Border Wars

Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration

Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Michael D. Shear

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781982117412
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency.

No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news.

As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis.

Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

— 1 — THE VESSEL

SOARING HIGH ABOVE IOWA in his private jet, Donald J. Trump permitted himself to imagine a successful campaign for the White House.

The year was 2013, and Trump had just finished a short trip to Ames, where he had spoken to the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of evangelical Christian conservatives that had become a mandatory Midwest stop for aspiring presidential candidates. During his speech, Trump lamented the decline of the country, which he said was on the brink of collapse. He mercilessly ridiculed Mitt Romney’s losing presidential campaign and what he said was the failed strategy of Republican operatives like Karl Rove. He warned that Hillary Clinton would be tough to beat in 2016 and cautioned Republicans against cutting any immigration deal that would allow undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship. That would be “a death wish” for the party, he said, given that all 11 million illegal immigrants would certainly vote for Democrats. He threw in some signature Trumpian flourishes, too, drawing chuckles from the audience when he said he’d much rather talk about himself than Romney. “It’s very hard for me to build up somebody else,” he told the crowd of devout, churchgoing Christians. “But what the hell.”

In fact, Trump was preoccupied with building himself up on that trip. He was already sixty-seven years old and thinking about seizing what his advisers were telling him would be his final chance at mounting a winning presidential campaign. As a Manhattan real estate magnate and political neophyte, he had donated to liberal Democrats but done little more than flirt on the fringes of Republican politics. He had no obvious policy platform on which to run and no core set of beliefs with which the public identified him. He was known for his boastful air as a businessman, his glitzy buildings and golden hair, his brash “You’re fired!” television persona—and not much else. But Trump had a gut feeling that he could build a movement that would capture the imagination of a group of disaffected Americans who disdained conventional politics and felt that they were being talked down to by politically correct elites. He imagined harnessing their anger and sense of exclusion to create a powerful groundswell. Trump knew they existed, and he knew how to speak to them because he had been cultivating them for years. These were the same people who had bought into a pet cause that had recently gained purchase as he traveled around the country: Trump’s quest to prove that Barack Obama was an African born in Kenya, making him an illegitimate—indeed an illegal—president.

Trump had been stoking the birther lie for two years, bringing it up in television interviews, embracing fringe conspiracy theorists who offered detailed purported evidence, and tweeting false claims about Obama’s birth certificate. Trump repeatedly taunted the sitting president to prove that he belonged in the Oval Office. Sam Nunberg, the foul-mouthed political operative from New York City who worked for Trump, had seen the result: Trump’s popularity among hard-core Republican primary voters had skyrocketed. Nunberg thought that people who believed in the birther conspiracy could represent at least 5 to 7 percent of Trump’s base if he ran for president. But running openly as a birther was a nonstarter. The trick, Nunberg told Trump that summer, was to weave the birther theme into a legitimate campaign platform, without losing those voters.

“It’s going to be immigration,” Nunberg told Trump that day as they flew back from Iowa to New York on his private 757, emblazoned with “TRUMP” in giant white letters. Birtherism was an attempt to stoke fear about installing in the Oval Office a dark-skinned foreigner whose loyalties and patriotism were in question. The voters who appreciated the theory were also moved by Trump’s blunt talk about the evils of immigration, and they harbored deep anxiety about people who looked and sounded different from themselves. “It’s interconnected,” Nunberg said later. “We would be able to keep those people.”

Trump was captivated throughout the flight, peppering Nunberg with questions. A communications operative who relished the same kind of in-your-face politics that animated Trump, Nunberg first drew attention for his fierce opposition to construction of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in New York. He was a volunteer for Mitt Romney’s first presidential campaign in 2007 and signed on with Trump in 2011, long before the real estate mogul was taken seriously as a potential candidate. That day on the plane, they discussed the Republican Party’s “autopsy,” in which the party leaders had called for renewed outreach to Hispanics after Romney’s loss in 2012. In a campaign, Trump would take the opposite approach, seizing on the threats posed by immigrants as a way of doubling down on the fears of American citizens who were struggling economically. Immigration dovetailed perfectly with Trump’s protectionist impulses and his long-standing antipathy for multilateral trade agreements, which riled up voters who felt exploited by globalization. And it had the advantage of setting Trump apart from some of the Republican Party’s leading lights, like Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator—two possible rivals whose positions on immigration were squishy at best. Nunberg ranted during the flight about John McCain, the Arizona senator who had tried, and failed, to pass a liberal immigration compromise with Democrats. “Nobody kissed the Spanish people’s asses more than Juan McCain, okay?” Nunberg told Trump. “And he got less votes from the Spanish than even Mitt Romney did in 2012,” Nunberg told him (though the opposite was true). “This shit is not how you get their votes.” Immigration was an issue Trump could take on without any real financial risk to his business, Nunberg promised. “I don’t think those people are getting married at Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago,” Nunberg said with a laugh. “It’s not going to cost you business.”

