The FRONTLINE Interviews
Carrie Johnson
Correspondent, NPR
Carrie Johnson is a correspondent for the Washington Desk at NPR, where she covers issues of justice, law enforcement and legal affairs.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder conducted on June 18, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller
So, Carrie, can you take us back to Sen.[Jeff] Sessions on the Hill, his reputation, and what he’s thought of when we think about immigration?
I spent a fair amount of time with Sen.Sessions and his staff when he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee.Of course, he was chairman during at least one if not two of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominations.And Sessions was basically the prime figure in the Senate pushing back on President Obama’s plans to be more lenient with drug offenders.So I often would call Sen. Sessions’ office to get quotes and comments on his stance on violent crime and law and order.
And in fact, I dealt quite a bit at that time with his spokesman, Stephen Miller, who was always ready to get Sen.Sessions on the phone or in person to talk.Sen. Sessions was maybe not considered a thought leader in the Senate, and so they were always eager and happy to go on air at NPR and with other reporters, sharing their views about violent crime and how President Obama’s immigration stance was problematic.And lo and behold, Sen. Sessions became actually an important voice on immigration in a way I didn’t realize at the time.
Talk to me a little bit about Stephen Miller at the time.Not your traditional communications staffer, or was he?
I found him to be really unexpectedly responsive to media requests.He often had lots of thoughts that he would email around to reporters on Capitol Hill and reporters who cover the Justice Department, thoughts on immigration, thoughts on violent crime, thoughts on why the Obama administration’s justice and immigration policies and his view were wrongheaded.And he was eager to get those points of view out at a time when not very many other people were making those points.
And certainly the position that the office had on immigration was a bit of a—it was kind of a fringe voice within the Senate?
Sen. Sessions was very much an outlier on the immigration issues.It came to pass that he helped to block bipartisan plans to overhaul the immigration system.But for a long time, he was a lonely voice in the Congress on those issues, maybe one of the hardest-liners on immigration.He called it an amnesty.He wrote a white paper in 2015 basically saying the Republicans lost the 2012 election because they were not paying attention to disenfranchised white voters who were losing out on wages and losing out on jobs to people coming from overseas.
Why would Sessions want to block Gang of Eight progress and comprehensive immigration reform?Help me with his worldview of it.
Jeff Sessions firmly believes that the country—Jeff Sessions firmly believed the country was heading in the wrong way, in the wrong direction, on immigration.His view was that people in his community in Alabama, people he’d known all his life, were losing out, losing out to people coming in from overseas, taking good jobs, depressing wages, and, in his view, without much evidence, causing crime problems throughout the American South and the country itself.And he firmly demanded that other lawmakers on the Hill stand up to what he viewed as special interests, special interests on behalf of immigrants, immigrant advocates, and stand up for American workers and American jobs.
The Trump Campaign and Transition
And he doesn’t really see sort of this conversation happening at a national level until candidate Trump rises to sort of the scene.And I wonder if you can help me understand the significance of the Sessions endorsement of Trump and how those two are aligned on immigration.
Jeff Sessions was the first—the first—member of Congress to vocally support candidate Donald Trump and to stand next to him at rallies and give his voice and his position in the United States Senate and put that—put the weight of that, the full weight of that, behind Donald Trump.Jeff Sessions famously on the campaign trail donned one of those “Make America Great Again” hats.And he was all the way right there with President Trump and giving speeches on his behalf and rallying the troops in Alabama and beyond on behalf of candidate Donald Trump.
And how important was immigration to Sessions in making that decision, do you think, to endorse President Trump?
Candidate Trump was one of the only candidates in the race who was embracing Jeff Sessions’ positions on immigration—not just embracing them, giving them voice and additional rhetorical boost in a way that other Republican candidates—remember, that field was enormous—was not really—was not really echoing or giving voice to those beliefs.
Then they, you know, they go all the way.There’s certainly the election.You know, they win.And suddenly Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, some of the folks that you know from the Hill, are elevated very, very quickly into key positions in which they can actually do something about immigration.Can you talk to me a little bit about that transition?
I remember vividly covering the inauguration address that Donald Trump gave in which he used the phrase “American carnage.”It was quite a departure from previous presidents in their more hopeful messages for the country on that occasion.I remember typing away and being a little bit taken aback by some of the provocative phrases.
And then I learned that Stephen Miller, former Jeff Sessions aide Stephen Miller, had helped draft that address, and things began to make a little more sense to me.It was a worldview that was a little bit darker than we all had imagined.
Did it remind you of those earlier emails that you got from him?
Yeah.It didn’t seem out of character with the set of beliefs that Stephen Miller had had for a long time about immigration and the problems facing the country.
