Border Wars, page 21
Ryan dispatched Casey Higgins, his top immigration aide, to begin private talks with Miller about what a potential deal might look like. But the distrust on both sides was profound. As a congressional staffer, Miller used to routinely savage Ryan as an open-borders enthusiast and amnesty apologist. He would feed unflattering information about Ryan to reporters at Breitbart and other hard-right outlets, and then blast out the resulting stories to an email distribution list that went to scores of congressional offices. (Despite repeated entreaties, Ryan’s staff could never get Miller to include them on his immigration news clips list.) One such article was the wall exposé from Ryan’s front yard in Janesville by Julia Hahn, who now worked alongside Miller at the White House. For Miller, the prospect of collaborating with Ryan’s staff on a compromise was risky, given the speaker’s long-established enthusiasm for a business-minded immigration overhaul. But the path to an eventual bill that could clear Congress and land on the president’s desk ran through his office. So the odd coupling commenced.
Ryan also put together a Republican working group to try to build consensus on what that would look like. It drew from all over the spectrum, from leaders Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, the No. 2 in the House, who had developed a rapport with Trump; to hard-liners like Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Judiciary Committee chairman; Raúl Labrador of Idaho and Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin; to more moderate voices including Mike McCaul, the Homeland Security Committee chairman; Martha McSally of Arizona; as well as Will Hurd of Texas and Mario Diaz-Balart, both of whom had been at the forefront of trying to forge bipartisan immigration deals in the past. But the group could hardly agree on anything, and without clear guidance from the White House about what the president would or would not accept, their efforts floundered. The messages from the White House about the elements of a DACA deal were mixed at best. One day, the RAISE Act—which slashed legal immigration by up to 50 percent—seemed to be the priority; the next, it was ending chain migration. Trump kept inviting different groups of lawmakers to the White House, seeming to cast about for possible solutions.
As he tried to figure out the contours of a deal, Miller stayed in close touch with the Freedom Caucus, the ultraconservative group that had forged a tight alliance with Trump and was deeply hostile to Ryan, speaking almost daily and sometimes more with its chairman, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina. Miller began developing a draft of immigration principles that would put the focus back on enforcement, restrictions, and reducing the number of people admitted to the United States, where he believed it belonged. Miller told colleagues that he was increasingly convinced that the idea of ending chain migration was the key to any agreement, both because it would make enduring changes to the existing immigration system and because it “polls through the roof.” In other words, it would put Democrats in a tricky political position, forcing them to explain to the public why awarding green cards based merely on family ties was better than doing so based on skills and accomplishments.
But Miller was also convinced that this was his chance—maybe his last—to win all sorts of immigration concessions in return for addressing the fate of the Dreamers. So he enlisted the Department of Homeland Security to help draw up an elaborate wish list. One Saturday evening in October, Duke frantically summoned her senior staff to an office at the Reagan Building. “Right now, I need a list of everything we could trade for DACA,” a distraught Duke told them. It was clear she had been upbraided by the White House and was desperate to deliver as big an ask as she could put together in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. The resulting four-page list would serve as the raw material for a lengthy menu of immigration demands Trump would issue the following week, each of which he said “must be included” in any DACA deal. “It was terrible government,” said an official involved at the time. “It was just a list of every single thing that everyone around the table wanted that could be immigration-related. And we just threw it together.”
The Tuesday after Duke’s frenzied brainstorming session, Ryan’s immigration working group gathered in the small Ways and Means Committee room on the first floor of the Capitol for a briefing on the laundry list, which was chock-full of measures that Democrats—and even some Republicans—regarded as poison pills with the potential to kill any DACA deal. It included the wall and more money for border enforcement, but also cuts to legal immigration, which Ryan had made clear he opposed, and dozens of other proposals meant to block migrants from entering the United States. New restrictions would make it easier to remove unaccompanied children who arrived at the border and make it more difficult for people to claim asylum. The country would accept fewer refugees fleeing war and persecution. The immigration system would be based on skills, rather than family ties, and the diversity visa lottery eliminated. Lawmakers wanted to ask practical questions about what the administration needed to make the immigration system workable, but Francis Cissna of USCIS spent much of his time hammering on the idea of ending chain migration, repeatedly making the political case for basing immigration priority on employment skills, rather than family members whose relatives happen to reside in the United States. Miller took a hard line as well, making it clear to lawmakers that the White House was going to insist on all of these measures as part of any DACA deal. Their rhetoric grew heated as they previewed what the public case would be for Trump’s position. As lawmakers peppered Miller with questions about how a proposal like this could possibly ever make it through the Senate—even if it could pass the House—Miller seemed to have no answers.
Only Duke appeared to acknowledge the political realities. She conceded that some of the measures Trump was demanding were politically difficult and potentially unachievable. While the wall was the top item on Trump’s list, when lawmakers pressed her on it, Duke would not say the wall or even border fencing was a top priority; while DHS had identified some areas where it was needed, she said, the bigger gap was in technology, an item that had been omitted from the document altogether. Ron Vitiello of Customs and Border Protection said he shared that assessment.
