THE IMAGES OF SOBBING children, forcibly separated from their mothers and fathers at the border, were seemingly everywhere on the muggy Thursday afternoon in June when Stephen Miller sat down for an interview in his third-floor suite of offices in the West Wing.
That morning, The New York Times had published the story of a five-year-old boy named José, who had been separated from his father at the Mexican border in El Paso and flown to live temporarily with an American family in Michigan. “The first few nights, he cried himself to sleep,” the article said of José, quoting his foster mother. Then it turned into “just moaning and moaning.” In another news report that day, an immigration advocate told the story of a seven-year-old girl and her older brother who had been separated months ago from their mother, and “cried and begged” to be reunited. At a rally in Chicago, protesters, including some young children, held signs that said: “Separating parents and children is a crime against humanity.” A day earlier, on CNN, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, described his visit to a border detention facility in Texas. “What you have is cyclone fencing and fence posts that look like cages,” Merkley said that morning. “They look like the way you would construct a dog kennel.”
In the interview, Miller was defiant and defensive, insisting that the zero tolerance policy would continue. He never expressed regret for the plight of children and their parents. Privately, he had told his colleagues in no uncertain terms that these families needed to be punished to deter others like them from coming to the United States. Miller’s public posture was more carefully articulated—but no less absolute. Democrats, he repeatedly insisted over the course of a 90-minute discussion, were to blame for the children who were being separated at the border, because they refused to allow the Trump administration to make changes to long-standing laws and legal precedents. He spoke quickly with his trademark intensity about how the government must be able to indefinitely detain anyone who crosses the border illegally—even if they are children or families. And he fumed about what he called the “radical left of the Democratic Party,” which he said believed in simply releasing everyone that came into the United States.
“The laws exist for a reason, and in an environment of lawlessness and chaos, innocent people are needlessly hurt,” Miller said. Publicly, other Trump officials, including Nielsen, had tried to dodge the question of whether the family separation policy was intended to be a deterrent for the surge of migrants from Central America. But Miller went on at length about what he said was the biggest “pull factor” luring Central Americans to make the dangerous trek across Mexico. It wasn’t American jobs and the prospect of a more affluent life, he insisted. It was the belief that immigration laws in the United States were easily evaded once they got here. The only way to send a different message back to Central America—to prevent illegal immigration—was to implement a crackdown. To do otherwise would be to continue offering what he called “an extraordinarily perverse incentive” to the migrants.
“But I do want to say this,” Miller said as he turned to rifle through papers on a table next to his couch. He was looking for a document he had printed out so he could have it for reference—a list of arrests that federal immigration officials had made during a recent raid in Philadelphia. He had chosen Philadelphia because the city’s Democratic mayor, Jim Kenney, had mounted and won a legal challenge in federal court to Trump’s bid to deny federal grant money to cities that limit their cooperation with ICE. Kenney had called the president a “bully,” and singled out Sessions for criticism, saying, “federal grant dollars cannot be used for a political shakedown,” and he had been captured on video doing a jig in his office after he got word of the favorable ruling. “It is impossible to take moral lectures from people like the mayor of Philadelphia, who dance in jubilant celebration over sanctuary cities, when you had innocent Americans, U.S.-born and foreign, who are victimized on a daily basis because of illegal immigration,” Miller said as he proceeded to read from the list. “We arrested an illegal alien who conducted lewd and lascivious acts with a minor. We arrested someone who had been convicted of murder, child neglect,” Miller said, reading from the list. “May 25, 2017,” he said, continuing. “Negligent manslaughter, stolen vehicle. Prostitution, racketeering, rape.”
The sheaf of papers encapsulated how Miller thought about immigrants, not as part of the fundamental fabric of the country so much as a group of dangerous, uninvited guests who threatened native-born Americans. Three weeks earlier, Trump had sparked another round of outrage by calling immigrant gang members “animals,” a fact that Miller thought was indisputable. “These aren’t people, these are animals,” Trump had said, referring to members of the brutal transnational gang MS-13 as he made the case for treating all undocumented immigrants more harshly. Several major news organizations covered Trump’s remark, some of them suggesting that he had called all immigrants “animals.” To Miller, the coverage highlighted how unwilling the media and both political parties had been to call illegal immigration by its name, and to enforce the nation’s immigration laws to prevent grave harm to Americans. In Miller’s world, there was no room for the niceties of asylum or refugee programs if they enabled the entry of even one person who would commit a crime.
