The FRONTLINE Interviews
Nick Miroff
Immigration Reporter, The Washington Post
Nick Miroff reports on immigration enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for The Washington Post.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 7, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Steve Bannon
Let’s talk cast of characters for a moment when you begin to report on the story.Who are they, where are they situated, and how important is it where they’re situated?Let’s start with [Steve] Bannon.
Bannon, too, was basically—I’ve never talked to Bannon, and I don’t know his influence on this particular issue.What I can say is that early on, the idea of restricting immigration, both obviously what the president aimed to do at the southern border by promising to build a wall and casting Mexico in a different light, but more importantly looking at potential restrictions on legal immigration, that these were ideas that gave a kind of coherence to his campaign messaging and to his economic messaging, particularly in its appeal in the quote/unquote “Rust Belt” states and the Upper Midwest.
I think both Bannon and his young comms guy, Stephen Miller, recognized that this was an idea that would potentially help them with that electoral map and would appeal to a lot of the frustrations and areas where jobs have been lost, particularly through NAFTA and North American free trade and globalization.
And so the immigration message and the economic message could be married through a lot of these ideas, and that’s something that I think both Bannon and Miller played a big role in getting the president to.
Stephen Miller
Who is Miller?
… Stephen Miller is the president’s senior immigration adviser and one of the most influential people in the White House.Miller was a communications director for Jeff Sessions before joining the Trump campaign.He was powerful and influential in that job already by the time he was in his mid-20s and impressed a lot of conservatives and folks on the Hill with his aggressive, argumentative style and his writing and his communication skills.
He signed up for the Trump campaign fairly early on and immediately shifted his loyalties to then-candidate Trump and became one of his most effective and loyal advisers.And Miller really has been able to survive in the White House almost longer than any of the people who were with that campaign, in large part to his relationship, his personal relationship with the president, his utility to the president, and his ability to maneuver in Washington and to kind of read where the president is going and steer him where he would like the president to go.
When you talk about Miller and Trump and Trump’s relationship around, especially around what seems to be the central policy pursuit of Miller, what is Miller’s position on legal and illegal immigration?Where is he on that issue?
Well, Miller, I think—Miller is one of the figures who has been influenced by and associated with some of the think tank and policy groups in Washington that have moved from the fringe to the mainstream with the Trump administration.… The major ideas I think driving the mission of these groups is the idea that immigration levels are too high, that they should be reduced, and that American workers will be—will benefit from a reduction in immigration because there will be less labor competition, and working-class wages will go up again, and that would be married to a kind of, you know, renaissance of American manufacturing.
And again, this is an idea that gave coherence to the Trump campaign and to, I think, a lot of the kind of gut frustrations that the president had about global trade, about globalization and about the increasing complexity of the global economy.The idea of “Make America Great” very much harkens back to … a pre-1960s worldview when things were simpler.And obviously this was a period of—that was a period of much tighter immigration, when there were far fewer foreigners and foreign languages and immigrants in the United States.
And you know, and I think in a broad way that, you know, this is one of the major pillars, obviously, of what the president is trying to do, and Miller has been one of his most effective and loyal soldiers in carrying this agenda out.
What’s Miller’s strength?What’s the thing he does that gets him juice?What is he good at?How does he survive inside the knife fights, the bureaucratic knife fights at the White House and throughout the government?
… Miller is a very skilled operator inside the White House and knows, I think, how to play to some of the president’s deficiencies, particularly in terms of immigration knowledge.One of the things I keep hearing is that the president doesn’t necessarily know a lot about immigration policy, but he’s always been impressed by people who project strength and a lot of knowledge, and Miller is precisely that type of figure.Though he isn’t an immigration attorney or doesn’t have a law degree, he’s very much steeped in immigration policy and particularly the kind of political goals of this restrictionist agenda.
And so Miller is someone who can speak with almost unchallenged authority in the White House and around the president on matters of immigration.And he has also worked to make sure that there are no other rivals in the White House who would potentially challenge him for that.
How does he do that?
Well, he’s done that by—he’s accomplished that by souring the president on many of the senior figures at the Department of Homeland Security.After John Kelly left DHS, went to the White House, and essentially got Kirstjen Nielsen, his deputy, installed as the secretary of Homeland Security, Miller, very early on I think, told the president that she was ineffective and was working to undermine her.And then we saw that again, you know, more recently with the removal of Ronald Vitiello, who had been moved over from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to be the acting director of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], so a figure with a 30-year career in the Border Patrol, who had a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of respect in his agency.He was the acting director of ICE, and when Vitiello and Nielsen both in March were hesitant to move forward with a very aggressive plan to increase arrests of families that Miller was pushing, he worked to have them removed.
