Immigration agenda still center stage
Unrest roiling cities across nation could give it more punch
Unrest in cities across the nation could give Trump’s plan more punch among core supporters.
WASHINGTON — Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Donald Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his homeland security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “Extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants.
That afternoon, at a separate meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.
Developed by the military as a crowd dispersal tool two decades ago, the Active Denial System had been largely abandoned amid doubts over its effectiveness and morality. Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president.
Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, told an aide after the meeting that she would not authorize the use of such a device and that it should never be brought up again in her presence, the officials said.
Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the department, said Wednesday that “it was never considered.”
It is not known whether Trump knew of the micro
wave weapon suggestion, but the discussion in the fall of 2018 underscored how Trump’s obsession with shutting down immigration has driven policy considerations, including his suggestions of installing fleshpiercing spikes on the border wall, building a moat filled with snakes and alligators and shooting migrants in the legs.
The Republican National Convention on Tuesday night featured a small citizenship naturalization ceremony at the White House clearly intended to try to soften the president’s image as a heartless foe of immigrants. In 2018, the president’s hard immigration policies may well have backfired when suburban women recoiled at the images of children separated from their families and migrants in cages. A Democratic wave that November driven by such voters swept Republicans from control of the House.
But for his core support
ers, Trump’s immigration agenda is again at the heart of his campaign, and the unrest roiling cities from Portland, Oregon, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, could give it more punch. The pitch: He has delivered on perhaps the central promise of his 2016 run, to effectively cut off America from foreigners who he said posed security and economic threats. Through hundreds of regulations, policy directives and structural changes, the president has profoundly reshaped the government’s vast immigration bureaucracy.
His campaign will also concentrate on making searing — and often false — attacks against former Vice President Joe Biden, telling voters that the president’s rival wants to fling open the nation’s borders to criminals and disease-carrying immigrants who will take hardworking Americans’ jobs.
“The public health necessity and the economic
necessity of controlling immigration has placed the view of the Democrat left even more radically outside the pale of mainstream American thought,” Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration policies, said this week in an interview.
The president tweeted last month that “the Radical Left Democrats want Open Borders for anyone, including many criminals, to come in!”
Biden’s campaign said such false attacks would be as politically ineffective as they were in 2018.
“Doubling down on divisive poison says one thing to voters: that even after all his devastating failed leadership has cost us — and even though Joe Biden has been showing him the way for months — Donald Trump still has no strategy for overcoming the pandemic, the overwhelming priority for the American people,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden’s pres
idential campaign.
Biden has not called for “open borders” or embraced getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as some on the Democratic left flank have sought. He has said he would roll back Trump’s immigration policies, promising to restore asylum rules, end separation of migrant families at the border, reverse limits on legal immigration and impose a 100-day moratorium on deportations.
But Biden and Democratic congressional candidates are bracing for what they expect will be a concerted focus on one of the most polarizing issues in American politics — made even more divisive by Trump’s embrace of harsh rhetoric about foreigners.
Some of Trump’s biggest immigration promises from 2016 have fallen short. No “big, beautiful wall” stretches the length of the southern border, paid for by Mexico. Instead, the president spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money to replace about 300 miles of existing barriers with a hulking wall of steel slats.
Like the heat ray, many of the president’s ideas — including the moat and shooting migrants in the legs — were thwarted by his own officials. Other policy proposals have been blocked by federal judges who have ruled that they violated existing laws, administrative rules or the Constitution.
But even the president’s most fierce critics concede that on immigration, the president can rightly claim that he did much of what he said he would do.
“The Trump administration, unilaterally, without passing laws in Congress, has radically reshaped immigration in the United States,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They have effectively shut down the asylum system at the border. They’ve reintroduced religious, racial and national origin discrimination into our immigration system. These are real, radical shifts.”
Because of the president’s policies, Central American migrants fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries now must wait, often for months, in squalid camps in Mexico while the United States considers their requests for asylum. For decades, asylum-seekers were allowed to remain in the United States while their cases were decided.
Trump derides that as “catch and release,” which he says allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to fraudulently claim persecution as a means of entering the United States and then disappearing into the country illegally. He repeatedly said it was his top priority to end the practice.