to give to Trump—and flashed, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not, within view of the phalanx of news photographers there to document the parade of transition visitors—was the immediate ending of DACA. It’s a promise you can’t afford to break, Kobach told the president-elect. A few weeks after that, Trump was once again tugged in the other direction during a meeting in the famous boardroom at Trump Tower with technology titans including Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft. It would be insane for you to end this program, they told Trump. A huge self-inflicted wound. Your presidency would be over before it even began. Don’t worry, the president-elect assured them, in an answer he would repeat often in the coming months. We’re not going to do that.
But no one really knew what Trump would do. As the clock ticked down on his final days in office, Obama and his aides were anxious that Trump would, in fact, follow through with his vow to end DACA as soon as he took office. Lawmakers and outside immigrant rights groups lobbied Obama to take aggressive measures, urging him to issue pardons to hundreds of thousands of Dreamers to shield them preemptively from deportation. Cecilia Muñoz, the outgoing director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, and others inside the White House concluded that was impossible, both legally and politically. If Trump was going to end the program, officials concluded ruefully, there was little they could do on their way out the door to stop him. The one thing they could and would do, they decided, was to help as many Dreamers as they could for as long as they could. At USCIS, the agency responsible for administering the DACA program, León Rodríguez, the director, ordered his staff to speed up approvals for Dreamers who had applied, so that officials could process as many as possible before Trump took over. Obama, who had made it clear he would largely refrain from criticizing his successor, issued a stern, public warning that all bets were off if Trump targeted the Dreamers. “The notion that we would just arbitrarily, or because of politics, punish those kids, when they didn’t do anything wrong themselves, I think would be something that would merit me speaking out,” Obama told reporters in the White House briefing room on his third-to-last day in office.
The matter came up again two days later, moments after Trump took his oath of office on the West Front of the Capitol. Inside, at the luncheon in Trump’s honor with congressional leaders, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the senior Democrat who had first sponsored legislation to protect Dreamers sixteen years earlier, grabbed a chance to plead their case with the new president. You simply cannot deport these young people, Durbin told him. They could be forced to leave the only home they had ever known if Trump followed through on his threats. Trump assured the senator that he needn’t worry. “We don’t want to hurt your kids,” he said. Hamilton’s group had prepared an executive order ending DACA, but the president did not act on it, and his top aides seemed to be downplaying the chances that he would quickly do so.
The day after Trump was sworn in, as he left the presidential inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus paused on the stone steps to pull out his cell phone and call Paul Ryan, the speaker of the house, about a possible deal to save DACA. “How much money do you think we can get for a deal on the Dreamers?” Priebus asked Ryan. It was clear to both men that DACA could be a key piece of leverage to extract funding for Trump’s wall. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday the following day, Priebus said that Trump wanted to work with congressional leaders to find a “long-term solution” to the issue. Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman, told reporters at the White House that ending the program was not a priority for the president.
Trump continued to muse publicly about being generous to DACA recipients, telling Time magazine in mid-December that “we’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud.” But his statements infuriated immigration restrictionists, who accused him of betrayal for failing to end the program. From his office near Reagan National Airport in Virginia, Roy Beck of NumbersUSA typed up a blog post to blast out to his millions of members asking them to join a campaign to urge Trump to keep his DACA campaign promise. A suggested tweet read, “Candidate @realDonaldTrump said he would ‘immediately’ end #DACA—@POTUS should end it NOW!” But weeks went by, and Trump seemed no closer to doing so. Privately, Paul Ryan was advising Trump that destroying DACA was a horrible idea, arguing that if the new president picked a fight over the program, it could swamp the party’s entire agenda, costing Trump vital political capital and creating a mess from which it would be difficult for him to recover. “Don’t get into this DACA fight,” Ryan told Trump. “Don’t pull the plug, or you will risk our entire agenda. You pull the plug now, and we’re stuck.”
