Border Wars, page 5
But Trump continued to struggle. While he loved to talk tough at rallies, Trump was by nature a pleaser; he hated face-to-face confrontations and often told people what they wanted to hear, saying whatever would get him through the next five to ten minutes. During a private meeting with Hispanic evangelical leaders at Trump Tower on a Saturday afternoon, Trump said he was open to granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who had not committed crimes beyond their immigration offenses. The statement was at odds with his promise one year before to employ a large “deportation force” to quickly remove undocumented people. The following day, Kellyanne Conway went on CNN’s State of the Union and was pressed about the inconsistency. Was Trump going to stand up a deportation force or not? It was, Conway said, “to be determined.” Trump’s base was up in arms. “Are you flip-flopping?” Trump was asked on Fox News the following morning. “No, I’m not flip-flopping,” he insisted. “We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer. It has to be very firm. But we want to come up with something fair.”
Behind the scenes, Trump’s team knew he had created a big problem for himself. The candidate was scheduled to give a major immigration speech in Colorado that Thursday, and Miller had been toiling away on it for weeks. Now Trump was facing new questions about what his policy actually was, and he was casting about for a way to back off of the idea of mass deportations without alienating his core supporters. With forty-eight hours’ notice, his staff summoned three prominent immigration hard-liners—NumbersUSA’s Roy Beck, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, and George Borjas, the Harvard labor economist—to an emergency meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan to strategize with the candidate on how to get him out of the box in which he had put himself.
They gathered on a Monday morning on the fifteenth floor, with Trump at the head of the table along with Beck, Camarota, Borjas, and his campaign brain trust: Bannon, Conway, Miller, and Sessions. For an hour, Trump aggressively quizzed the immigration hawks about what he could say in his speech that wouldn’t look like he had abandoned the grass roots. What would the troops be willing to tolerate? he asked. How could he square this circle? Borjas spoke first, giving a lengthy and dry, academic answer that seemed to bore Trump. “No,” the candidate said, with an emphatic shake of his head. Camarota was next. “That’s not it,” Trump responded, his frustration mounting. Then it was Beck’s turn. Trump was still not satisfied, and he was starting to act angry, snapping at his guests. He seemed to want them to say it was okay not to insist on a deportation force. Sessions intervened, imploring Trump to tone it down. “Donald, you dug this hole,” Sessions said to him, pointing out that none of them had pushed for mass deportations. “These people didn’t make you do it.” All the while, Trump barked orders at Miller, who was typing away furiously on a laptop as he made late revisions to the speech. “Stephen, you gotta write that!” Trump kept saying. But it soon became clear that the candidate was nowhere near ready to deliver the speech. We’re going to have to postpone this, Conway said, as heads nodded around the table. You can stop working on that one, Trump told Miller, gesturing at his computer. He would have to write an entirely new speech.
Sessions and Miller got to work rewriting the speech, adding specific proposals drawn from the hard-core agenda that they had pursued for years, packaged in a ten-point plan. They included Trump’s wall, but they went further. Trump would call for an end to “catch and release” policies at the border, an embrace of “zero tolerance” when it came to prosecuting illegal border crossers, the elimination of funding for so-called “sanctuary cities”—those that limited their cooperation with federal immigration authorities—and an overhaul of legal immigration that would prioritize the admission of people with certain skills rather than those whose family members were already living legally in the United States. Trump insisted on calling for an end to Obama’s “illegal executive amnesties,” now targeting the Dreamers he had met with at Trump Tower years earlier. He would keep the idea of a deportation force, but it would be a team of agents within existing immigration enforcement agencies that would focus on the most violent criminals. And Trump would reassure his base there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.
The speech was rescheduled for the following week in Phoenix, immediately after Trump was to return from a trip to Mexico City where he would meet with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. On Trump’s jet on the way back, Sessions made the case that he should seize the opportunity to make it clear that he would prioritize the deportation of criminals, not the removal of undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for years or decades without incident. What he needed to emphasize, Sessions told Trump, was that the fate of those people would only be addressed once his restrictive and punitive policies—the rest of the ten-point plan—were in place. The conversation turned into an argument. It was too complicated, Trump complained, and it would sound like a retreat. Other politicians are for amnesty, and I’m against it, Trump told Sessions. He said he didn’t want to muddle his message. But Sessions persisted, and in the end, they reached a compromise of sorts. Trump would use his signature tough rhetoric, but he would also say that his first order of business would be to kick out criminals and secure the border against future illegal immigration, stopping short of saying he would immediately deport other undocumented immigrants. “Then and only then will we be in a position to consider the appropriate disposition of those individuals who remain,” Trump said toward the end of the speech, speaking to 7,500 people at the Phoenix Convention Center.