And this was really the beginning of a purge that he has engineered at the Department of Homeland Security in the last few months, whose main goal is to put people who are more loyal to him and who are going to be more responsive to his directives.
And I gather he’s connected like that over at State, and obviously at Justice because of Sessions.So in lots of ways, he has his own foot soldiers out there in the bureaucracy.
That’s right.There are Miller acolytes and people from his circle, I think, that have been placed in many of these different agencies, not necessarily because he has put them there, but they’re very much allies of his and responsive to his phone calls and to his interests and to his—sometimes to his requests for information about their agencies.This has become such an issue that in some cases, the principals of this agencies have told their staffs to let them know when Miller makes calls to their—when Miller makes calls to their deputies.
We saw this at the Department of Homeland Security, where Miller would reach out to kind of second-tier officials, asking them for information, really going around the usual communication channels.And Secretary Nielsen and her team very much felt like they were being undermined by these efforts and by his efforts to kind of go around them and have other people at the agency responding directly to the White House.
Back in the day, that was the modus operandi of Dick Cheney, a 60-year-old man with a 40-year career in Washington.But here’s Miller, what is he 32 or 33 years old.How does he do that?
He does that by making use of telephones and making use of surrogates, but almost never putting anything on paper.You rarely hear of Miller putting any of his questions or interests or goals in writing.His communications come through telephone calls and often through his deputies.
And one of the things I hear consistently is that, you know, he doesn’t—he doesn’t give orders, but he will call and ask why something isn’t being done, can it be done faster?The president—he’ll say the president is really interested in this.So in his—you know, in these communications, he’s always leveraging the president’s power and making it clear that he’s acting on behalf of Trump and the White House.
You mentioned earlier that he has a personal relationship, or at least a relationship with the president of the United States.Some of this obviously grows out of their travels on the road during the campaign as Miller is the warmup speaker and the speechwriter for Trump.Does that make sense?
Yeah.One of the most interesting changes I’ve seen in Miller is that he’s gone from being a very visible public figure—again, doing these type of warmup speeches and appearing on the Sunday shows as a surrogate for the president—to really receding from public view over the last several months.And one of the ironies is that as he has withdrawn from visibility, his power has really grown, and his influence over the president has really grown.And we see that in the shakeup at the Department of Homeland Security that he has pulled off.
His real coup de grâce came in the last few weeks when he engineered the removal of Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.Keep in mind that’s the agency that handles legal immigration, and Cissna was a figure, a career official, an immigration law expert, who was widely respected and admired by senior Republican lawmakers.But he had a personal beef with Stephen Miller, and he didn’t respond kindly to Miller making orders or trying to give orders to his deputies.And the two of them, I think, had a, you know, a real personal chemistry issue, and Miller, when he was—after removing Kirstjen Nielsen from DHS and Ronald Vitiello—was on his way to get Cissna out, and Sen.[Chuck] Grassley and other senior Republicans told the White House: “Stop.Don’t do this.We like this guy.He’s your most effective operator.”And that gave Cissna, you know, a few—bought him a few more weeks, but once that resistance died down, we saw Cissna ousted.
And the way it happened I thought was very indicative of the way that Stephen Miller operates.And that is, you know, the president saw Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general, on television praising him, talking tough on immigration and essentially auditioning for a job in the White House.And at DHS they had been clamoring for the kind of figure who would be a quote/unquote “immigration czar,” who would be able to coordinate immigration policy between DHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and Health and Human Services, kind of a traffic cop/coordinator-type figure.
That position was always contemplated for the White House, but Miller did not want someone else in the White House close to the president who would be opining on immigration policy, and so that person was redirected to DHS.And the idea of having an immigration czar at DHS would essentially duplicate the role of the secretary of Homeland Security.
And so the current acting secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, made it very clear that he didn’t want Cuccinelli in that role or in his office.And so Cissna became the obvious target and the odd man out, so to speak.And on Monday, Ken Cuccinelli will take over as acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The long hand of Stephen Miller.
That’s right.
… The other thing is, he does this without—publicly he’s a shouter; he’s a screamer; he’s combative; he’s in your face.But it doesn’t sound like in the clinches that’s his style.Or is it?