Back and forth it went. The president, who hated to display even a shred of doubt about most issues, talked openly about his dilemma. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have, because you have these incredible kids,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House when questioned about it. He said he would address the matter with “great heart,” but noted that there were tricky politics involved. “I have to deal with a lot of politicians, don’t forget. And I have to convince them that what I’m saying is right.” Inside the West Wing, Bannon and Miller winced. Trump shouldn’t be referring to them as kids, they told Spicer. They may have come to the United States as children, but some of these people are in their thirties, Miller would say. If the president insisted on referring to them as “kids,” the idea of revoking their legal status, already deeply unpopular, would be even less appealing to the public. And bottom line, giving them special legal protections was just the kind of amnesty that Trump had promised not to embrace.
Even as Bannon put his plan to kill DACA into motion, Kelly, the DHS secretary, was on Capitol Hill reassuring lawmakers that he would handle the issue humanely. At his first meeting with Durbin in the senator’s office on the third floor of the Capitol, Kelly said, “I care about the Dreamers as much, if not more, than you do.” At a gathering with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Kelly described himself as the chief protector of the Dreamers, their “best friend” in the Trump administration. “I’m the best thing for DACA that you’ve ever seen,” he told them. “Nobody,” he added, “has done more for the Dreamers than me.” That was galling to hear for a roomful of Hispanic members of Congress who had been working for years to win protections for the group. Luis Gutiérrez, the loudmouthed Democratic congressman from Chicago, asked Kelly how he could say such a thing, given that Sessions had said he wanted to end the program and Trump had promised to do just that. Kelly told the lawmakers that most legal experts believed the program was unconstitutional, but that he was sympathetic to the Dreamers, and wanted to help them. “That’s not true of everybody in this administration,” Kelly told the lawmakers ominously. “I’m the best advocate they have.”
In fact, Dreamers had other allies in the West Wing. Without telling Kelly or Bannon, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had launched a covert effort save the program, and were quietly working with Graham and Durbin on a potential deal. In conversations in the senators’ offices on Capitol Hill and in the West Wing of the White House, the group had begun exploring what it would take to get Republicans and Democrats to embrace a legislative solution for the Dreamers along the lines that Graham had pitched to Bannon. The Dreamers would get legal status and Trump would get his wall and other immigration restrictions. A win-win. Even Durbin was optimistic.
Kushner was supremely confident in his own negotiating prowess despite the fact that he was unfamiliar with the many nuances of the issue. As a Manhattan real estate developer and entrepreneur, he had never cracked open an immigration statute, never paid the slightest bit of attention to the raucous debates in Washington around the topic, and certainly never attempted to navigate the political crosscurrents dividing both parties that had scuttled efforts to fix the system for the better part of his lifetime. Still, Kushner believed this lack of experience was in fact a virtue, and he envisioned ultimately going even further than Durbin and Graham suggested. He began meeting with business executives, lawmakers, and immigration advocates to prepare the ground for what he was calling “our version of comprehensive immigration reform.” In one gathering in his office in April with Dina Powell, a deputy national security adviser who had served in George W. Bush’s White House, and a few outside advocates, Kushner laid out the kind of deal he was hoping for: a bevy of strict immigration enforcement measures, including more money for detaining and deporting illegal entrants, paired with a pathway to legal status—but not citizenship—for the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the United States, and a shift to a merit-based immigration system for the future, which would prioritize skills over family ties. True, Sessions is pretty conservative on this stuff, but we can work with him, he said. In fact, Sessions had always insisted on slashing legal immigration and imposing tough new enforcement measures—the kinds of restrictions that had always doomed a broad, bipartisan immigration overhaul. One meeting attendee, experienced in the ins and outs of the bitterly partisan immigration fights of years past, told Kushner how far they were from a compromise that could actually pass Congress. To be honest, that’s not remotely in the ballpark of what we’re talking about here, the attendee said. Kushner shrugged off the skepticism. He wasn’t a politician, Trump’s son-in-law insisted. He wasn’t bound by the silly rules that had divided Republicans and Democrats before. He could get it done.