* * *
But even as Miller pressed for a wide-ranging immigration measure full of new restrictions, Trump was musing about a far different plan. During a Columbus Day golf game at the president’s club in Sterling, Virginia, Lindsey Graham chatted up Trump about the same sort of deal he had been discussing with Kushner months earlier: legalize the Dreamers and give their parents work permits in exchange for strong border security measures, including a wall component. In a nod to the goal of limiting chain migration, Graham proposed barring Dreamers from sponsoring the parents who brought them to the United States illegally. And they would do away with the diversity visa lottery, which Trump viewed as the most egregious aspect of an immigration system that seemed to allow people in almost at random.
Trump seemed intrigued. I want to fix this, he told Graham, and I’m willing to sit down with Democrats and get it done. They met again for golf the following Saturday. “He wants to make a deal,” the South Carolina Republican told The New York Times a few weeks later. The senator said that Trump was even entertaining the idea of a second phase of immigration changes after DACA had been dealt with, in which he would grant legal status to the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants—those who were not felons. But Graham wasn’t the only one trying to get Trump to endorse an ambitious plan.
For weeks, as a year-end deadline loomed to reach a deal on federal spending, groups of Republicans would make pilgrimages to the White House to try to get the president’s stamp of approval for their wildly divergent immigration ideas. They thought they were racing against a clock; Democrats had said that legislation to address the plight of the Dreamers should be part of any year-end spending legislation, raising the specter of a government shutdown to cap off Trump’s first year in office if no agreement could be reached. But they could not get a clear read from the White House. Trump was desperate to get his wall, but Miller was instead fixated on broader immigration changes. At a meeting at the White House, Miller told the heads of the leading immigration restrictionist groups that if they were ever going to win his main goal and theirs—making major cuts to the number of immigrants allowed into the United States—an amnesty for the Dreamers was the only way to do it. They’re not going anywhere anyway, Miller acknowledged. And this is the only chance we’re going to have to cut legal immigration. If we don’t do it now, who will? He implored the anti-immigration leaders not to oppose the idea.
Pressure was beginning to mount in Republican ranks to address the issue. Just after Thanksgiving, Mark Amodei, a four-term congressman and the only Republican in Nevada’s House delegation, became the first in his party to sign on to an insurgent effort to force a vote on legislation to protect the Dreamers. The so-called “discharge petition” was an arcane but potentially potent parliamentary tactic that would essentially compel Ryan to schedule action on a DACA bill if a majority of the House—218 members—signed on. Thirty-four House Republicans signed a letter to Ryan calling for such a measure. With his working group in shambles, the speaker was increasingly worried that more of his members would take the same position as Carlos Curbelo of Florida, another contrarian Republican lawmaker, had: that they would not vote for any more spending bills until there was a deal to save DACA.
But Democrats were not going to force a shutdown over the Dreamers—at least not yet. In late December, Schumer decided he would allow a stopgap spending measure without a fix for DACA to pass, thus punting the issue to January and averting a shutdown. Rank-and-file Democrats were furious, and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gathered off the House floor and marched across the Capitol to Schumer’s office to demand an audience with him. During a tense meeting in the Senate Democratic leader’s suite, Gutiérrez unloaded on Schumer, accusing him and other Democratic senators of ignoring the plight of the Dreamers and “throwing them under the bus.” The argument got heated, as Schumer chided Gutiérrez for speaking ill of members of his own party. But in the end, when Republicans muscled a month-long spending bill through the House, Senate Democrats refrained from trying to block it. Privately, Democratic leaders explained their rationale for forgoing a year-end fight with Trump over DACA. They simply did not want to be blamed for a government shutdown.
— 16 — Life in Two-Year Increments
WITH INERTIA SETTING IN in Washington, the real-world consequences of DACA’s demise were being felt around the country by hundreds of thousands of young immigrants. Itzel Guillen Maganda was one of them.
As a young girl growing up in San Diego, Guillen lived in constant fear that the secret of her birthplace would get out. Born in Mexico City in 1994, Guillen had crossed illegally into the United States at age five, accompanied by her twelve-year-old brother, in a car driven by a man she did not know. Her mother, terrified that she would never see her children again but desperate to get them out of Mexico, followed a few weeks later with Guillen’s aunt and cousin. Guillen’s earliest memories of America in the weeks before they arrived were of the numbing heartache of not being with her mother or even knowing where she was—along with the sheer joy of trying McDonald’s for the first time.
It was delicious. Guillen was terrified.
The anxiety never really subsided, even after her family was reunited and they settled into life in San Diego, ten people to a three-bedroom apartment where Guillen crowded into one bed with her mother, aunt, brother, and cousin. She would often stay up after midnight worrying that her mother, who usually returned at 2 a.m. from her job cleaning offices, might not actually make it home safely. When her mother was late, Guillen would worry that she had been caught and deported. She slept fitfully until she heard the familiar click of her mother’s key in the door.