As the conversation continued, Miller tried to steer away from the political implications of separating families, but he could hardly contain himself. He predicted that Americans would resoundingly side with the political party that secured the borders. “And not—not by a little bit. Not 55–45, 60–40, 70–30, 80–20. I’m talking 90–10 on that,” he insisted. He lashed out at the Democrats again, arguing that the American public would reject what he called the “open-borders extremism” of the Democratic Party. He paused for effect and then ratcheted up his attack. “I would go one step further and say the current position of the Democratic Party is open-borders nihilism. They’ve adopted a point of view so radical that it can really only be described as absolute nihilism,” he said.
Still, the images of the small children separated from their families were politically powerful. Is there any chance that Trump will back down in the face of those pictures? Could the White House really sustain this policy with condemnation coming from everywhere? His answer was classic Miller.
“The United States government has a sacred, solemn, inviolable obligation to enforce the laws of the United States to stop illegal immigration and secure and protect our borders,” he declared as the interview came to a conclusion. “And there’s no straying from that mission.”
Eleven days after the Miller interview, ProPublica, an investigative news cooperative, posted a chilling audio clip online that had been secretly recorded by an employee inside a Customs and Border Protection detention facility and later provided to a Texas civil rights attorney. For almost eight excruciating minutes, children could be heard crying and wailing in Spanish for “Mami” and “Papá” and begging border agents to see their parents. “Well, we have an orchestra here, right?” a border agent could be heard joking about the chaotic noise of the children inside the facility. “What we’re missing is a conductor.” One little boy continued uncontrollably, in between sobs: “Papá. Papá. Papá.”
As the heartrending sounds continued, one six-year-old girl from El Salvador, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, tried to reason with a female consular official at the detention facility. “Are you going to call my aunt so that when I’m done eating, she can pick me up?” Alison asked in Spanish. “I have her number memorized,” she continued, rattling off her aunt’s number: “Three, four, seven, two…” After a few more minutes, Alison tried again. “Are you going to call my aunt so she can come pick me up? And then so my mom can come as soon as possible?” The consular official did not tell Alison that her mother had been arrested and was not coming anytime soon. But the official told a colleague that she planned to call Alison’s aunt. Alison explained what her mother told her before they were separated by Border Patrol agents. “My mommy says I’ll go with my aunt and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible so I can go with her,” she said.
The recording was difficult to listen to. And within hours, it was everywhere—broadcast in a seemingly endless loop on CNN and MSNBC; delivered on demand by every news website; played on the radio news programs during the morning and evening commutes. On Capitol Hill, Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, stood at a lectern on the floor of the House, reached into a pocket in his suit jacket, and pressed play on a small audio device. The sounds of the wailing children echoed through the largely empty chamber with the C-SPAN cameras running. “The gentleman will suspend,” demanded Representative Karen Handel, a Georgia Republican who was serving as the speaker that afternoon. Lieu refused. “Why are you trying to prevent the American people from listening to what it sounds like in a detention facility,” he declared, letting the sounds of the children crying continue to play. Handel grew frustrated and slammed the gavel. “Rule 17 prohibits the use of an electronic device to make sounds in the chamber,” Handel insisted. “The gentleman will suspend!” Lieu refused to relent. “We have 2,300 babies and kids in detention facilities who were ripped away from their parents. I think the American people need to hear this.” The sounds of the children from Lieu’s recorder continued for another two minutes and thirteen seconds as he stood, stone-faced toward the cameras and Handel conferred with the House floor staff. Lieu finally turned off the recording only after Handel threatened to have the chamber’s sergeant at arms “enforce the rules of decorum.”
The audio clip crystallized the human dimensions of the family separation policy. In the weeks since Nielsen’s decision, more than 2,500 children had been treated like the wailing voices captured on the recording. Under the new rules, children traveling with adults as they crossed without authorization into the United States were taken and reclassified as “unaccompanied minors.” It was a mere bureaucratic designation, but it had a sinister effect that would prove disastrous as the number of separated families climbed; it essentially broke the linkage in the United States government’s records between the migrant child and the parent with whom he or she arrived, making it extremely difficult to match them together later on. It also triggered a long process that, for many children like Alison, led them hundreds of miles away from their parents, to shelters for “tender-aged” children run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The shelters were mostly well maintained and staffed by caring employees. But they were already at capacity even before Nielsen’s decision, forcing CBP to hold some children in detention for days or weeks before they could be transferred. Images of children sleeping under metallic blankets behind chain-link fences quickly captured the public imagination.