Some news accounts described Trump’s speech that day as a characteristic doubling down by Trump on his hard-core anti-immigration rhetoric, but others had precisely the take that he had told Sessions he feared. The Washington Post noted that Trump never clarified whether he meant to forcibly remove the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, and The New York Times even used the word Trump had on the plane ride to Phoenix, saying that the candidate had “muddled” his message. Still, for Miller and Sessions, it was a triumph. They had finally gotten Trump to lay out a point-by-point plan for what he would do on immigration if he was elected. It was the roadmap they needed.
* * *
Just hours after CNN declared Trump the winner at 2:47 a.m., on November 9, 2016, Mario Diaz-Balart was on American Airlines flight 1533 for the short trip back to Washington from Miami.
A Cuban American whose aunt had been Fidel Castro’s first wife, the Republican congressman from Miami had spent more than a decade in the House working to forge consensus on immigration issues and watching two presidents fail miserably to solve the problem. George W. Bush had made a run at a deal with Ted Kennedy, the Senate’s liberal icon, that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, but ran into a buzz saw of opposition from conservative talk radio hosts and hard-liners like Sessions. When Congress blocked Barack Obama’s efforts at a similar deal, he gave up on legislation and tried to use the power of his office to protect millions of immigrants from deportation, only to be stopped by the courts. Now, the nation had elected as its president a man who won the office by trashing immigrants. In their early-2013 post-election autopsy, Republican leaders had concluded the party needed to repair its image with Hispanic voters if they had any hope of winning back the presidency. Trump had not just rejected that approach; he had obliterated it.
But Diaz-Balart was an optimist by nature. As he waited at Washington’s airport to be picked up after the flight, he ran into Doug Rivlin, a top aide to one of his Democratic colleagues. Rivlin, the communications director for Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago, was also rushing back to Washington after staying up all night watching Hillary Clinton lose to Trump. He was tired and despondent, and Diaz-Balart could see it all over his face.
“No, no, no. This could work out. He’s a dealmaker,” Diaz-Balart told Rivlin. Overhauling the nation’s outdated, broken immigration system had always failed in large part because conservatives demanded harsh measures to secure the border in exchange for anything that might look like amnesty for the illegal immigrants already living here. Trump wouldn’t need to bend over backward to prove he’s tough. He comes into office with the credibility among immigration hard-liners that Bush and Obama never had, but also with the hubris of a billionaire-celebrity-mogul-turned-politician who is certain he can succeed where his predecessors had failed.
“Think Nixon going to China,” Diaz-Balart told Rivlin. “He wants to make deals that no one else can make.”
— 3 — The Hamilton Group
THE EMAILS STARTED ARRIVING the morning after the election.
Across Washington, a small cadre of congressional staffers received invitations from Gene Hamilton, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer from Georgia who was a top legal adviser to Sessions. The unimaginable had actually happened; Trump had won the presidential election, in no small measure on the power of his promises of cracking down on immigration, building a border wall, and banning Muslims and other refugees from the United States. But Trump had been too superstitious to plan for his own transition to the White House. And he was too toxic as a candidate to have attracted the usual throng of young, eager policy experts angling for plum posts in his nascent administration. Now the president-elect needed people who could help draft an aggressive new set of immigration measures to match his tough campaign rhetoric. And it needed to happen fast. It fell to Hamilton to quickly assemble a team.
Their assignment would be shrouded in secrecy; unlike government workers, the members of Hamilton’s group could not speak about their work to anyone and would have to sign nondisclosure agreements of the kind usually used to guard corporate secrets. They weren’t even supposed to alert Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill. But the pitch was attractive: they would be part of a small but influential team charged with restoring the rule of law and reversing decades of liberal mismanagement of the nation’s immigration system. No longer would they be relegated to the sidelines, grousing about the perverse incentives and dysfunctional practices that had long governed the way the country treated immigrants and immigration. They would have a free hand to rewrite the rule book. Trump had promised as a candidate that were he to win the presidency, he would waste no time in beginning to deport undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes—“My first hour in office, those people are gone,” he had vowed. He wanted to strip the legal protections Obama had provided to the Dreamers, those who had been brought to the United States as children, and block immigrants from what he called “terror-prone” countries.
Bannon and Miller knew that time was of the essence. They were convinced that Trump’s refusal to back down from his divisive rhetoric and extreme policy proposals on immigration during the campaign had won him the presidential race, earning him the undying affection of white working-class voters who were sick of seeing both political parties mince words and shrink from harsh measures when it came to immigrants. The pearl-clutching outrage of liberal Democrats and even mainstream Republicans was of no concern to them or to Trump; they courted and invited it. So Trump’s first order of business was to do what he said he would on immigration, the more shocking the better. Speed, Miller believed, would be critical if Trump was to maintain the credibility on immigration that he had built up during the campaign. It was also vital because of what Miller and Bannon considered the liberal leanings of the “deep state,” career officials who had served for years and had no loyalty to the elected president. If they were given the chance, they would use all the bureaucratic tools at their disposal to stall and obstruct and thwart Trump’s plans. Better to go fast—use a “shock and awe” approach—so there wouldn’t be time for them to resist.