Jeff Sessions as Attorney General
Can you help us understand why Jeff Sessions wants to be attorney general?What is there about that position that he can do in that job that he can’t do elsewhere in the administration?
You know, of all the jobs that Sen. Jeff Sessions had, he said early in his career his favorite one was serving as United States attorney during the Ronald Reagan presidency.He was the U.S. attorney in Alabama.He deeply, deeply enjoyed having control over prosecuting crime, including some civil rights crimes, in Alabama.And at that time, of course, there was a drug epidemic facing the country, and he wanted to be on the front lines.He found that to be among the most satisfying jobs he ever had.
And Jeff Sessions says to everyone who will listen that he loves the Department of Justice.So the notion that this guy, who had risen to the Senate and in fact had become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was eager to leave the Senate and become the attorney general means something very significant about what he believed about the institution of the Justice Department and all the power that would be at his disposal there.
There are former staffers from Judiciary Committee that begin to—I should say former Sessions staffers on the committee who begin to populate the administration.Do you know some of their names?Could you—
I do know some.I’m not as—there are people who went into the DHS [Department of Homeland Security]; there are other people who went into the Justice Department.And Stephen Miller, of course, went straight to the White House, where it’s been described to me he was behind the driver’s seat for the entire administration’s immigration policy, which is an enormous job for somebody of his relative youth and inexperience in the federal government in the executive branch.
What did it tell you about the way in which Sessions was viewed by the White House and his staff?
Well, remember a whole bunch of people got automatically disqualified for big jobs in the Trump administration if they ever spoke out against candidate Donald Trump or signed any letters with respect to Trump’s positions on national security, immigration and other issues.And there were a lot of Republican lawyers, veterans of the George W. Bush White House and the Reagan White House, who signed those kinds of letters and spoke out, and they were not considered for jobs in the Trump administration—not just in the White House, but in the Justice Department or the Homeland Security Department.
In fact, some lawyers who may have given television interviews but not signed letters were put up for big jobs in the Trump administration, and if they disclosed in the vetting process that they had spoken out in a negative way about candidate Donald Trump, they, too, got the ax.So it very much limited the pool of people who were going to get very influential jobs in this early administration.
And there was a dependency, I think, on Jeff Sessions, probably, to deliver names and deliver staffers.
Jeff Sessions, having worked in the Senate for 20 years, had a built-in pool of staffers who could come in and who had, in most cases, not spoken out about candidate Donald Trump and therefore were eligible for some of these big jobs.
And probably looked at candidate Trump as somebody that is certainly putting forth some of the views that Sessions had been trying to get sort of onto the national stage for sometime.
You know, I followed Jeff Sessions for 10, 15 years, and I have never heard anybody say that he didn’t genuinely believe in the things he said and the things that Donald Trump said about immigration. …
Let me ask you about Gene Hamilton.Is that a name you know?
Yes, not well.
That's okay.What do you know about him, I guess?
One of the reasons that Jeff Sessions wanted to become attorney general is that he understood how much power the Justice Department has.And DOJ has particular power when it comes to immigration because the Justice Department and the attorney general control the nation’s immigration courts.Jeff Sessions and the people he hired to work with him inside the Justice Department knew how to work that system.They worked it early and often, and they used their power over immigration in ways we've not seen for a generation or more.
I think something that a lot of us had missed is those guys don’t get enough credit, maybe, at a certain stage earlier in the process in which it looks as though they’re ready to work.They know the systems.They’ve got in Gene Hamilton in particular somebody who worked at ICE.Lee Cissna is somebody who was at Judiciary Committee and was certainly a DHS guy.They sort of have the right team in place that knows these agencies well.And so really on day one, they’re ready to go in a way in which I don’t think a lot of people are paying attention.
They were absolutely ready to go on day one with respect to immigration.And I’ve covered the Justice Department for a long time.I did not know that the attorney general could exercise that kind of authority over the Board of Immigration Appeals and exercise authority to refer cases to himself in a way that Jeff Sessions did at least eight times during his relatively short tenure as attorney general.
A lot more than previous administrations?
A lot more than previous administrations.Certainly a lot more than the Obama administration and the George W. Bush administration.
The Travel Ban
The executive orders start right off the gate.… And first is the travel ban.It’s a pretty chaotic delivery.It’s a pretty wild ride.I’m curious to hear what you’re seeing at Justice when that comes down.
A few days before that first travel ban executive order came out, I had been hearing inside the Justice Department that the current DOJ leader, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was a holdover from the Obama administration, Sally Yates and her staff were getting concerned that people in the White House, and maybe even inside the Justice Department, were not running past her significant legal interpretations.
