Border tensions boil over as President Trump’s frustrations grow

Struggle reveals a deep rift within the Cabinet

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration’s struggles to curtail illegal immigration have exposed a deep rift among the president and his top advisers, one that could lead to changes in the Cabinet and undermine the government’s response to a record surge of migrant families at the southern border.

Even as President Donald Trump continues to believe immigration will be a political winner next month in helping turn out his conservative base for the midterm elections, tensions in the West Wing have reached a boiling point. A profane shouting match over immigration this week among top aides prompted Chief of Staff John Kelly to storm out of the White House and marked the culmination of weeks of mounting anxiety, several senior administration officials said.

Trump’s own escalating frustration has led him to excoriate aides for not taking more aggressive actions and to offer his own ideas, officials said. He has ruminated this week over the possibility of sending more soldiers to the border, even though thousands of National Guard troops have been deployed there since April with no evidence of a deterrent effect.

In the summer, the president was so upset by the border numbers that he proposed sealing the entire 1,954-mile U.s.-mexico border, including shuttering legal ports of entry, blocking trade flows and halting tourism and travel, according to the senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to Migrants from Honduras march in a caravan toward the Mexican border, leaving Guatemala City on Oct. 18.

discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

“Close the whole thing!” Trump demanded at one point during an Oval Office meeting, the officials said. He was talked out of it by advisers who highlighted the effect such a measure would have on more than $600 billion in U.s.-mexico annual trade, as well as the potential damage to bilateral relations, according to the officials.

The worsening immigration numbers are particularly fraught for Trump, who centered much of his 2016 campaign around incendiary vows to build a border wall – which has not been built – and has begun focusing on immigrants as a dire threat in the final weeks before the Nov. 6 midterms.

Experts said the White House is straining under the same political dilemma that past administrations encountered in trying to manage the massive U.S. immigration system despite Congress’s inability to strike a comprehensive legislative reform package. Trump is hitting the limits of what he is legally able to do through executive authority, they said, and the United States has relatively few tools to deal with the gang violence, poverty and hunger propelling a mass exodus of

Central American migrant families over the past five years.

“The tension between the White House and the Department of Homeland Security reminds me of when people tried to characterize stopping illegal immigration as a willingness problem – and accused the Obama administration of not wanting to stop it,” said John Sandweg, who served as a high-ranking DHS official under President Barack Obama. “This administration is learning the hard way – it’s not a lack of willingness. It’s just our ability [as a government] to do so that is limited.”

White House officials have sought to play down the tensions. After news broke Thursday about the squabble just outside the Oval Office between Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton over the performance of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement saying Bolton and Nielsen had patched things up.

But Kelly was audibly cursing as he left the White House grounds and he did not return that day, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The blowup came after Nielsen, during a White

House meeting, had touted an effort by the Mexican government to enlist help from the U.N. Refugee Agency to process asylum claims from a caravan of thousands of Honduran migrants traveling north toward the United States. Trump has demanded that the Mexican government disband the group and threatened to cut off foreign aid or upend a new trade deal if it fails to do so.

Nielsen characterized the United Nation’s involvement as a significant measure that could help stem the flow, according to administration officials. Bolton, a longtime critic of the United Nations, responded that the international body was ineffective and expressed disbelief at Nielsen’s view, the officials said, prompting an argument over the DHS chief’s performance.

Kelly, who served as the head of that agency for the first six months of Trump’s tenure and handpicked Nielsen to replace him, jumped in to defend her.

“The White House wants to see more passion, energy and a more proactive approach, rather than waiting for the president to get pissed off and then come up with a solution,” one senior DHS official familiar with the dispute said of Nielsen.