Border situation triggers tension in White House
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 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' 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 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.