So I did a story about that, not fully understanding that the travel ban itself came as an enormous surprise to the acting attorney general of the United States.They had—the White House did have a sensitive office inside the Justice Department called the Office of Legal Counsel review the travel ban executive order, but just on a very pro forma basis.And it came as an enormous surprise to Sally Yates and her senior leadership team on that Friday night, the Friday night just one week after the inauguration, just about one week after the inauguration.
And remember, chaos ensued.Chaos ensued at airports.There were immigration lawyers and family members flocking to airports.The whole weekend after the travel ban, there was action in courts in Brooklyn, New York, and Massachusetts, where Justice Department lawyers responsible for defending the administration’s position had to tell judges, “We don’t entirely understand what happened, and we’re not fully prepared to argue these issues because they came as a surprise to us.”
This is the United States Department of Justice.It’s not the way the system is supposed to work.But according to Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, it was exactly how they wanted the system to work.
And so even though they’re rebuked, do they slow down?Does this slow down their sort of focus on immigration?
Not at all.We go on to have two additional versions of the travel ban after it’s blocked in the courts across the country.And meanwhile, once Jeff Sessions becomes the attorney general, they start thinking and enacting additional measures on immigration.And Sessions is working very closely with people in DHS and in the White House to make big changes there.
I should say that Miller goes out on the Sunday shows around this time period and is really defending this policy.So while we’re all sort of watching the chaos in the airports and the TV coverage of that event, of the ban, they’re seeing this through, it seems, a completely different paradigm, which is one of shock-and-awe deterrence, you know, sort of a dream they’ve wanted to carry out for many, many years.
This is a dream realized for people like Stephen Miller, who has been concerned about immigration for a long time, concerned about what he believes, without much evidence, to be immigration’s effect on violent crime here inside the United States and depression of American workers’ wages, and a whole bunch of other concerns that he has about what he viewed as the previous administration’s relative amnesty toward immigrants and immigration.
Jeff Sessions’ Recusal
A few months later, Sessions is going to recuse himself over the Russia investigation, and his influence within the White House is going to sort of begin to maybe diminish a bit.I’m wondering if that’s something you agree with, if that, in fact, his influence is sort of decreasing there, and if you can kind of give us some sort of view on where Sessions is around this time period.It’s a bit of a black box to us.
Remember that during his confirmation hearing in the Senate, Jeff Sessions got asked questions about contacts with Russians during the campaign, and he basically muffed that answer, causing Democrats in the Senate to demand the Justice Department investigate the attorney general for making false statements to Congress.Sessions was in a tough position.Reporters like me were asking him all the time whether he was going to have to recuse himself from the biggest investigation inside the Justice Department, the investigation into Russian election interference.He never quite answered that question directly.
And then one day—I think it was in March, just a month or two after his confirmation—he came out in a kind of a surprise and gave these remarks on camera with his top aide behind him while he was explaining his position and basically said, “Career officials at the Justice Department have determined I should recuse myself from the Russia investigation, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
And we know that President Trump went through the roof.It began this campaign of attacks that continued throughout Jeff Sessions’ tenure—very vocal attacks, very public attacks.President Trump would tweet terrible thing about the attorney general.He would tell The New York Times on tape he never should have picked Jeff Sessions as attorney general.There were concerns that Jeff Sessions ought not show his face even inside the White House at important meetings lest he enrage the president.
And one thing I remember very vividly was being very, very concerned during a phase when Trump was persistently attacking Sessions about whether Sessions might show up at the White House and just get fired at any moment’s notice.So DOJ sent out word that Sessions was traveling to El Salvador to meet with his foreign counterparts to talk about MS-13 and the gang problem and immigration.And I thought things have got to be really, really bad in Washington for Jeff Sessions if he’s voluntarily going to El Salvador to talk about gang problems and MS-13.
What’s he doing there?Is it survival?Is he buying time?Is he burrowing in?
Well, I think he’s attempting to buy time and attempting to demonstrate, even though he never really got there, attempting to demonstrate to the president that: “Hey, you may not like what I did on Russia, but I’m doing every single other thing you want me to do in terms of policy.I am advancing your immigration strategy in a way that nobody else can or will in this administration.”And Sessions fervently believed that he did and that he did a good job.
Yeah, and in fact, that they were delivering on some of the campaign promises related to immigration.
Ironically, for all of the times that Jeff Sessions was in the doghouse with President Trump, I would argue he was the single most effective Cabinet member in advancing Trump’s agenda.