I mean, Miller’s known as being aggressive and making very clear, you know, what he wants and working toward those goals.He isn’t like a combative figure, I think, in person.And he’s not, he’s not–he’s not a combative figure in person.I think, you know, he’s aggressive in working toward his agenda, but not someone who’s going to shout or scream, unless he’s in a mano a mano with Jake Tapper on CNN.
That was an amazing moment and probably endeared him to the president in some important way, right?
Certainly.He, as much as anyone, is very aware that the president highly values the way that White House aides and the key people around the president, how they appear on television and how vigorously they defend him, how forcefully they advance his arguments.And one of the ways that Miller has been able to, I think, sour the president on other figures in his administration is to tell the president that those people are not as loyal or not working to advance his agenda and maybe have their own interests above the president’s.
Jeff Sessions
We’re going to rejoin Miller in a second, in our narrative, anyway.The other person I want to ask you about is [Jeff] Sessions.Pre-recusal, after recusal and all the times in between, who is Sessions in this setup at the beginning of the administration and throughout?
Well, Sessions—and again, Miller was his communications director.Sessions was one of the leading immigration hard-liners in the Senate prior to joining Donald Trump.He was one of the major opponents of many of the Obama administration’s immigration initiatives and became a leading voice on immigration restriction and tougher borders.So in that way, he was a natural ally for the president.And by placing him as attorney general, the president was able to send a strong signal that immigration was right at the top of his agenda and that he wanted someone, you know, who knew how to maneuver in Washington to carry it out.
But of course, we know their relationship immediately soured when Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Style very different than Bannon, very different than Miller.He must operate in a different way.
That’s right.You know, I’ve never covered Sessions, so I don’t—I can’t comment on, you know, his style.I can only say what I’ve observed.But he certainly brought a more, a more senior, stentorian kind of demeanor to this debate, and obviously has a long career in Washington behind him.But he very much represented the bridge to that establishment, you know, border hard-liner, immigration restrictionist view.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt if immigration is part of what you want to get done as a new president to have as your attorney general, if immigration is one of those things, Jeff Sessions as your attorney general.He certainly knows the ins and outs of the laws.And to have the kind of power that an attorney general would have must be tremendously valuable.Or at least they thought so.
That’s right.I mean, I think one of the ironies of watching Trump really tear apart his own attorney general over the Russia probe was that throughout that whole time, Sessions continued to advance the White House’s immigration agenda very forcefully and do all of the things that the Trump administration wanted.That remained really the kind of lodestar for the Justice Department throughout, you know, all of the turmoil of the Mueller probe and the investigation.The one thing you could kind of count on were escalating legal efforts to crack down at the border and on legal immigration.
It didn’t really matter in the end with Sessions, because the president had already—had already, you know, really had his falling out with Sessions.But Sessions remained loyal to that element of Trump’s agenda, clearly because there was a kind of, you know, ideological mutual interest there in advancing it as aggressively as possible.
The Dreamers and DACA
… A lot of people we talk to say the president was always a little squishy about “Dreamers” and DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals].He loved the kids.He tells people: “I’m going to take care of the kids.Don’t worry.You don’t have to worry about it.”Take me to the Dreamers story anyway, that part of it.What does it tell us about that being the sort of very first, after eight months, very first public presidential action on immigration?
Well, I can tell you that DACA was one of the biggest targets for immigration restrictionists and for conservatives who were really frustrated with the Obama administration’s approach to dealing with the estimated 11 million people living in the United States without legal status.The idea that the president of the United States with an executive order could give protection to those immigrants who arrived as children, that he could do that in a kind of unilateral way, to them was an abuse of power that exceeded his authority, and that they rightly saw as, you know, as a political threat.
And so I think when Trump took office and was, you know, had his eye on an immigration deal of some kind, to try to deliver on the restrictionist goals of his supporters and his base and people like Miller and Sessions who were so close to him, I think that the belief was that DACA would become a really valuable chit in that negotiation.
And so, you know, ending DACA had a legal rationale that was provided, certainly by Sessions, but I think the broader thinking was that this was going to be, you know, a political bargaining chip that they would be able to get a lot of leverage with.And as we know, it didn’t work out that way.
You mean trade the Dreamers for the wall or something.
Trade the Dreamers for the wall.Trade the Dreamers for—and then to the Diversity Visa lottery.Trade the Dreamers for asylum restrictions.You know, there’s a laundry list of things that the immigration restrictonist groups have been wanting to do for a long time.And by throwing the Dreamers into this sort of state of limbo and, you know, giving—you know, making it a priority for Democrats to get some kind of protections for them, I think that they thought that they would be able to accomplish some of their goals.