Like Miller, Trump was defiant, and refused to back down.
In an event in the East Room of the White House on space research, the president lashed out at Democrats and vowed that the United States would not become a migrant camp or a refugee holding facility like Europe. “Not on my watch,” he declared, with Vice President Mike Pence standing silently to his right. “Remember,” the president added, “a country without borders is not a country at all.” And he dismissed the people crossing the southwestern border as lacking any qualities that might benefit the United States. Americans should want to let in people based on merit, he said, “not people that snuck across the border. And they could be murderers and thieves and so much else.”
Nielsen was equally defensive during a little noticed speech in New Orleans to the National Sheriffs’ Association on the morning of Monday, June 18. She complained about the “outcry and consternation” about the family separations and the refusal by Congress to give border agents more flexibility to detain families. “As a result of charging people for crimes they have actually committed, we must often separate adults from minors in their custody,” she told the audience. She was unapologetic, insisting in the face of the swirling controversy that “there are some who would like us to look the other way when dealing with families at the border and not enforce the law passed by Congress, including some members of Congress. Past administrations may have done so, but we will not.”
On the flight back to Washington, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called with an urgent request. Nielsen was needed in the White House briefing room, she said. You’ve got to go out there and defend the president and this policy. By the time she arrived in the West Wing, Nielsen was wary, as were her closest advisers. It was one thing to give a speech to a friendly audience full of supportive law enforcement officers. It was another thing entirely to face the White House press corps at the height of a full-blown scandal. Jonathan Hoffman, her spokesman, believed it was probably her job to do the briefing—a shitty job, but one she signed up for. Even so, he counseled her not to, knowing she would face a fierce grilling. Kelly, who was Nielsen’s top protector in the administration, strenuously fought against the idea. You don’t own this; don’t do it, Kelly told her. Whoever goes out there is going to be the public face of this, and that shouldn’t be you. “This is Sessions’s shit storm,” he told her. “Don’t clean up his mess.” Forget it, Nielsen said. I’m not doing it. But then she changed her mind again. She felt she owed it to the men and women in her department, who were being demonized for the family separations, to make the public case for them. And under immense pressure from Sanders and others in the White House, she relented. Nielsen got no preparation and little direction for her first solo appearance in the White House press room for a news conference that was carried on live TV. Try to call on someone in the middle, Sanders counseled. She didn’t say why, but Nielsen later found out that the front rows of the briefing room are reserved for the highest-profile reporters, network correspondents and journalists from the top newspapers in the country.
Once at the lectern, Nielsen assailed Democrats and activists who were criticizing the administration, and declared firmly that “this administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border.” But moments later, she acknowledged that “what has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. Everyone is subject to prosecution.” Reporters in the room, clearly unsatisfied with Nielsen’s evasive comments, peppered her with questions.
“Have you seen the photos of children in cages? Have you heard the audio clip of these children wailing, that just came out today?” one asked. Another pressed Nielsen on whether “this policy is not, by your definition, in any way cruel?” One simply wanted to know: “How is this not child abuse?” Nielsen got more and more defensive, her lips pressed tightly together. She deflected questions about the photos of children in cages and said she had not heard the audio recording. She repeatedly blamed Congress, suggesting that the government had no choice but to separate families as long as lawmakers refused to change asylum and immigration laws. When a reporter asserted that “we’ve never seen this under previous administrations,” Nielsen seized on the inaccuracy and insisted that they “all separated families,” too. She did not mention that prior administrations had taken migrant children from parents only on a case-by-case basis, when they had a specific reason to do so based on a concern for the child’s welfare. It was a misleading answer that most viewers watching on television would not catch.
But it was Nielsen’s answer to one of the last questions during her appearance that stood out as blatantly false, given the memo approving family separation that she had signed six weeks earlier. As reporters shouted to be heard, Steven Portnoy, a young and aggressive correspondent for CBS News Radio, broke through the din. “Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out?” he asked, jabbing his hand in the air. “Are you intending for parents to be separated from their children? Are you intending to send a message?”