At a certain point, he does threaten to resign, or he does resign, and Steve Bannon races out to convince him to, in fact, rescind his resignation.Do you know this story?Part of the explanation is that he’s told, you know, “You were put on this earth for the purpose of serving as attorney general.”
At one point, things get so bad between the president and Sessions that Sessions actually provides a letter of resignation to the president, and the president keeps it.And when he finds out, Steve Bannon and also Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff to the president, get into a panic.They think that Jeff Sessions cannot resign.It would just cause so many problems, so many more political problems for the administration.
So Bannon is dispatched to tell Jeff Sessions: “Please don’t do this.Why were you put on this earth?You were put on this earth to do good at the Justice Department.Don’t do it.”Reince Priebus rushes out, literally runs out of the White House, to find Jeff Sessions and implore him not to resign.And we now know, after reading the Mueller report findings, the special counsel findings, that Priebus was obsessed with getting that letter of resignation back from the president.He actually told Jeff Sessions that as long as Donald Trump had that letter of resignation in his hands that the Justice Department would be in a chokehold, a chokehold, controlled by the president of the United States.
Jeff Sessions’ Immigration Reform
Incredible.Around this time period, Sessions is starting to work on some of the immigration courts and reform there.Do you know a little bit about these early moments?He’s—this is the limiting sanctuary cities’ funding; there are some changes to how immigration judges are hired, increased prosecution of immigration crimes.Do you know sort of a little bit about this time period?
One of the first things in terms of policy that this new Sessions administration did was to try to use carrots and sticks with jurisdictions at the state and local level.So the Justice Department has these enormous pools of money that it can give states and localities for law enforcement purposes.But the Sessions Justice Department wanted to impose conditions.They wanted to make clear that places that got this kind of federal funding would cooperate with the Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department to turn over people who were in the country and were undocumented.
And so it tried to, the Sessions DOJ, tried to place these kinds of conditions on grants, and in particular to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, cities or localities that had policies where they would protect undocumented people.And Sessions tried, without much success, actually, to impose all these conditions, without much success because just as we saw with the early travel ban, courts, including judges from—including judges who were appointed by presidents from both political parties, early on blocked a lot of these conditions on grants that Sessions tried to impose.
What did it tell you, though?I mean, you’ve been an observer of the Justice Department for sometime.What did it tell you that immigration is the single issue at the Justice Department during this time period?
You know, I had not covered immigration in a regular way in over 10 years covering the Justice Department.It just was not a high priority at the end of the Bush administration or throughout the entire eight years of the Obama administration.So DOJ reporters had to get smart really fast on immigration issues and understand how much power Jeff Sessions had over the system.It was enormous power.
Sessions almost immediately decided to hire more immigration judges.He was very upset about the hundreds of thousands of cases in backlog that he inherited after the Obama administration ended, so he wanted to hire more immigration judges.And he also wanted to put conditions on those judges.He wanted to put benchmarks or quotas.He basically came out and said, “These judges need to handle 700 cases a year.”And when you talk to these judges, they say: “We are not Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line.This is the Justice Department.We are dealing with people who are claiming credible fears of persecution and abuse and violence, and we need to take these cases seriously and give them the time they deserve.”
What did some of those decisions tell us about Jeff Sessions’ views on the immigration system as it existed?
Jeff Sessions believes that the immigration system he inherited was rigged.He gave a speech talking about how there were dirty immigration lawyers gaming the system; that there were potentially thousands of people filing false or phony claims of asylum; that there were asylum mills run all over the country by bad lawyers trying to get people into this country and keep them here on conditions that were just baseless and false.And he viewed that as a persistent danger, and he wanted to do something about it.
Asylum seekers, asylum cases were sort of viewed by him as loopholes?
Yeah, he thought that there was an enormous, overly generous interpretation for people seeking asylum.The standard is that anyone who demonstrates a credible fear of persecution in their home country would get a legal process here if they arrived here.But Sessions thought that there were a lot of people taking advantage of that generous standard and that the cases were lingering too long, that people were allowed here in the system, allowed to live out in the country, and he wanted to make big changes to that.He has foreclosed a major avenue for seeking asylum.
He delegated cases to himself to decide, including a very, very important case involving an El Salvadoran woman who claimed that she was the victim of terrible domestic abuse for over 10 years.She says her husband beat her up, including while she was pregnant; that she moved from one city in El Salvador to another to escape her husband; he found her and beat her up again, and that her own government did nothing for her.
So she came to the U.S. and sought asylum, and she won at the lower court level.But Jeff Sessions decided as attorney general to take a second look at her case, and he decided that people who have fears of what he considers to be private violence, domestic violence, that’s not enough to demonstrate you should win asylum here in the U.S.
A very different view on how asylum cases up until this point have been viewed.Domestic violence has always been a big consideration.
This—this—prior to Sessions’ decision, these arguments about domestic violence and physical abuse and emotional abuse had been used by many, many women to gain asylum here in the United States with their children.Now, most asylum claims, to be sure, are not granted.But this was a very important strategy and a pressure valve that these women use.And Sessions, based on his own power, took the wheel and turned the valve, and it’s closed.
Around this time, Bannon leaves the administration to go work on some of these issues from the outside, he says.Miller remains, but then sort of aligns himself more with the [Jared] Kushner wing of the White House.Again, Sessions is still sort of figuring out his influence within the White House, but then also at Justice.Can you give us a sense of that trifecta we kind of described a little bit earlier as sort of seemingly to break down, or are they continuing to sort of prioritize immigration and focus on these efforts?They’re just doing it in sort of new ways as they learn kind of the new dynamics of the administration and the president’s evolving views on immigration and campaign promises.
During this time, Jeff Sessions is, in many ways, on his own.The president can’t stand him, doesn’t want to be in the same room with him, is attacking him all the time.But Sessions never gives up on his goals for the Justice Department and for immigration.He maintains a steady stream of policies and actions on immigration to speed up the court system, or what he considers steps to speed up the court system, to foreclose avenues for asylum, to try to starve sanctuary cities of funding, and a number of other steps defending the administration’s travel ban in court, defending other immigration priorities at the DHS in court.
But Sessions is often on his own with his own team of advisers.In fact, it becomes clear that Sessions is so unwelcome at the White House that eventually his chief of staff, Matt Whitaker, takes his place in a number of meetings with the president and other major principals in the administration, thus paving the way after Sessions finally leaves for Matt Whitaker to get the AG job for a while.
Sessions makes that decision?Sessions knows that his influence is not welcome at the White House and sends Whitaker in his place?
You know, it’s an open question as to how much Jeff Sessions knew.I would argue that he didn’t entirely understand what the result of giving Matt Whitaker all that power might be. But Sessions is basically conflict-averse, and he has told reporters that the president’s attacks on him hurt his feelings.And so who would want to expose themselves to more attacks face-to-face?
So is he the one, then, that sends Whitaker over, do you think?Or is it kind of a collective decision that more prioritization of the DOJ issues are going to sort of be greenlit if we send over a friendlier face to the White House?
You know, I think Matt Whitaker was happy to volunteer to go to the White House and have one-on-one meetings with President Trump and also to be at the table with a whole bunch of people who did win in Senate confirmation and were, you know, deputies in the Cabinet, or Cabinet members.
The Dreamers and DACA
So in the summer of 2017, we understand that there are meetings at the White House about what to do about the “Dreamers.What we’re trying to understand, though, is certainly the larger story about a group of attorney generals [sic] looks at this Obama policy, feels one way about it and sends off a letter to the administration.Can you sort of set up the—that sort of eventual litigation, but at that point just sort of the shot across the bow towards the Trump administration about “Hey, this is a policy we’re going to take on”?
Remember, the Obama administration took executive action in 2012, I think, on behalf of this pool of people who were brought to the country illegally as children by their parents.And Congress could not pass wide-scale immigration reform or immigration overhaul, in part because Jeff Sessions in the Senate was blocking it.So Obama would argue he was forced to take executive action to protect these people.
Late in the administration, he also tried to do something to help the parents of those children, but that was blocked by the courts.But his first DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] program was solid until—until President Trump took office, Jeff Sessions became the attorney general, and a group of state AGs led by Ken Paxton from Texas decided to provoke the issue, or set up the issue in a way that would tee it up for a judge in Texas who’s been very, very aggressive in issuing nationwide injunctions in the past on immigration issues and some other issues very favorable to the Trump position.
The ACLU and others have tried to find out what kind of coordination there was between Ken Paxton, the Texas AG, and Jeff Sessions’ office.Sessions was actually asked that question in Senate testimony, and he declined to answer the question from Sen.[Dick] Durbin about that, which gives rise to a lot of questions about the level of backdoor communication that may have existed.
What’s going on here?I mean, this is—is this a—how does Sessions use the AG suit or the threat of the suit towards the president?Because at the moment, Sessions needs some leverage.
This letter from the state AGs gives Jeff Sessions a lot of leverage, actually.It gives him a deadline, in his view, where the Justice Department has to tell this court what it wants to do.And it decides that it wants to abandon the DACA program, which is enormously controversial, including among some Republicans.In fact, President Trump’s initial reaction is to go both ways.He talked out of both sides of his mouth about it, ultimately landed where Jeff Sessions wound up.
But it’s an enormously, enormously controversial issue.In fact, President Obama, former President Obama, who’s largely remained silent throughout the Trump term, actually told people that were the DACA program to be in danger, that’s one of the few areas in which he would speak out.
In this sort of time period, it seems that Sessions and Miller in particular are trying to use every tool, really, that they have access to to keep the president in line on some of these campaign promises.
Donald Trump came to office with no prior government experience.That is not the case for people like Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller and some of Jeff Sessions’ aides.They knew enough to understand how the immigration system worked, the power the attorney general had over the immigration courts, and the power the Justice Department has in pending litigation to basically press the administration to do things.In their view, Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller were just pushing Donald Trump to get behind a pledge that he made during the campaign.
There’s the speech that Sessions gives where he announces the end of DACA.… Do you remember thinking kind of as you did with the inauguration address, that this was the way in which DACA was being described as this illegal program that President Obama had enacted, did it sound sort of like a Miller speech?
There is a throughline in this rhetoric, right?In this 2015 white paper that Sessions and Stephen Miller wrote [“Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority”], they talk at great length about amnesty.… And they view a lot of these programs as illegal amnesty, and that point of view carries through almost all of their actions on immigration.
Can you take it back to the paper, even?
Sure.This white paper talks about an amnesty that is allowing, in Sessions’ and Stephen Miller’s view, floods of people that enter the country and in a way that depresses wages for Americans, that hurts the Republican Party at the polls; that, in their view, contributes to crime here inside the United States, even though there’s not a lot of evidence to back that one up.And they view it as deeply problematic, both politically and socially.
I’m going to jump a little bit to Trump meeting with congressional leaders in January.This is the bipartisan meeting that’s televised about Dreamers, and it appears as though he may structure a deal with Democrats on the Hill.
Yes, is this when [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein—yeah, OK.Yeah, yeah.
… This seems to be a completely different position that the president is sort of putting forth, so much so it looks like he may actually do a deal with the Dems, and [then-House Majority Leader] Kevin McCarthy has to kind of remind him, “Oh, no, no, no, sir, this is not how you actually feel about this issue.”The whiplash between those two sort of camps?
I’m not a person who likes to watch a lot of television at her desk during the day, but during the Trump era, it becomes necessary to keep track of what is happening.And I remember vividly watching this exchange on television and watching Dianne Feinstein, who’s been in the Senate for a long, long time, just look unbelievably delighted that she had got the president to commit to something that was actually against his position.
And we all stood around the TV sets and thought, what is happening?And apparently Republicans in Congress thought that, too, because the president had to be pulled back, reeled back, by Kevin McCarthy, who interrupted and basically tabled that part of the discussion.But it was yet another moment as in after the initial announcements on DACA where the president seemed to be on both sides of the highway on the same issue.
And Sessions and Miller are obviously watching the same thing.They’re there, and they jump into action.Very quickly, hard-liners are pulled over from the Hill.Two days goes by; there’s a second meeting.This is the meeting in which Durbin, [Sen. Lindsey] Graham come up with a bill and show up, and Stephen Miller is in the room.The president has been sort of—is very impassioned about not doing a deal.They’ve gotten to him; Sessions and Miller have gotten to him.Does that sound like something you can talk to?
I don’t remember that as well, but I think I remember that Sen. Durbin, who’s also been in the Senate a really long time, a Democrat from Illinois, being offended that somebody who was actually not a Cabinet official or a Senate-confirmed person of any sort, Stephen Miller, seemed to be driving the car in that meeting in a way that he thought had torpedoed the entire effort.It was sort of like, if Stephen Miller is here, and actually the spokesperson for this issue, what are we doing here?We’re not going to get anything done.
In fact, he drives that car off a cliff, really, and that deal is really dead.
It’s dead.And for all of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s support of this president, Graham has actually been attempting an immigration deal for a long, long time, and he still hasn’t got one.
This is also in the meeting in which “shithole” comments comes up.Graham has to sort of push back on that.But as that story is leaked out, what does it tell us about the moment?What does it tell us about where Trump is?What does it tell us about the influence of folks like Miller and Sessions on Trump in that moment?
It’s hard to separate, in some respects, what was already in candidate and now-President Donald Trump and in his head about immigration and crime, on which he’s had a public record since the 1980s, from the ideas of Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions, who are also well documented as having a certain set of beliefs and motivations on those issues.
And so an open question in my mind to this day is what did Donald Trump already believe before Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller became close advisers to him on these issues?
The court blocks the new DACA rule, again another sort of repeated—
Rebuke, yeah.
Yeah, rebuke of what happened with the travel ban.Are they learning—are Sessions and Miller learning lessons here?Is this really even a setback in their view?
You know, state attorneys general, including the one in California, Xavier Becerra, have basically made a cottage industry suing the Trump administration on immigration and a host of other issues.The Trump administration, in large part, keeps losing in the courts, losing so much that President Trump gets very upset about what he calls “Obama judges” who are ruling against him, even though sometimes it’s judges appointed by Republican presidents who are ruling against him.
… That said, the United States Supreme Court did ultimately allow the travel ban to go into effect.The administration, after three tries, was able to create restrictions on travel from majority Muslim countries that would pass constitutional muster with this Supreme Court.And this administration very much wants this Supreme Court to take up the DACA issue.This Supreme Court has not wanted to go there so far.
Zero Tolerance and Family Separation
… Let’s jump to the “zero tolerance” announcement, family separation announcement, at the border, that speech.That’s a pretty big moment in our film.I’m curious as you’re watching what you’re seeing.
… So Sessions went out to tour the border.He went to Arizona and California, and he delivered this, in his view, major address where he talks about a zero tolerance policy.His message is, if you come to this country without papers in an undocumented way, we’re going to arrest you.And he says, “If you come and you’re smuggling a child, we’re going to separate—we’re going to separate you from that child.”
Now, Sessions and his allies would say that he was discussing family separation in the context of human trafficking and child smuggling.But of course the policy we now know was put into effect in cases that did not involve human trafficking or child smuggling and that have created enormous personal and emotional and sometimes physical hardships.
… This is a very dramatic shift in how the Justice Department and the attorney general has handled immigration.I mean, this is—this is a pretty monumental legacy that Sessions is leaving.
To hear President Trump tell it, the Obama administration separated kids from their families all the time at the border.But that is not, in fact, what happened.And Jeff Sessions firmly believes that there’s only one way to prevent large numbers of people from trying to travel here and get across the border without papers, and that’s to get really, really tough on enforcement.That’s been a throughline throughout his entire career.He believes that the executive branch has not carried out or used all the power it has when it comes to enforcement.And on his watch, this government is going to use all the levers of power it has.
He defends the practice pretty early with a Bible verse.There’s very much a statement that he puts out: “If you don’t want to have your kids separated, don’t come here.”I mean, there is clearly a tone he’s setting.
Well, he’s trying to send a message to thousands of people who may be en route to the United States or thinking about it, that if you come, it’s not going to be good for you; it’s not going to be good for your families.Just don’t do it; just don’t leave your homes.But to hear Democrats and some immigration analysts tell it or talk about it, there are such persistent problems in some of these Central American countries with violent crime, persecution and economic hardship, that no matter what the attorney general of the United States says, it’s not going to stop the flow of migrants here.
… The news coverage of family separation and zero tolerance really dominates that time period.Can you talk to us a little bit about—this, again, feels very similar to the travel ban—but how these stories are being covered?The audio recordings of some of the kids that are being separated from their folks—the administration’s really getting pummeled on it.
The firsthand accounts from lawmakers who were able to visit some of these detention centers and social workers and other people inside the system who were blowing the whistle about conditions in some of these facilities were enormously powerful and enormously disturbing, right?
So this image, or this phrasing you hear about kids in cages, which the Trump administration pushes back against, it kind of has taken over the public imagination.And then the numbers of cases in which children have died in detention or in custody, every single one of those cases has received an enormous and deserving amount of attention.
But it was really those audio recordings that Ginger Thompson from ProPublica got and broadcast that gave voice to some of the people in those facilities and affected people, the American public, in very deep ways.You know, you had women, American women, marching and speaking on behalf of their families, on behalf of people they never met before.They were motivated in an unusual way by some of this news coverage about conditions and problems in these facilities.
The coverage ultimately reaches the president, and he decides very quickly, “I’m backing off of this; this isn’t something I’m committed to.”
You know, President Trump doesn’t like to publicly back off.He may change his mind, but he doesn’t like to give voice on camera to some of those changes.This was one area where he put up a rhetorical stop sign.
And files this EO [executive order] and effectively ends the policy.Again, a pretty big division from where Sessions and Miller are on this issue.I mean, I think they felt as though this is a big success, and yet they seem completely out of step with the president.
You know, the president’s position on immigration has been confounding.In some ways, he campaigned on this.He gave a lot—he gave all of his significant communication skills to some of these issues on the campaign trail.But when push comes to shove, on a couple of occasions, at least as president, he’s backed down or put a stop, and the zero tolerance policy is one of those.
And Sessions’ view on zero tolerance at this point, I mean after the EO?
You know, I’ve talked to a couple of Jeff Sessions’ advisers about this.They think he’s not getting a fair shake.They think that he basically is concerned about human trafficking and human smuggling and did not mean for the policy to be carried out in some of the ways in which it was carried out.But Sessions has not himself said those things in public.He’s been pretty solid in his position on immigration.And to the extent he’s still talking now, he’s not renouncing any of those views.
… This doesn’t seem to be anything but sort of a natural arc in his crusade to seal, you know, some of these channels for immigration.
This is a guy who started out as the U.S. attorney in Alabama, became a senator who was relatively well liked for being cordial and congenial, and who never in a million years thought he would have the enormous power of being the attorney general of the United States.Remember, he wanted to get a federal judgeship 20 or 30 years ago, and the Senate would not confirm him because of alleged racially insensitive remarks that he made.
So this is a guy who never thought he was going to get to lead the Justice Department, and he took that wheel, and he really, really drove the car in the direction he wanted to go, especially on immigration.
Jeff Sessions’ Record on Immigration
… But now, you know, Sessions is out, leaves.What does immigration in the courts look like and sort of underneath Justice, and what is the legacy that Sessions leaves there?
Jeff Sessions’ complete legacy on immigration has yet to be written, because a number of the things he wanted to do have been blocked by the courts, and we need to wait and find out those legal resolutions.That said, his successor, William Barr, has already—has already adopted similar positions to Jeff Sessions on immigration.…
For instance, before he left, Sessions started the process of rethinking whether people should get bond hearings and whether they could be free inside the United States while they awaited those hearings or whether they had to be detained.And Bill Barr, the new attorney general, has already come out and tried to limit that and to ensure that people stayed in detention instead of living freely in the United States while they awaited legal process.
Stephen Miller’s Staying Power
To see Stephen Miller remain at the White House, surprise you?Again, he’s somebody you followed for sometime.He’s really sort of outlasted all of the guys that we’ve spoken about today.
… Stephen Miller has demonstrated some political skills that I didn’t know he had when he was just an aide, a communications aide, to Jeff Sessions in the Senate.He’s managed to survive inside this White House in a way that most of President Trump’s senior staff have not.We know from scholars that this White House has more turnover than any in decades.But Stephen Miller remains, and he remains, I think, an influential voice not just for President Trump, but also for Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka.
It seems that he’s been sort of leading the way at DHS in terms of purging many leaders and trying to kind of get more hard-liners to replace [John] Kelly, [Kirstjen] Nielsen, others at the agencies.That all seems to be Stephen Miller’s work, from what we understand.
Stephen Miller seems like a pretty gifted political infighter, too, right?He’s managed to engineer the ouster of senior officials inside the Department of Homeland Security.But, on a few occasions recently, things he’s wanted to happen, personnel decisions, for instance, have been blocked.President Trump appears to take his counsel and often act on it in a way that’s not always true for other people inside the White House.
… The relationship between Miller and Sessions.As Sessions is sort of held back because of the anger of the president towards him, is Miller, do we know, is Miller working with Justice and with Sessions?What’s happening?Does that relationship continue?
Stephen Miller, throughout the early part of Jeff Sessions’ tenure, is very supportive publicly and privately of Sessions, but there does seem to be a bit of a cooling off between the men after Sessions recuses himself from the Russia investigation and gets farther and farther afield of President Trump’s blessing.
Miller may be doing what he can to support Sessions behind the scenes, but he certainly is not going to throw himself on the railroad tracks for Jeff Sessions.
Jeff Sessions’ Influence
….I think it’s really interesting to understand that Jeff Sessions has the ability to have total oversight over these immigration courts.That’s very different than how courts outside work.Can you just sort of set up that—Jeff Sessions’ purview over this?
Yeah.In most courts, Article III courts where federal judges are confirmed by the Senate for lifetime tenured positions, they can only be overruled by appeals courts of the U.S. Supreme Court.But the immigration courts are something different.They’re operated from inside the executive branch.And so while there is an ability to mount a legal defense for an immigrant or somebody who appears in these courts, the ultimate authority is the attorney general of the United States.These judges are hired by the Justice Department and overseen by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.So when he decides that they’re not hearing enough cases and they’re not hearing cases quickly enough, he decides to impose benchmarks on them.
When cases reach a higher level in appeals inside the executive branch, Jeff Sessions can delegate himself the authority to refer cases to himself and decide them, creating a precedent for other cases in the immigration system.That’s why when he decided that fears of domestic violence and, in fact, actual domestic violence, a campaign of domestic violence over 10 years or so, was not enough for an asylum seeker, it had such a wide-seeming impact on all the other cases in the system.
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