When Bannon caught wind of Kushner’s DACA rescue mission, he saw it as the perfect pretext for sidelining the president’s son-in-law, whom he viewed as a mortal enemy who was tainting Trump’s instincts and becoming an increasingly bothersome adversary inside the West Wing. He and Miller went to Priebus with an idea: We tell Trump that Jared is going over Kelly’s head on DACA, and say he has to go. Bannon knew that at that moment, Trump adored Kelly, with his military bearing and his good-soldier demeanor. In the disastrous aftermath of the travel ban, despite his private griping about having been ill-informed about what was in the order and how it was to be rolled out, Kelly had gone on television and sought to calm the chaos, telling the public that any problems were his own fault, basically throwing his own body on the grenade that was the botched order. If Trump believed Kushner was getting in Kelly’s way, Bannon thought, he would sideline his son-in-law. “This is the kill shot, man!” Bannon exalted to Priebus. “Jared will forever be in the doghouse.”
Priebus was incredulous. This is crazy, he said. I’m not going to go in and try to take out the president’s son-in-law over a policy dispute. If anybody’s going anywhere, he told Bannon, it’s you. Priebus was sympathetic; Kushner’s constant meddling in any issue he took an interest in was a pain in the ass. (Rex Tillerson would later tell the story of the time that he was eating at a Washington restaurant and ran into Kushner having dinner with Luis Videgaray, the Mexican foreign secretary. “Welcome to Washington,” Tillerson said dryly to the pair as the color drained from Videgaray’s face. “I don’t want to interrupt what y’all are doing. Give me a call next time you’re coming to town.”) But to think that Trump would turn on his own family was preposterous, Priebus knew. Besides, everyone understood that the president had a soft spot for the Dreamers; the notion that Kushner was trying to cut a deal to save them wasn’t going to provoke the president’s anger. We’re all going to be gone before Jared, Priebus said ruefully.
The rift was inevitable. The truth was that Trump’s White House was at war with itself on immigration issues, with Bannon and Miller, hard-right immigration restrictionists, just steps away in the West Wing from Jared and Ivanka, progressives at heart who were constantly trying to prod the president to soften his stance, and Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs investment banker, who believed that immigration was an economic imperative. Cohn had been an unlikely choice for the Trump White House, a Democrat who believed in free trade and was often referred to derisively at the White House as “Globalist Gary.” When Trump summoned him for an interview in Trump Tower shortly after having won election in 2016, Cohn had made it clear that he broke with the president-elect on immigration. We have to continue to have robust immigration in this country, he told Trump then, because there are a lot of jobs in the United States that Americans won’t do. Like Dina Powell, Priebus and Spicer were establishment Republicans who never bought into Trump’s hard-line stance. And the president was caught in the middle. While Trump’s impulses hewed to the Bannon-Miller-Sessions way of thinking, he was a man untethered from any particular policy vision and untroubled by the idea of ideological inconsistency. Trump would do whatever was politically expedient, publicly marketable, and personally satisfying in the moment, and it was when those things came into conflict—as in the case of the Dreamers, who tugged at many Americans’ heartstrings, including his own—that Trump was most likely to stray from his restrictionist bent. Bannon often said privately that Trump “doesn’t give a shit about his agenda.” Most days, he had little patience for hearing about the ways in which it was being carried out. “I don’t give a fuck,” the president would say. Or, “I don’t care about that shit.”
Bannon had failed to push Kushner aside, but he was determined to insert Miller into the negotiations, to be his eyes and ears and to shape the outcome. When Jared and Ivanka hosted a dinner at their mansion in D.C.’s tony Kalorama neighborhood with Graham and Durbin to discuss DACA, they invited Miller. “They’re going to try to co-opt you,” Bannon told Miller. “Just sit there and take it in.” As Durbin walked into the Trump-Kushner residence and saw Miller there, his heart sank. We’re never going to be able to do a deal if he’s a part of it, Durbin thought. He was mostly right. Briefing Bannon in the White House days later, Miller said that Jared and Ivanka were discussing just the kind of deal that Graham had described: a bill that would grant legal status not just to DACA recipients but to up to a million additional people who were eligible for the program but had never applied. In return, Trump would get funding for his wall. It was a total nonstarter, Miller said. Bannon agreed.
Even as Bannon and Miller plotted to make sure that Trump didn’t agree to what they saw as a terrible DACA deal, Kelly was trying to avoid being saddled with the responsibility for ending it. The program had been put in place by Jeh Johnson, Kelly’s predecessor, and as the homeland security secretary, getting rid of it would require his signature. “Why are they sticking me with this? This shouldn’t be my decision to make,” he confided to a colleague. “Only Congress can solve these issues. We’re getting this out of here, and it’s going to Congress, and we’re going to play chicken and get Congress to act.”