“I find that offensive,” she said before declaring firmly: “No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?”
“Perhaps as a deterrent,” Portnoy said.
“No,” she responded.
“AG Sessions says it was a deterrent,” he said.
“The answer is, it’s a law passed by the United States Congress. Rather than fixing the law, Congress is asking those of us who enforce the law to turn our backs on the law and not enforce the law. It’s not an answer. The answer is to fix the laws.”
It took only another forty-eight hours for Trump to cave.
In the weeks since Nielsen signed the memo, more than 2,500 children had been separated from their parents. (Officials later admitted that thousands more were separated prior to Nielsen making it a formal government policy.) The top human rights official at the United Nations condemned the practice as “unconscionable.” The pope called it “immoral.” Closer to home, Thomas J. Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, declared that “this is not who we are, and it must end now.” The president’s wife publicly chided her husband, saying the United States needed to be “a country that governs with heart.”
Few people had more impact on the president than his daughter—and she was furious. As the mother of three young kids, Ivanka was flabbergasted at the idea that the government would purposely separate a mother or father from their children. And as the daughter of an embattled president, she was determined to stop the political damage that the policy was wreaking on her father. Ivanka blamed Trump’s advisers, particularly Kelly and Nielsen, for getting him into the family separation mess by failing to appreciate the power of the devastating images that had for weeks been broadcast on television screens. She told her father that they had set the policy in motion without explaining the consequences to anyone, and now the president was paying the price.
On the morning of June 20, the West Wing was in complete chaos. The previous evening, Trump had admitted to Republican lawmakers that the optics of the family separations were “nasty” for him. His daughter Ivanka had told him the images were not good, Trump told the lawmakers. “The crying babies,” he explained, “doesn’t look good politically.” By the time he woke up the next day, he had decided to throw in the towel on family separation. He told Kelly that he wanted to issue an executive order ending the policy that day. He instructed Don McGahn, the White House counsel, to draft the directive. He called Nielsen. “Come in to the White House. We’re doing this.” When she arrived, nobody seemed to know what was happening. Miller was pacing around and popping in and out of McGahn’s office to weigh in on the emerging draft, looking like he was having a meltdown. At one point, the vice president wandered through and buttonholed Nielsen. “What is this thing going to say?” he asked her. She didn’t know. The whole process took less than an hour, and the result was a complete muddle. The 773-word order did not explicitly end family separation nor order the already separated children to be reunited with their parents. (A federal judge would later do both.) Instead, the document, titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation,” pledged to continue aggressive enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws while at the same time attempting to “maintain family unity.” Parts of the order read more like a Miller-authored policy paper or speech than a legal document. “It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law,” the order said.
Still, Trump was clear with his staff about what this meant. He was sick and tired of the attacks and the controversy. He just wanted it to end. With Nielsen standing behind him at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Trump signed the executive order overturning Nielsen’s memorandum and directed the government to keep families together.
The retreat was the first real moment since taking office that Trump had backed down on a major immigration initiative, and some inside the West Wing saw it as evidence that Miller had finally gone too far. A few Republicans even called on Trump to dump him. “The President should fire Stephen Miller now,” tweeted Mike Coffman, a Republican House member from Colorado who was facing a tough reelection race. For a time, Miller retreated into the background, content to be out of the headlines for a while.
Inside DHS, an odd combination of relief coupled with disappointment set in among top officials. On one hand, the white-hot controversy that had earned them condemnation from around the country and around the globe had ended instantly with a stroke of Trump’s pen. But no one could shake the feeling that if the president had only been willing to hold out for a bit longer, as little as a week or two, the policy would have had its desired effect. The numbers of families showing up at the border would have started to fall as word reached Central America that the price of admission to the United States was having your child taken away. Instead, the opposite message would quickly reach the region: the Trump administration will never enforce the law against you. Homan, in particular, was disappointed. He thought the separations had been implemented disastrously, without the proper planning that he assumed would have taken place when he signed on to the memo for Nielsen. But he also thought that Trump had abandoned it too soon. He told colleagues that if the separations had continued for another thirty to forty-five days, it would have been the end of the Central American caravans.
Instead, Trump had buckled, causing what one senior official later called a “reverse boomerang effect.” More families began flooding toward the United States.