First lady seeing lots, saying little

It’s unclear what lessons Melania Trump has learned

Melania Trump lit up when a 3-year-old boy darted out of “Family Unit 8” at a migrant center in Tucson, Ariz.

“Hello!” said the first lady, brightening amid the semicircle of eight cells in a short-term holding center for migrants. “How are you?”

Mrs. Trump, an immigrant and a mother herself, wanted to find out more about how her husband’s strict immigration policy was playing out on the ground, especially among families that have been separated at the border.

Two tours of migrant detention centers in a week gave her a sometimes grim view.

Now the question is what she does with that knowledge — and how she meshes it with her dislike for dividing up families and a concurrent belief in strong borders.

Spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham says more border visits or talks with lawmakers are possible, but it’s not clear what lessons the first lady took from her visits and what she’ll communicate to her husband.

“She cares about children deeply,” Grisham said.

“She also believes in strong border laws and treating everybody equally.”

The first lady has given her husband her views on controversial political issues throughout his presidency, but never in such a public way as with the issue of immigrant children.

Before her husband reversed himself and put a halt to separations at the border, Mrs. Trump’s office put out a statement saying the first lady “hates” to see families separated and expressing hope that “both sides of the aisle” can reform the nation’s immigration laws. She did not say whether she supports the president’s “zero tolerance” policy for criminally prosecuting those who cross the border illegally.

“This is a complex issue,” Grisham said. “She recognizes that.”

The sights and sounds of Mrs. Trump’s visits to border facilities in Texas and Arizona amounted to a hard-to-forget information file about the 2,000 children separated from their families nationally.

In Phoenix, as the first lady’s motorcade approached a sprawling Southwest Key migrant facility, protesters lined the sidewalk amid a big inf latable likeness of her husband, dressed in a white robe and holding a hood reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Melania Trump is guilty, guilty, guilty!” the protesters chanted of the first lady, who is from Slovenia and came to the United States on a special visa during her modeling career.

Inside, she stopped at an air-conditioned trailer marked No. 4 that held 10 boys and girls around 5 years old.

“Do you like it here with some friends?” Mrs. Trump asked.

“Si,” said one girl.