If there was any doubt in Nunberg’s mind that immigration would be Trump’s issue, the flight dispelled it. It was, he said later, like pushing on an open door.

---

Trump did not know it at the time, but seven months earlier, three men had gathered in Washington, D.C., and sketched out what would become the contours of Trump’s immigration-centered campaign. They met in the shabbily chic, ornate dining room of a townhouse on Capitol Hill known as the Breitbart Embassy, which served both as Steve Bannon’s home and the headquarters of Breitbart News, the right-wing media empire he oversaw. Bannon had invited Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama, and Stephen Miller, one of the senator’s top aides, for a dinner that would last for five hours and serve as the spark for a political alliance that would change history.

A onetime Navy officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker, Bannon in 2013 looked like neither, with his unkempt, ragged mane of salt-and-pepper hair, chinos and multiple layers of shirts, open at the collar and usually stacked under a khaki barn jacket. He was not yet a universally recognizable figure on the national stage, assailed by the left as an anti-Semite or lampooned by Saturday Night Live as a Grim Reaper–like figure behind a childlike president. But as the chairman of Breitbart, the hard-right internet outlet backed by the conservative Mercer family, he was well known in media circles and within the Republican Party as a political anarchist. Bannon had spent $1 million of his own money making The Undefeated, a hagiographic documentary about Sarah Palin, McCain’s ill-fated 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, which had been panned by critics. Bannon used his clout at Breitbart and the megaphone of a satellite radio show popular with the far-right conservatives and white supremacists who make up the alt-right to torment establishment Republicans. He prodded the party toward a darker view of American society and culture—one in which whites felt threatened by immigrants, radically left-leaning Democrats, and, most importantly, by mainstream Republicans who he argued had forsaken the people who sent them to Washington. There was, Bannon argued, a “collective unconsciousness” among working-class voters, who believed that immigrants were to blame for the social and economic problems they were suffering. But politicians had to find a way to tap into those concerns, and he needed to find the perfect vessel to carry the message. Bannon railed against elites even as he eagerly rubbed shoulders with Washington reporters while pitching them on the dangers of a corrupt ruling class. A fan of apocalyptic imagery and the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which mass migration to the West from the Third World leads to the destruction of Western civilization, Bannon argued that the “Judeo-Christian West” was engaged in a war against Islamic fascism.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had strong views on immigration shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama. He had watched as an influx of immigrants had moved into his state’s white working-class communities, taking the grueling, low-wage jobs in poultry plants that had once been the exclusive domain of poor, unskilled Americans. During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and twenty years in the Senate, Sessions came to believe that legal and illegal immigrants posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes, and competing for welfare benefits. At sixty-six years old, he was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy. An apple-cheeked, almost elfin white-haired man with a glint in his eye, Sessions was as courtly as his deep southern accent suggested. He was no fire-breather, and he did not set out to become the leading anti-immigrant voice in the United States Senate. He had never worked much on the issue before 2006, when George W. Bush had set out to forge a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that would give the undocumented immigrants living in the United States—then estimated at around 12 million—a pathway to citizenship. But during a meeting in his Senate office that year with Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that pressed for less immigration, it dawned on Sessions that he might be the only person willing to take up the cause and try to block Bush’s “amnesty.” Sessions turned to look out his window, clasping his hands behind his back as he pondered a future as the leading anti-immigration voice in Congress. “I guess if I don’t do it,” Sessions finally said, “nobody’s going to do it.”

