Out of chaos, Trump reshapes nation’s immigration policy
WASHINGTON — Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Donald Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.
Five months before, Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.
But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Trump said.
According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.
More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained. Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
As the meeting continued, John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, and Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, tried to interject, explaining that many were short-term travelers making one-time visits. But as the president continued, Kelly and Miller turned their ire on Tillerson, blaming him for the influx of foreigners and prompting the secretary of state to throw up his arms in frustration. If he was so bad at his job, maybe he should stop issuing visas altogether, Tillerson fired back.
Tempers flared and Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied Saturday morning that Trump had made derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.
“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” she said, referring to the current White House chief of staff, the national security adviser and the secretaries of state and Homeland Security. “It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”
The meeting in June reflects Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.
Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thoughtout goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.
Like many of his initiatives, his effort to change U.S. immigration policy has been executed through a disorderly and dysfunctional process that sought from the start to defy the bureaucracy charged with enforcing it, according to interviews with three dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers and others close to the process, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private interactions.
But while Trump has been repeatedly frustrated by the limits of his power, his efforts to remake decades of immigration policy have gained increasing momentum as the White House became more disciplined and adept at either ignoring or undercutting the entrenched opposition of many parts of the government. The resulting changes have had far-reaching consequences, not only for the immigrants who have sought to make a new home in this country, but also for the United States’ image in the world.
“We have taken a giant steamliner barreling full speed,” Miller said in a recent interview. “Slowed it, stopped it, begun to turn it around and started sailing in the other direction.”
BAN RESTARTS ENFORCEMENT
Trump came into office with a long list of campaign promises that included not only building a wall at the border with Mexico (and making Mexico pay for it) but also creating a “deportation force,” barring Muslims from entering the country and immediately deporting millions of immigrants with criminal records. Miller and other aides had the task of turning those promises into a policy agenda that would also include an assault against a pro-immigration bureaucracy they viewed with suspicion and disdain. Working in secret, they drafted a half-dozen executive orders. One would crack down on sanctuary cities. Another proposed changing the definition of a criminal alien so it included people arrested — not just those convicted.
But mindful of his campaign promise to quickly impose “extreme vetting,” Trump decided his first symbolic action would be an executive order to place a worldwide ban on travel from nations the White House considered compromised by terrorism.
With no policy experts in place, and deeply suspicious of career civil servants they regarded as spies for President Barack Obama, Miller and a small group of aides started with an Obamaera law that identified seven terror-prone “countries of concern.” And then they skipped practically every step in the standard White House playbook for creating and introducing a major policy.
The announcement of the travel ban on a Friday night, seven days after Trump’s inauguration, created chaotic scenes at the nation’s largest airports, as hundreds of people were stopped, and set off widespread confusion and loud protests. Lawyers for the government raced to defend the president’s actions against court challenges, while aides struggled to explain the policy to perplexed lawmakers the next night at a black-tie dinner.
FORCED TO BACK DOWN
The ban’s message of “keep out” helped drive down illegal border crossings as much as 70 percent, even without being formally put into effect.
Immigration officers rounded up 41,318 immigrants who were in the country illegally during the president’s first 100 days, nearly a 40 percent increase. The Justice Department began hiring more immigration judges to speed up deportations. Officials threatened to hold back funds for sanctuary cities. The flow of refugees into the United States slowed.
By early March, judges across the country had blocked the travel ban.
By year’s end, the chaos and disorganization that marked Trump’s earliest actions on immigration had given way to a more disciplined approach that yielded concrete results, steered in large part by Kelly. As secretary of Homeland Security, he had helped unleash immigration officers who felt constrained under Obama. They arrested 143,000 people in 2017, a sharp uptick, and deported more than 225,000.
In September, a third version of the president’s travel ban was issued with little fanfare and new legal justifications. Then, Trump overruled objections from diplomats, capping refugee admissions at 45,000 for 2018, the lowest since 1986. In November, the president ended a humanitarian program that granted residency to 59,000 Haitians since a 2010 earthquake ravaged their country.