And then, bang, lightning strikes, crying Dreamers on television.Trump’s daughter [Ivanka], Jared [Kushner] coming into the Oval Office, saying, “What are you doing to these poor kids?,” when it doesn’t seem to be working.And Trump gets, it seems to me, a little anxious about what it looks like he’s doing under those circumstances.
Yeah, I think we’ve seen consistently—I think we’ve seen repeatedly throughout Trump’s presidency a kind of competing impetus between wanting to look tough and to deliver on a lot of his hard-line promises on immigration and a real squeamishness around the human cost of doing that.We saw that with DACA, and of course we saw that during the family separation debacle, when the president—members of the president’s own family really came to him, you know, upset, distraught about what was happening to children.And the president, you know, at that point had to cave and pull back his policy.
… We’re in ’18 now. … Do you know what Miller and others are doing in that period as we head for the summer, and what is happening around the separation issue from the border to Washington to DHS?
Yeah, keep in mind that for the president, the metric for success of his immigration enforcement policy and his promises is almost entirely based on the monthly border arrest numbers that are released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Is that right?
Yeah.So that’s essentially a gauge of migration, illegal migration flows or irregular migration flows.And so what we saw in the first few months after Trump took office was really the chilling effect of his rhetoric and the perception that with Trump in power, that the U.S. was a much more difficult place to reach and to cross the border into.And so we saw monthly arrest numbers plunge to their lowest levels in more than half a century.By March, April, May of 2017, there were only—there were fewer than 20,000 people being taken into custody along the Mexico border per month.
So just his existence and the threat of what he’s talked about during the campaign stops everything.
That’s right.But it was—in some ways, it was an aberration, and it was not to last.It was smuggling organizations kind of watching to see what the new administration would do.And so by the fall of 2017, that number starts going up again, and Trump is losing ground on one of his key campaign promises.And he grows increasingly frustrated.He, like, just as he was out there taking credit for the stock market and would want to distance himself when the Dow would go back down, he was very much touting his success when the border arrest numbers were at their low point.And when they started going up again, he began to grow increasingly frustrated and angry with Secretary Nielsen at that point.
And so the idea of doing something dramatic, of doing something really harsh began to take root around that time, because the president was angry and frustrated and lashing out.And operators as well as folks like Miller were recognizing that a growing number of migrants were arriving with children in order to avoid a prolonged detention, in order to avoid a quick deportation.And the—
It’s what [Mark] Krikorian called their “passports”; the kids were their passports when they crossed the border, right?
Right. That is the way that some talk about it.But it’s this idea that, you know—I mean, it is true that if a single adult who has no legal right to stay in the United States, if they arrive alone, they are far more likely to be held in custody the whole time and then summarily deported, whereas if you arrive with a child, because of court restrictions on the amount of time that children can be held in adult immigration jails, that child has to be released.
And so the harsh solution that Sessions and Miller in particular, along with Gene Hamilton—at the time was a policy adviser at DHS—the three of them really settled on this idea of a “zero tolerance” crackdown that would charge parents who bring children, as well as single adults, in order to send a message that the child—having a child with you would not exempt you from some kind of prosecution or a deportation.And so this idea that was considered far too harsh, that had been concocted years ago at DHS but basically shelved under the Obama administration because it was so distasteful to Obama officials, they basically dusted this idea off and said, “Let’s do it,” and got the president to go for it.
Did they not know or not care that the video images of these scenes were not going to be not only heartbreaking but be political dynamite?
I don’t think that they anticipated the intensity of the backlash, nor the explosiveness of doing things on an enforcement level involving children.Parents obviously respond in a visceral way when you do things that hurt children, and apparently they failed to really foresee what it would do, and whether the president himself would be able to stand up to images like that.And certainly, they were wrong.
Yeah, they must have known from the Dreamers stuff that Trump has an emotional side, too, that sways him here and there.That was certainly the case there.
Yeah.It’s one thing, though, to have teenagers and college students, you know, who are—when we think of Dreamers, I think we typically think of college students and young adults.It’s another thing to see, you know, to hear toddlers and—I don’t know.You’ll recall there was a moment that was clearly pivotal when Ginger Thompson, a reporter at ProPublica, got a hold of an audio recording of a screaming child who had, you know, her mother taken away.And that was—that was it, you know.That moment when that audio came out, that truly turned public opinion against it, and you know, obviously, as we know, turned members of the president’s own family.And he just couldn’t keep—you know, he couldn’t go forward with it.