Much of official Washington would try to stop them, they knew. For more than fifty years, both political parties in the United States had largely embraced the idea of opening the country’s borders to immigrants from all over the world. Democrats pushed to expand refugee and asylum programs as part of their bid to treat immigration as a new civil rights cause. Republicans wanted new ways to recruit workers from overseas for high-tech companies and vast agribusinesses.
Now that Trump had been elected, his inner circle knew they were pushing against a bipartisan consensus in favor of immigration that would be difficult to counter. In Trump-world, the level of suspicion toward the government bureaucrats who handled immigration issues bordered on paranoia, and informed Hamilton’s planning from the start. Trump and his advisers believed that the people running the country had betrayed working-class Americans with liberal trade and immigration policies that had cost them their jobs, their wages, and their dignity, bringing foreigners from faraway places who spoke different languages into their communities. As they began to put together their team, Hamilton and the others closest to Trump felt they could not trust any of the experts on immigration policy: the diplomats, lawyers, analysts, or migration specialists who worked at the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, or the National Security Council. They would be cut out of the process altogether. What he would need instead, Hamilton decided, was a group of loyal immigration experts who thought like Trump.
* * *
Andrea Loving received one of Hamilton’s invitations. She was the whip-smart general counsel at the House Judiciary Committee and a top immigration adviser to Bob Goodlatte, the committee’s hard-line Republican chairman from Virginia. George Fishman, a veteran immigration lawyer for Goodlatte, got an email from Hamilton, as did Dimple Shah, a first-generation American who speaks Hindi and handled immigration issues for the committee. Art Arthur, a former immigration judge who had worked for Goodlatte, was on the list. Hamilton invited Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, a top aide to Republican senator Chuck Grassley, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Lee Francis Cissna, the son of a Peruvian immigrant and career civil servant who had worked at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, then alongside Hamilton and Miller after having been assigned to work on Grassley’s staff. And Hamilton requested help from Tracy Short, who had worked with him years earlier as a lawyer in the Atlanta office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE.
About fifteen people in all, they took leaves from their jobs after receiving clearance from congressional ethics offices to work for the transition. What they shared, in addition to Trump’s restrictionist views about immigration, was status in Washington as political and policy outcasts. For more than a decade, they had labored mostly on the fringes of the immigration debate, shunned not only by Democrats on Capitol Hill, but also by mainstream Republicans in their own party, who saw them as too strident, too unwilling to compromise, too aligned with the agenda of racist hate groups that opposed immigration at all costs. When Republicans from moderate districts wanted to compromise with Democrats on immigration, these staffers gave no quarter, putting principle over politics and earning scorn from their party leaders as they quietly blew up deal after potential deal. But over the years, their success had been almost entirely defensive, a matter of killing immigration measures they viewed as too soft by tapping into the party’s nativist base and whipping “no” votes. They had rarely been in the position to go on offense, scoring legislative victories of their own.
Over the years, the members of the group had pushed unsuccessfully for passage of bills that would deny benefits to undocumented immigrants, eliminate family-based immigration rules, drastically slash the number of visas for legal immigrants, end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States, require a biometric system to allow companies to screen for illegal immigrants, and deport millions of immigrants. It didn’t seem to matter whether a Republican or a Democrat occupied the White House; no president supported an agenda designed to protect the country against what Miller, Hamilton, and their colleagues saw as the ravages of immigration. It was clear that they were doomed to remain on the fringe until someone came along who would embrace their restrictionist ideology and enable their agenda. And now someone had.
* * *
Even as Hamilton began assembling his team, Dan Stein faced reporters at the National Press Building blocks away from the White House to unveil the latest immigration wish list compiled by his group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. For years, Stein and FAIR had been part of a network of restrictionist activists who tried, largely without success, to prod lawmakers and presidents toward their anti-immigration views and funneled their work to hard-right publications like Breitbart News and conservative television and radio hosts like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.
A graduate of Indiana University and the law school at Catholic University, Stein was a disciple of John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist and white nationalist who had founded FAIR in 1979 and begun a crusade against immigrants, warning about what he called a coming “Latin onslaught.” By the time Trump arrived on the political scene, Stein was in charge at the group, having spent two decades arguing for the kinds of restrictions that the new president embraced. “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing,” Stein said in 1997. “Many of them hate America; hate everything that the United States stands for.” Until Trump’s arrival, Stein and his counterparts at other groups that advocated for much lower rates of immigration—people like Roy Beck at NumbersUSA and Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies—were shunned as extremists by the Republican establishment, the business community, religious groups, and others. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks and monitors hate groups, condemned their work and listed some of them as hate groups, on par with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
