Border tensions boil over as Trump’s frustrations grow

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 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 requested anonymity.

“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 impact 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.

Experts said the White House is straining under the same dilemma that past administrations encountered in trying to manage the immigration system despite President Donald Trump has threatened to send even more troops to the Southern border, if not close the border entirely. Congress’ inability to strike a comprehensive reform package. Trump is hitting the limits of what he is legally able to do through executive authority, they said, and the U.S. 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.

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 Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying Bolton and Nielsen had patched things up.

But Kelly was audibly cursing as he left the grounds and did not return that day, according to sources.

The blow-up 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 U.N.’s involvement as a significant measure that could help stem the flow, administration officials said. Bolton, a longtime critic of the U.N., responded that the body is ineffective and expressed disbelief at Nielsen’s view, the officials said, prompting an argument over her performance.

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

Trump backed Bolton and another influential senior White House aide, Stephen Miller, who also has been critical of Nielsen.