The impact at DHS of him trying to walk it back?
I think that was a particularly revealing moment as well.Secretary Nielsen, who was always uncomfortable with this policy, who was doing it in some ways reluctantly, was asked to go and stand up at the White House podium and defend it.And that became, you know, really a defining moment in her career when she got up and insisted that DHS didn’t have a policy to separate children, really kind of arguing on a technical point there, but, you know, stood up and had to give a full-throated defense of this policy at the White House’s insistence.And within days, President Trump himself had buckled under this, you know, growing public pressure.
And I think that was a moment at which, you know, you could see both a lot of restrictionists frustrated with him, that he wasn’t willing or able to stick to his guns on something, but also I think sent a message to people throughout his administration that he may ask you to do something really unpalatable, and, you know, you’d better think twice before risking your public reputation and your career to do it, because he could also change his mind.
Where’s Miller at this moment?
Well, Miller was very much an enthusiast for this plan.You know, their logic, their thinking was, look, in the American criminal justice system, people who commit crimes, parents who commit crimes are not exempted from prosecution; they have to face consequences.And sometimes those consequences involve, you know, being separated from their children.And to them, crossing the border illegally is a serious crime, and, you know, I think they believed that they would win the argument in the public sphere on the kind of moral defensibility of separating children from their parents without—and it also, I think, showed a tone-deafness to the difference in these kinds of, you know, in these kinds of family dynamics.
I think in most cases, you know, an American who commits a crime, an American child whose parent commits a crime, has other—you know, has a support network, has maybe another parent, has relatives here.There’s a system in place to minimize the harm and trauma for that child.But what we saw at the border during zero tolerance was children being split from their parents in this incredibly traumatic way and then sent to this network of shelters.And the agency that was responsible for their care, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, really didn’t have a way to track the location of their parents and to make sure that the family could be quickly repaired, you know, when it was time for them to reunite.
And did the border numbers change once—what happens on the border once Trump changes his mind?
So all we saw—the family separation element of the zero tolerance policy only lasted about six weeks.What we saw during that period was a kind of plateau in the border arrest numbers.They declined only slightly.
Now, many who have gone on to defend the family separations after the fact believe that if the policy were allowed to continue, that it would have achieved a greater deterrent effect.They believe that it was working and that it would have made the difference, and it would have prevented the situation we’re in now.
But what we really saw was that doing this incredibly controversial thing that created all this noise and generated all this coverage in Latin America, and then taking down that policy in a very visible and loud fashion, that the coverage of that rippled across Latin America and rippled across Central America and was reinterpreted by smuggling organizations as a kind of welcome banner to parents considering—to adults considering the trip.And the message was: “The United States will let you in if you come with a child.”And that is the message that smugglers have been broadcasting in their sales pitches ever since.
Let’s move ourselves—we’re there at that moment anyway—the summer of ’18.The midterms are coming in the fall.Now from the White House, as part of the Republican political campaign, caravans are coming; [murdered student] Mollie Tibbetts’ story gets out there; the military is intense on the border—all of the political tools that a White House can bring to bear on a crisis or an apparent crisis.So talk to me about your observations about that.
Well, the president had to shift essentially from campaigning on a promise to crackdown on the border and to keep out illegal immigrants and dangerous Mexicans to recognizing a reality in which his policies at the border were failing to achieve his objectives.And so he had to shift to blaming Democratic Party obstruction and to blaming lawmakers and to blaming other countries.So what we’ve seen really since then is an attempt to transfer responsibility to other countries and to the opposition party for his inability to deliver on one of his signature campaign promises and one of the things that has been so important to his base, which is border security and reductions in the number of immigrants coming into the United States.
And really what we’ve seen is the exact opposite.The border has arguably not been, you know, this out of control in a generation.And the situation at the border right now is truly unprecedented.We’ve never seen a situation like this where both large numbers of people are coming without authorization, and nearly all of them are staying in the country and not being deported.
During the arguments about this, there’s a fairly regular reference to the fact that Obama started this; Obama’s the one that separated kids from their parents.It’s a trope, almost, out of the White House and out of the advocates.What’s the truth of that?
Yes, that’s been a very interesting exercise in rhetorical jujitsu.The White House, the president has almost been saying that family separations were not the Trump administration’s idea; they were a policy that was already in place, and that Trump himself reluctantly ended the policy, and because of his big heart, that’s why we have so many people bringing children and crossing the border in such large numbers now.