Growing up, Guillen became adept at hiding where she was from. From her mother, she learned to fear law enforcement; when a police officer was around, Guillen knew to stand up straight, be polite, and not call attention to herself. The look on her mother’s face and the way her body tensed when any uniformed official was nearby were unspoken signals to Guillen that she had to be on her guard. From her friends at school, she learned never to mention that she had been born elsewhere, or how she came to live in the neighborhood. At the age of twelve she discovered what “undocumented” was when she joined protests in San Diego against legislation to take harsh measures against the roughly 11 million immigrants, like her and her family, living undocumented in the United States. Around the same time, Guillen confided in a friend at school that she was from Mexico and had snuck into San Diego as a child. She was heartbroken when the girl responded by calling her an “illegal alien.” As a teen, she was in the car when her mother mistakenly blew through a stop sign and was pulled over by a police officer. Guillen’s mother did not have a driver’s license, and as the officer slowly walked to his car to call in the infraction, the two exchanged horrified expressions. “If I have to go, we go together,” her mother said. Guillen nodded silently, then texted her brother to say they might never see him again. After what seemed like an eternity, the officer returned. They were free to go, he said amiably, with a warning.
But for every near miss, there was another panic-inducing risk around the corner. When she took the SATs, Guillen hesitated before filling in the bubble indicating that, “NO,” she was not a United States citizen. She shielded her paper with a hand, worried that someone would see. But when Guillen turned eighteen, everything changed. Barack Obama signed a directive creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. It was for people like Guillen, whose parents had brought them to the United States as kids and who had grown up, in almost every way, as Americans. She applied, and within a few months Guillen received a permit, which gave her legal status for two years. She would be able to get a job. She enrolled at San Diego State University and studied political science. Guillen still lived in fear of what might happen to her brother, who was too old to qualify for DACA, and to her mother, who remained undocumented, living and working in the shadows. But for the first time she could remember, she stopped worrying about being deported herself.
That all changed the night that Donald Trump was elected. Guillen knew in an instant that DACA was doomed—that it was only a matter of time until he would end the program. Trump’s public waffling on the issue, his musing aloud about what a tough decision it was for him to consider hurting “these incredible kids,” only made things worse. “The dangling,” she would say later, “that was torture.” Even though Trump was hesitating, she took matters into her own hands. Guillen applied to renew her DACA permit in July 2017, a year early, just to be certain that she would be safe if the president ended the program. But she went further. As a DACA recipient, Guillen was shielded from deportation and had legal status to work or go to school. But the program could not fix the problem of her initial illegal entry into the United States. She would never be able to adjust her legal status to become a permanent resident until she had left the country and reentered legally.
So Guillen decided to attempt the second-riskiest journey of her life. She hired an immigration lawyer and applied for emergency permission to travel to Mexico and return to the United States afterward. When she received it, her colleagues told her there was no time to waste—she had to go right now. Nobody knew when Trump would decide to end DACA, and what might happen to people in the program when he did. So on a sunny day in late August, with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder and butterflies in her stomach, Itzel left her home in San Diego in a car driven by a friend and they made the short drive across the border into Mexico. She stayed five days in Tijuana, visiting migrant shelters and deported veterans, and talking about her own experience growing up undocumented in the shadow of the border wall. She walked on the beach near the hulking structure, taking in the colorful slats of the wall and the Customs and Border Protection vehicle just beyond on the U.S. side. She ate tacos stuffed with meat and hugged the deported parents of Dreamers, people just like her mother—except they had gotten unlucky instead of lucky when it mattered most. When it came time to return to the United States, the trip back was harrowing. Once again in a car approaching the border, Guillen flashed back to her five-year-old self, uncertain and afraid. Only back then, she did not know enough to have been worried about being detained by an agent at the border. This time, her heart was in her throat for the entire hour-long wait to approach the port of entry. Once there, as she sat waiting to be processed, Guillen had a moment of panic when a border agent called her forward by name. But he was only making conversation; seeing her surname, he wanted to know if she was of Filipino descent. Guillen didn’t fully exhale until the car she was riding in had crossed the border and she was safely back in the United States.
Days later, Trump announced he was, indeed, ending DACA. Guillen helped organized an evening rally at Waterfront Park in downtown San Diego, where crowds of people protesting the decision held signs that said, “We Are All Immigrants,” “Dreams Don’t Have Borders,” and “Defend DACA.” Standing in front of the crowd that night, Guillen delivered a message of hope and optimism for the Dreamers, saying that Trump’s actions had galvanized a powerful movement that was showing its determination to stand strong against his agenda. It was only after she stepped down from the stage and hugged a colleague, the mother of another Dreamer whose future was now uncertain, that Guillen broke down in tears. She was back to living in fear for her future. She took up running to ease her anxiety and postponed a decision about whether to go back to school and pursue an advanced degree.