Behind closed doors, Kelly told lawmakers that he had no intention of targeting Dreamers for deportation. He made it official in a mid-June 2017 memo, in which he formally rescinded Obama’s 2014 directive extending the program to Dreamers’ parents, but also said that the DACA program itself would continue. The announcement generated mass confusion about Trump’s true intentions; while Kelly’s memo stated flatly that DACA “will remain in effect,” department spokespeople and White House officials scrambled to clarify that Trump had made no long-term decisions about the fate of the program and was still considering ending it outright. “There has been no final determination made about the DACA program, which the president has stressed needs to be handled with compassion and with heart,” Jonathan Hoffman, the assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, said in a statement. Kelly, he added, “has noted that Congress is the only entity that can provide a long-term solution to this issue.”
Thanks to Bannon’s clandestine strategizing with Kobach, there would soon be a deadline to force the issue. By late June, with Kobach’s prodding, ten Republican attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, wrote a letter to Sessions at the Justice Department threatening to challenge DACA in federal court if DHS did not move within months—by September 5—to get rid of it. Like the 2014 order covering parents of Dreamers that had been struck down, they wrote, “DACA unilaterally confers eligibility for work authorization and lawful presence without any statutory authorization from Congress.… We respectfully request that the Secretary of Homeland Security phase out the DACA program.”
Advocacy groups that had been obsessively tracking Trump’s twists and turns on the issue began to raise red flags. One well-connected immigration operative went to the White House in early August to warn DACA proponents in the West Wing—including Dina Powell and Jeremy Katz, Cohn’s deputy at the National Economic Council—that they had to do something dramatic if they wanted to stop the program from being eliminated. “You are going to get rid of DACA,” he told them. “You are trapped.” The officials swore that was not going to happen. The president doesn’t want to touch it, they said; we just can’t say that publicly. “It doesn’t matter,” the operative said, shaking his head. “You’re jammed.” Either the president calls Ken Paxton and tells him to call off the lawsuit, or this program is dead.
Thanks to his feuding advisers, Trump was boxed in and whipsawed by conflicting advice. Bannon and Kobach’s plan had pushed him to the brink of canceling a program that even he didn’t really seem to want to kill. His daughter and son-in-law, along with Cohn and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell, were tugging him in the other direction but offering no real solution for saving DACA. And Miller was pressing for him to endorse even further-reaching immigration changes that Trump barely understood. The president was, in many ways, at the mercy of his staff on immigration, unschooled in the details and surrounded by people who had competing agendas on the issue that he did not always share.
In early August, Trump held an event in the White House Roosevelt Room to announce that he was endorsing the RAISE Act, a Republican bill that aimed to shift the American immigration system from one based primarily on family ties to one based on “merit.” The bill made large cuts to family immigration levels and gave priority for employment-based green cards to those with specialized skills or other desirable qualities like educational attainment. Minutes before the president’s speech, an immigration advocate who had been visiting the West Wing told Trump’s advisers that the president, who had in the past said that he did not want to cut legal immigration, was being deeply inconsistent in endorsing legislation that would slash it by nearly half over a decade. No, Trump’s aides answered. That can’t be right. They had just come from a briefing with the president where Trump had asked this exact question, and Miller assured him in front of everyone in the room that the RAISE Act did not cut legal immigration. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the measure’s authors, was there, too. Maybe you have an outdated version of the bill, they said hopefully. The visitor assured his hosts that he did not. The president was going to endorse the bill in front of the whole world in twenty minutes, and the officials started to panic. One aide rushed out of the room to investigate, returning minutes later to report that the legislation did not touch legal immigration levels. At about the same time, the White House was sending out a fact sheet to reporters that acknowledged that the RAISE Act “reduces overall immigration numbers.” And not long after Trump endorsed the bill, Miller appeared in the White House briefing room to tell the press that the legislation would make “a major, historic change to U.S. immigration policy” that would, in fact, “cut net migration in half.”
Trump had just called for a massive cut to legal immigration, and some of his top advisers didn’t even seem to know it. Trump would later claim that he had always opposed the idea.