That is false.Family—separating a family was something that was done on a much more selective basis in the past, and typically in cases when there was a safety risk to the child or the parent had a serious criminal history that placed in doubt, you know, the safety or welfare of the child.
The idea of separating children from their parents as a deterrent to unauthorized migration was what the Trump administration brought to the table and what the Trump administration attempted to do…But we know, because Secretary John Kelly, when he was at DHS, said, on the record, on CNN, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, that the Department of Homeland Security was considering doing a family separation policy for the purpose of deterrence.
So at that point, it was no longer some kind of secret or ulterior motive. It was really the stated goal of doing something dramatic and essentially punishing parents who bring children in an attempt to deter migration.
John Kelly
Can you give me a sense or some visibility into Kelly?The more I read, the more I talk to people, the less I understand who he is and where he’s coming from, from when he was at DHS, when he came in, where he is vis-à-vis Miller and Trump’s policies then, and when he gets to the White House as chief of staff.I know you’re not covering chief of staff, that time period, but who is John Kelly when he shows up at DHS, and what does he kind of stand for?And how much his legacy or perspective was carried by Nielsen and then now?
Sure.Well, John Kelly was a decorated four-star Marine Corps general who had been head of SOUTHCOM [U.S. Southern Command], really running military operations in Latin America and across the hemisphere, an experience that gave him a background in migration and drug-trafficking enforcement and many of the issues that are salient to the Department of Homeland Security.
And so when Trump is looking to put in an authoritative, powerful figure with a strong reputation at the Department of Homeland Security, which has, you know, which is one of the most important Cabinet positions and has been one of the positions that is typically filled the quickest after there is a transition, he installs Kelly, and Kelly, you know, is easily confirmed with bipartisan support.And to his credit, Kelly populates the different DHS agencies with career officials who knew those agencies.
So he puts Kevin McAleenan as the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a career official.He puts Francis Cissna at Citizenship and Immigration Services, a career official.And Tom Homan is head of ICE, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also a career official with extensive experience.
So rather than putting politicians or kind of, you know, lobbyists or those types of figures in those roles, he really sets them up with figures who have credibility with their agencies, who know their own agencies and who are able, you know, to kind of hit the ground running.
Moving that forward, Kelly had a good reputation at DHS, and it was that, I think that perception of his effectiveness that led the White House to bring him in as chief of staff when Trump got tired of Reince Priebus.And so Kelly comes into the White House.As you’ll recall, you know, he was there to bring discipline, to bring order, to bring a kind of, you know, military bearing to this unruly place that was leaking from all sides.But as we know, he almost immediately began to clash with the president.And Nielsen, at that time when Kelly moved over, became his deputy and also made a lot of enemies at the White House, and those enemies were then able to, you know, settle scores and have the knives out for her once she became secretary of Homeland Security.
The Government Shutdown
… So we’ve covered the summer of ’18. The midterms have happened, and the Democrats have the Congress. Help me understand at least what you know and understand happens in that period of the lame-duck Congress around the trading of the wall for money, whatever the heck is going on around the shutdown. Do you have any understanding of what happens in November and December leading up the shutdown?
So we see this conflict gathering steam, and the president increasingly unable to get the money he wants for a border wall, one of his signature campaign promises, and really something that has become so closely related to his—and really something that is completely intertwined at this point with his own public image, really as a kind of personification of the president himself.And Democrats are dug in, and the White House is dug in.
And so the president threatens to shut down the government, says he will do it and that he will own that shutdown.And he does it.And it creates incredible strains.And once it begins to affect ordinary Americans’ travel with problems at TSA [Transportation Security Administration] and people getting paid on time, the pressure grows too great.He is clearly not going to be able to achieve his objectives.And so he buckles, and the Democrats score what may end up being just a short-term victory on that.But they only give him a fraction of the $5 billion that he is requesting to build a border fence.
And so it’s since then that we have seen him order reprogramming of military funding to build the wall, to get this project going.And what that indicates is that the president views the wall in very personal terms and wants to have as much of it built by 2020 as he can to be able to take credit for it.And what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, amazingly, is his ongoing fixation with the aesthetic appearance of the wall, again, really underscoring the degree to which he views it as a kind of monument to his presidency.
Just this week, we learned that the Defense Department has assigned soldiers to paint a section of the border wall black as the president has demanded “to improve its aesthetic appearance,” in the words of the Department of Homeland Security.
