› Trump administration gives conflicting messages, immigration

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump boasts of progress he’s made on his biggest campaign promise — to build a wall and stem the flow of illegal immigration across the southern border — he speaks in terms of unadulterated success.

But few others in the administration go so far. And with White House spokespeople, Cabinet secretaries and immigration officials more willing than the president to acknowledge the far more complicated state of immigration in the U.S., a muddled picture has emerged on where the Trump administration is headed.

Thursday offered a clear example of the problems that arise when Trump and his top aides send different messages.

Discussing recent immigration raids around the country, the president touted an unprecedented “military operation” targeting criminals that resulted in 680 arrests.

“You see what’s happening at the border. All of a sudden for the first time, we’re getting gang members out,” he said. “We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country, and at a rate that nobody’s ever seen before.”

But just last week, the Department of Homeland Security cast the operation as routine.

And in Mexico City hours after Trump spoke, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly pushed back on accusations that he had embarked on a mass deportation of people living in the U.S. illegally.

“We’ll approach this operation systematically, in an organized way, in a results-oriented way, in an operation and in a human-dignity way,” he said while on a diplomatic mission with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer tried to reconcile one apparent contradiction between Trump’s and Kelly’s comments, saying the president meant only that the operation was military-like in its efficiency.

“The president was using that as an adjective,” Spicer said of Trump’s word choice.

The back-and-forth underscored the communications confusion that has quickly become a signature of the Trump administration. It is an outgrowth of the president’s salesman-like tendency toward exaggerated terms, aides’ repeated false assertions and strategists’ goal of quickly upending bureaucracy and steering it away from Obama administration policy.