Miller, then in his mid-twenties, had found a home on Capitol Hill as a spokesman and strategist for Sessions. By day, he drafted the senator’s strongly worded speeches lamenting how Congress was too complacent in the face of Obama’s overly permissive immigration policies. By night, he would pelt journalists with barrages of emails arguing that immigrants were taking advantage of native-born Americans, depressing wages, living off welfare, and posing threats to their communities. He forged an informal alliance with Breitbart, pumping out a steady stream of tips and critiques that the news site would dutifully publish, making life exceedingly uncomfortable and politically dangerous for those seeking a consensus for a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

Together, the trio couldn’t have been further out on the fringes of the Republican Party establishment in 2013. But they were convinced that their views represented those of the majority of voters. And they were determined not to give up on their vision of a very different future for America, one where secure borders meant that immigrants were no longer threats to the economic and physical safety of the native-born.

The dinner unfolded at Bannon’s home at a dark time for Republicans. Obama’s reelection victory over Romney two months earlier had sent dejected party leaders searching for answers for how they could have suffered defeat in two consecutive presidential elections. Some argued that Romney’s harsh approach on immigration—he had proposed making life so untenable for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”—had cost Republicans the election, driving away Hispanic voters who helped Obama win key states like Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia. Miller thought that analysis was disastrously stupid. What was needed, the trio agreed, was not a more inclusive party but a raw, populist appeal to the grievances and concerns of white working-class voters. Those men and women felt betrayed by liberal politicians like Obama, who constantly cried foul about “inequality” but did nothing to confront the trade agreements and immigration policies that created job loss, low wages, and disappearing economic opportunity. Over steak and fish from Dean & DeLuca, the three men discussed an article entitled “The Case of the Missing White Voters” by Sean Trende, a right-wing writer. More than six and a half million white voters did not show up in 2012, Trende wrote, because they could not stomach Romney, who had allowed himself to be caricatured as a wealthy elitist and failed to articulate an agenda that spoke to their fears and insecurities.

As the clock ticked close to midnight, talk shifted to 2016, and Bannon turned to Sessions with an out-of-the-blue idea: “We have to run you for president.” Bannon told Sessions the same thing that he had told both Sarah Palin and Lou Dobbs, the Fox anchor, during similar conversations years before. He wouldn’t win the presidency. But a Sessions campaign could catapult trade and immigration to the top of the Republican agenda and reshape the party in the process. The argument was simple. Mass illegal immigration was just a scam perpetrated by the Chamber of Commerce and corporate-backed Republicans to suppress wages for unskilled black and Hispanic workers, Bannon said, and legal immigration was doing the same to skilled workers. Trade agreements were nothing more than a permission slip for unfair foreign competition, hurting working people while fattening the wallets of the elites who ran the companies that benefited. It was the same set of arguments Sessions had been making in the Senate for many years, Bannon argued. If he took it national in a presidential campaign, the populist right could seize control of the Republican machinery in Washington.

The Alabama senator demurred. I’m not the guy, he said. Even if he thought the strategy could elevate the issues that he had been toiling quietly for years to highlight, a presidential campaign would dredge up the nasty accusations of racism that his enemies raised during his failed bid to be a federal judge in 1986. In his Senate confirmation hearings that year, an African American prosecutor testified that Sessions had called him “boy.” Sessions had always denied the story, but if he ran for president, that would all come up again, he told Bannon and Miller. Still, the three men were captivated by the idea of finding a candidate who could seize on the deep resentments of white, working-class Americans toward the large influx of immigrants entering the country.

Sessions believed there was a cleavage between where the American people were and where the political establishment was. Bannon saw it, Stephen Miller saw it, and Sessions saw it, along with a few others. Why not give the American people what they want? What’s wrong with a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest? The energy generated from the clash between elites and everybody else was what generates populism, Sessions liked to say. And if a politician was serving the people, instead of the elites, there was nothing wrong with honest populism.

Even if they didn’t know it that night in early 2013, the three men were setting in motion an absurdly unrealistic takeover of the Republican Party and an improbable presidency, which would usher in an equally audacious effort to upend decades of law and policy that had opened the United States to generations of immigrants. By the time their project had come to fruition, they would erode a public consensus in favor of immigration that was more fragile than most in Washington had thought it to be.

The notion of finding a candidate who could catapult those ideas to the forefront of the Republican Party was still on Bannon’s mind two months after their dinner when he heard Trump speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Washington. Trump was not a candidate for anything at the time. But his speech touched on all of the themes that Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had talked about at dinner: China’s rise, the danger of 11 million “illegals” gaining the right to vote, the decline of the manufacturing sector in the United States. “You’re on a suicide mission,” Trump told Republicans. “Our country is a total mess—a total and complete mess, and what we need is leadership.” Bannon’s ears perked up. Suddenly, the conversation that had started two months earlier was no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. Trump was the living, breathing embodiment of what Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had agreed was needed to bring their party back from the dead. Miller was impressed, too. Within months, Miller would tell friends that he hoped that Trump would run for president.