If you were keeping score here, he has not exactly hit the ball out of the park on immigration since the beginning of his presidency as we head into last March, April.
I think what we’re seeing right now is a kind of game of chicken between the White House and Democrats heading toward 2020.And the question is, who benefits politically more if the situation at the border remains in crisis?If 140,000 people are crossing and being taken into custody every month, who’s fault is that?Is it Democrats for blocking the administration from doing the kinds of harsher enforcement measures that it wants?Or is this an indication that the president has failed, that he has whipped up all of this emotion around immigration and made immigration enforcement so unpalatable that even moderates on the Democratic side cannot sign up for more enforcement measures to address what is obviously a crisis and a situation that has gotten out of hand.
Firing Kirstjen Nielsen
Nick, walk me through the firing moment of Kirstjen Nielsen.Start with her in England or whatever it is and maybe some preamble to that.… Was there a precipitating event?
I think it was the border numbers; that was like the—was it the March border numbers?I think it was.
Yeah, he was really angry.
… So Nielsen was able to survive several near firings.At one point last year, the president was telling aides that he was ready to move on and wanted her out at DHS, but she was able to hang on, and she won herself more time, if you’ll recall, when there was a large caravan that made its way to the San Diego area and attempted to rush the U.S. border.And at that moment, Customs and Border Protection officers and Border Patrol agents responded with tear gas.It was considered—it was viewed, I think, very negatively by many people as an excessively harsh response that included shooting tear gas in areas where there were children.But President Trump was impressed with that response and considered it the kind of tough measure that he had long been asking for.
And so one of the things we’ve seen is as these border numbers have gone higher and higher, he increasingly demands tougher responses.“Toughness”: he uses that word over and over.
…But Nielsen’s undoing really came during one of these peaks in anger when the border numbers came in and the president was angry, was looking for her, wanted her to act, and she was in Europe at the beginning of a trip to Europe to engage other officials in Europe on antiterrorism discussions, essentially attending to the other elements of what the Homeland Security secretary has to do.
She was in London when the call came in and the president was demanding to know where she was.And he made very clear that he was displeased that she was out of the country and not entirely focused on this thing that was so important to him.And so, she immediately returned to Washington to try to save her job.But within days, she was out.
And a crucial part of that frustration for the White House and with Stephen Miller was her reluctance to move forward on a plan hatched months earlier with the Justice Department to really target many of these parents who have arrived with children.These family groups that had come across the border, sought asylum, were in the—had been released into the U.S. interior and were living here in this kind of limbo state.
The Justice Department went out and got removal orders, deportation orders for thousands of these families.And the Department of Homeland Security drafted a list of families in 10 U.S. cities.They had a plan to do a kind of shock-and-awe lightning operation that would round up as many of these families as possible and deport them from the country with court orders in a very visible way to try to, again, send the type of deterrent message that they feel like they haven’t been able to do.
And that plan stalled when it got to Secretary Nielsen and to the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald Vitiello.They felt like the plan wasn’t ready, that it needed more preparation, that it was going to be extremely controversial, and that they needed more assurances that it would go the way that folks in the White House said it was going to go.And that hesitation is what Miller used ultimately to remove Nielsen and Vitiello, to get the president to sign off on their removal.
This is a plan that Miller is pushing, wanted it to have happen right on the edge of legality.
They wouldn’t say it’s on the edge of legality because, again, these are families who have removal orders from the U.S. immigration courts.In many of these cases, they say the families—in many of these cases, these removal orders were issued in absentia; meaning, the families were notified that they were facing a court hearing, they failed to appear, and so the courts have ordered them out of the country.And if they are noncompliant with those court orders, then they are fair game for deportation, essentially.
What would it have looked like?How many people?We’re showing up with SWAT squads?What are we doing?How were the deportations in 10 cities going to look?
Well, these are extremely complicated, logistical operations that involved arresting children, so they must be done with a lot of sensitivity and a lot of caution.That was a big concern for Nielsen and Vitiello.You can imagine, these are the kinds of operations that will be recorded on cell phone cameras and that will show up, you know, on the news almost right away.That is part of the goal for Miller and others; they want this to be as visible as possible to kind of, again, to broadcast that deterrent message.
But so much can go wrong in an operation like that.I mean, think about ICE agents fanning out across a neighborhood in Los Angeles to, you know, to remove—to capture and remove 50 families one particular morning.So that’s a large operation with a lot of moving parts.
And as soon as you do an operation like that, other people who are potentially facing deportation are likely to leave the area, to go somewhere else, to pick up and move. And so one of the reasons they have to do it in a kind of mass-coordinated way is to get, you know, as many of their targets as possible.Again, these are operations that involve a lot of agents and are obviously very costly, so they are looking to get big numbers when they do this to make a big impression. …
The president had authorized it?
The president had authorized it long ago.This was an operation with the White House’s blessing.… And you know, the reluctance of these key figures at DHS, including Nielsen, was interpreted at the White House as a kind of lack of commitment to the president’s agenda and an indication that these particular figures were putting their own interests ahead of the president’s.
And how significant is it that this has happened, that DHS is in the state it’s in now, with temporary leadership in many of the major posts?
Well, all of the major agencies at DHS have a leader in an acting capacity right now.I have never heard of or seen a situation like that before.There isn’t a single Senate-confirmed principal at the Department of Homeland Security doing immigration enforcement.The president says he likes having these people in an acting capacity because they’re on a short leash and they’re easier to remove if he thinks they’re ineffective. But the whole purpose of having a Senate confirmation process is to make sure that these senior law enforcement officials in the United States government are people who are acceptable to at least a majority of our elected representatives.
So to completely bypass this process and to really show disregard for, you know, for this kind of institutional mechanism is something that appears to be without precedent.And it’s certainly created a lot of uncertainty, and has certainly created a lot of instability at DHS and throughout these agencies.
Trump’s Record on Immigration
So often in covering stories like this, while we’re in the fog of war, it’s hard to know what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what’s lasting, what’s temporary, what’s of the day, what’s of the whim of the president, whatever.We’re just about at that point, especially if we head into 2020, where we can step back a little bit and make a real assessment of, have important things happened?We may not know exactly what.
So the question is … have significant things happened?Things that will be memorable?Things that will really matter in terms of the immigration war?
I think it’s too early to tell, but at this point what is, I think, very obvious, looking at the latest arrest numbers from the border, is that this administration is failing to achieve its goals.I think the president’s rhetoric around immigration and around building a wall has politicized law enforcement at the border, has politicized immigration enforcement to a degree we’ve never seen before, and has made it increasingly difficult for moderate Democrats to sign up for any kind of increase in enforcement as a bipartisan measure.The chances of us getting some kind of bipartisan immigration deal are more—appear more remote than ever.
And what we’ve also seen are U.S. courts blocking the administration from attempting to implement its most ambitious and radical proposals, essentially telling the administration: “You can’t do it this way.You have to do it through a change in our laws, through working with Congress.”
And the administration is defying that approach and is really doubling down on executive action as the path to achieve its goals.It’s backfiring again and again.Everyone is all whipped up and stirred up emotionally around immigration, and that is making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement officials and our courts and our whole immigration enforcement system to function.
So there were problems that the administration was looking at coming in, and those problems have grown—and those problems have grown exponentially worse in the past two years.
So the White House appears to be losing the public opinion fight.It is losing at the border in terms of gaining control and greater enforcement capacity.And its other goals of reducing legal immigration are also stalling.
So by all of those measures, I don’t see how the White House is achieving the president’s campaign goals on immigration.
… Before the zero tolerance policy is announced by Jeff Sessions, is there an internal debate?Is DHS consulted about the policy before that decision is made?Are they surprised by it?
So Sessions announces the zero tolerance crackdown in early April, and the White House almost immediately turns to DHS and says, “You have to implement this.”There was—that set off a scramble within DHS to figure out how to put such a plan in place.By late April, after several drafts, Secretary Nielsen signed off on a memo generated by CBP, ICE and Citizenship and Immigration Services outlining the way that they could implement the policy.
There was a—the whole episode was also characterized by a lack of coordination with Health and Human Services—again, the agency that was going to have to take responsibility for children after they were separated from their parents.
One of the things we found in doing kind of an autopsy of what happened was that the software used by HHS, by the Office of Refugee Resettlement that was caring for these children, that its software didn’t have a data field available to indicate which children had been separated from their parents and which child—and really how to reunite those children.
So these agencies didn’t have computer systems that could really speak to each other.That was one of the biggest factors that contributed to the chaos we saw and to these alarming stories of parents not knowing where their children might be, or parents being deported without their children, saying that they didn’t consent to such a thing, and children languishing in shelters not really knowing when they would see their parents again.
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