---

Raised in Queens and a longtime resident of Manhattan, Trump spent most of his life in places defined by diversity, where differences of language and national origin are a reality and multiculturalism is a fact of life. But even in his childhood, Mr. Trump and his family sought the homogeneity afforded by wealth and privilege that set him apart. Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where he grew up, was a cloistered and mostly white enclave in a sea of more pluralistic communities, where he attended a private school before being sent to a military academy. As an adult, Trump was equally removed from the clash of cultures on the streets of New York City, overlooking them from the windows of his glitzy triplex apartment in Trump Tower. He once observed that from the top floor of his building “we looked down on the sidewalk and there were thousands and thousands of people, they looked like ants, little people going all over—boom boom boom—so little, because when you’re sixty-eight floors, they look really small, but there were a lot of them.”

The president himself is a grandson of immigrants, as Michael D’Antonio notes in the biography of Trump that he wrote a year before the 2016 election. Friedrich Drumpf, Trump’s grandfather, immigrated in the 1890s from Bremen, a German city on the banks of the Weser River in the northwest part of the country. He arrived in New York at Castle Garden, an entry point at the southern tip of Manhattan, where immigration officers conducted many inspections before stamping their approval, and the name Trumpf, on his papers. A barber in Germany, Friedrich Trumpf followed the mining boom of that decade to the Pacific Northwest, and later renounced his allegiance to his home country and became an American citizen. He eventually returned to New York like many immigrants, wealthier and more prosperous than he was when he arrived. After traveling back to Germany to marry, D’Antonio writes, Friedrich Trump (by then he had dropped the “f”) returned to New York with a pregnant wife.

If Trump took anything profound from his grandfather’s experience as an immigrant to America, there is little evidence of it. Despite having been the subject of attention and scrutiny for much of his adult life, Trump rarely built his grandfather’s immigrant story into the narrative of his own life. (In fact, one of Trump’s most curious fabrications involves claiming that his father, not his grandfather, had been born and raised in Germany, a false assertion that he has repeated at least three times as president.) His early upbringing was not without exposure to some other kinds of people; his family occasionally vacationed at the Concord in the Catskills, where they “ate dinner together at tables piled with platters of kosher food,” writes Gwenda Blair in her book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President. But there are few stories about Trump’s exposure to people from other cultures during his time at the New York Military Academy, where he attended high school, and later at Fordham University and the Wharton School of Business. Those early years offered few clues to explain his later embrace of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment as a path to political power.

In the early 1970s, the Justice Department sued Trump and his father, alleging that the pair refused to rent apartments to African Americans, a charge that Trump vigorously denied. As Blair observed, the future president learned a lesson from the episode about surviving accusations about racism: “He had also seen that being charged with discrimination did not seem to deter anyone in the public or private realm from doing business with him,” she wrote. “Indeed, practically speaking, the entire matter appeared to add up to little more than ‘a spit in the ocean.’ ”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s instincts about race a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1. The Vessel
• 2. Breaking the Apology-Retreat Cycle
• 3. The Hamilton Group
• 4. Forty-Three Minutes
• 5. “Bring Out the Crazies”
• 6. “A Fucking Watered-Down Version”
• 7. Shackles Off
• 8. Angels and Demons
• 9. No Legal Basis
• 10. The Trump Effect Fades
• 11. The Admiral’s Almanac
• 12. Refugees Not Welcome
• 13. A Not-So-Global Compact
• 14. Blind Spot
• 15. No Way Out
• 16. Life in Two-Year Increments
• 17. Forced Removal
• 18. “Just Bite the Bullet”
• 19. “Shithole Countries”
• 20. Ash and Trash
• 21. “No More DACA Deal!”
• 22. Zero Tolerance
• 23. Reverse Boomerang
• 24. Always a Bomb Thrower
• 25. “You’ve Kidnapped Our Kids”
• 26. Evelyn and Amber
• 27. “Pencils Down”
• 28. Use of Force
• 29. Hijacking the Midterms
• 30. Mexican Standoff
• 31. Shutdown
• 32. “We’ve Wasted the Last Two Years”
• 33. The Purge
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• About the Authors
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright