The FRONTLINE Interviews
Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Co-Author, Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration
Julie Hirschfeld Davis is the congressional editor for The New York Times and is a political analyst for CNN. She is the co-author of Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration.
Following are transcripts of interviews with FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder and Michael Kirk conducted on June 19, July 12, and July 26, 2019. They have been edited for clarity and length.
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Jeff Sessions’ Early Stance Against U.S. Immigration Policy
OK, so, Julie, I’m going to ask you to go back to a story you just told me about a 2015 hearing on the Hill about Syrian refugees.Sessions is asking the witness certain questions, and there are two advisers there with him.Can you set up that room?
Right.So it’s in a Senate committee hearing room.Jeff Sessions is the chairman of the hearing, and basically this is during the consultations that went on between the Obama administration and the Congress about what the refugee ceiling for resettled refugees was going to be in 2016.
And, at the time, there was a big crisis in Syria with the civil war, a huge flood of refugees.And the Obama administration had decided that they wanted to be very aggressive about plussing up the number of refugees overall, but particularly Syrian refugees.And Sessions was clearly very concerned about this; he was raising lots of national security concerns.And you had Obama administration officials, but really the career professionals inside the government, who handled the refugee resettlement program up there to testify.
And so the hearing room is—it’s a bunch of senators on a dais.Sessions is there in the middle, and behind him are Stephen Miller, who is his spokesman, and Gene Hamilton, who is his counsel on the Judiciary Committee.And at various points, they’re kind of leaning over and whispering in his ear.And he’s clearly trying to raise concerns with the officials there about the wisdom of allowing in more refugees, the wisdom of particularly admitting more Syrians.
The officials arrayed in front of him include Larry Bartlett, who was the career person at the State Department and the Refugee Bureau who had overseen this program for many years and was making the case for why it made sense to do this, why it was in the national security and sort of foreign policy interest of the United States, all of the protections that exist in the program and how well vetted refugees were.
But Sessions was really pressing on him and the other officials who were up there, sort of questioning the whole premise of why would we want to have more refugees.Isn’t this going to increase the threat of terrorism?So at one point, he brings up the Boston Marathon bombing and asserts that the people responsible were refugees, and he has to be corrected by one of the witnesses: Actually they weren’t refugees; they didn’t come in through that program.
But clearly he has an agenda here, and it is to basically raise concerns about the refugee program and push back against this effort to really build it up and flesh it out in response to the humanitarian crisis that was happening at the time.
And Sessions’ reputation this time?
So Sessions had kind of established himself as really one of the most vocal critics of immigration in the United States of any kind—legal immigration, illegal immigration, the refugee program.He was willing to really go out on a limb and take down efforts to get a deal on comprehensive immigration reform.There had been repeated attempts to do this over the years.George W. Bush had tried in the second half of his two terms.A bipartisan group had tried again in 2013 after the 2012 presidential election when the Republican National Committee had come out with this “autopsy” report and said, “We really have to do a better job of appealing to Hispanic voters and expanding the tent.”
There had been this effort to get together Republicans and Democrats on large bipartisan immigration reform plan.And Sessions had kind of made it his cause to fight back against that.He broke with the vast majority of Republicans, many of whom were very hard-line on immigration.They wanted a lot more security; they wanted much stricter policies.But at the end of the day, they were Republicans; they believed in capitalism.They heard from the business community how vital immigration was to American business and manufacturing and agriculture.And they were generally in a place where they were at least open to talking about comprehensive immigration reform.
Jeff Sessions was way out there on the edge kind of throwing grenades into this process at every turn.And he and his staff, his staff in particular, were known as quite out there.They were over the top with their rhetoric.Stephen Miller in particular was known for kind of going around and lecturing people about—Republicans, fellow Republicans—about what a travesty the American immigration system was and how hard they had to push back against some of these moves that the Obama administration was making, but also how they had to be less open to compromising with Democrats on some of these things.
And he would be very aggressive behind the scenes about criticizing people like Paul Ryan who became the House speaker, a Republican from Wisconsin, and really not shy about criticizing other Republicans about their openness to immigration changes that he thought were going to be disastrous.And so this was kind of their reputation, his reputation, on the Hill.
And Sessions had a meeting—I think it was back around the time that the Bush immigration plan was going through Congress in 2006-2007—with Roy Beck, who is the head of one of the big anti-immigration, low-immigration-numbers groups called NumbersUSA.And Beck is in the office with him and says, “We really need someone to be a champion for this point of view, the point of view that immigration can be harmful, and immigration is not an unmitigated positive for this country.”
And Sessions kind of agreed that that was going to be his thing.And so he took it on as a cause, and he really played that role.He was not shy about it throughout his time in the Senate.
Is that really when it started, was around 2006-2007?
That’s when Sessions took it on.He’s from Alabama, and so he had come to this issue, in some ways, organically.He had seen the poultry industry in Alabama, which had been sort of a bastion of jobs for the white working class in Alabama, these really grueling jobs that were, you know, very arduous and in some cases dangerous that a lot of poor people in his state had taken.He saw a huge influx of immigrants who took a lot of those jobs.Those are jobs that most people don’t want to do, and as the economy of his state changed, he saw a lot of immigration and immigrants come in and take those jobs.And so he felt this in a very personal way.
So he came to it somewhat naturally.But it did take sort of the advent of this whole discussion—about should we do a big, broad immigration reform?And that would have involved legalizing, in some way, the 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants who are currently living in the United States.And so it wasn’t until then that he really started to focus on it, and activists who were pushing hard against it focused on him as the person who was going to be the bulwark against this.
Who is Gene Hamilton?
… Gene Hamilton, you mentioned his name, and I’m curious to get your analysis of who he is in Sessions’ office, Sessions’ Senate office.
So Gene Hamilton is Sessions’ counsel.He’s a lawyer, a young guy, very personable but very much in line with Sessions’ point of view on immigration issues.So he would be the one who would prepare Sessions to either offer amendments or ask tough questions at hearings that had to do with immigration and, in this case, refugees.And he was very well connected with this kind of network of conservatives on Capitol Hill who were likeminded, people who worked for Chuck Grassley, a senator from Iowa; Bob Goodlatte, a representative from Virginia who would become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee on the House side.
And they kind of all were a team communicating amongst each other trying to figure out ways to push back against efforts to get comprehensive immigration reform, forge some of these bipartisan alliances with Democrats to do that.So he had kind of come up as a young lawyer in the South dealing with some of these issues in a U.S. attorney’s office.But now he was on the Hill, and he had the opportunity to really kind of influence the direction of these debates from inside of Sessions’ office.
And unlike Miller—he’s kind of the yin to Miller’s yang.… Stephen Miller, not a lawyer.He’s a communicator.He’s very sort of bombastic.He liked to talk a lot, and he had this very aggressive reputation for being—he could be obnoxious.He would take people on publicly.Gene was very soft-spoken; he’s a lawyer; he would seem to be very sort of reasoned.
But in the end, they had the same point of view; they had the same philosophy, and they shared that with Sessions.And it was sort of two different approaches to the same goal, which was essentially to make sure that comprehensive immigration reform didn’t go anywhere; that if they were going to be talking about immigration, they were going to be talking about more restrictions and less numbers and not legalizing people and what they considered amnesty and all the rest.
Bannon, Miller, and Sessions Reject the Republican “Autopsy”
Let me ask you about the “Breitbart Embassy” dinner that’s happening shortly after this time period.Who’s there?What are they meeting about?
Yeah.So after the 2012 presidential election, Republicans were doing a lot of soul searching about what happened.Why did they lose?What went wrong?And the sort of consensus—one of the consensus points that seemed to surface from all of that was this notion that Republicans had—Mitt Romney had run on sort of a wishy-washy but fairly restrictionist view of immigration where he was saying that people should “self-deport” and that that had been a disaster for the party, and in fact what they needed to do was expand the tent, appeal more to Hispanic voters and actually embrace some sort of comprehensive immigration reform.
So Steve Bannon, who is the top person at Breitbart, the “alt-right” news website at this point, totally disagrees with that.He thinks that’s a total disaster.And he has forged this alliance with Jeff Sessions and his communications guy, Stephen Miller, who would feed Bannon and his staff a steady stream of kind of story ideas and little leaks and studies that he either had conducted or had seen that he thought were relevant to the discussion, all geared toward demonstrating that immigration was bad; Congress’ moves on this had been a disaster; comprehensive immigration reform was the wrong way to go; immigration was hurting American workers; immigration was dangerous.
So they had sort of established this relationship where Miller would talk often to Bannon and to his staff about stories.Sometimes they would be stories about Republican members of Congress who were insufficiently tough on immigrants and immigration.At one point, Steve Bannon sent a reporter, who later ended up working in the Trump White House, to Paul Ryan’s home in his district in Janesville, Wisconsin, to write a story about how even though he was against a wall on the southwestern border, he had a wall around his home in Janesville.
So they had sort of—they knew each other well, and so Steve Bannon invited Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller to dinner in late 2012 to his townhome on Capitol Hill right behind the Supreme Court to talk about, you know, politics and what should come next.And the three of them all agreed that this analysis of "we need to be more open to comprehensive immigration reform as Republicans" was totally wrong.And they had this long dinner.Bannon ordered from Dean & DeLuca steaks, and they drank a lot, and they ate a lot, and they talked long into the evening, partly about an article that had been written, and I think had been on the website RealClearPolitics, just about the white working class and how—the argument was the Republicans hadn’t lost the presidential election because they had been insufficiently popular with Hispanics or middle-of-the-road voters.It was like white, non-college-educated voters who didn’t like Mitt Romney; that that was the problem.
And so their idea was, and Bannon’s thought was, we need to get those people; we need to get those people engaged.And he thought the way to do that was through trade and immigration policy.And these are two things that Jeff Sessions had been talking about for years and years, and so as they talk, at one point Bannon says to Sen. Sessions, “We’ve got to run you for president.”And Sessions was: “Oh, I don’t know about that.I like where I am, and I’m doing what I’m doing.”But he clearly was in the market for a candidate who was going to be able to make those arguments and who was going to be willing to center an entire presidential campaign around trade to some degree, but immigration in particular.He thought it was an incredibly powerful issue that was going to really motivate this group of voters that polls had just shown them really had turned against Republicans.
And so the three of them all kind of agreed, even though Sessions sort of pushed back on the notion that it should be him, they all agreed, “We need to find someone to do this.”And so that was kind of in their minds already in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 election, even though Donald Trump wasn’t anywhere in the conversation.
Defeating Eric Cantor
They very quickly see a bit of success.Cantor loses.What’s the signal that’s sent by that loss on immigration, and then what happens to the Senate bill?
Cantor’s loss was terrifying for Republicans, I think.This shift had started I think well before that, but it really took the defeat of Eric Cantor, or the House majority leader, someone who nobody had considered vulnerable at all, to drive home the point for them that not only were there opportunities to appeal to this group of voters that Republicans had really lost, but that if they didn’t embrace this message of anti-immigration, tough measures against immigrants, that they could easily be swept out very quickly; that this was an issue that it was no longer going to be sufficient to just kind of talk about on the margins; that this was really a focal point for a lot of voters in a way that I don’t think many Republicans really realized.
And so it was a message to people on the right that they really had something here and that they could really take this and run with it.And it was a message to all the rest of the Republicans that even if they didn’t believe in this anti-immigration, restrictionist point of view, they’d better talk the talk, because that is what the Republican base wanted to hear from them, and if they didn’t, they would risk losing their seats as well.
Stephen Miller’s Immigration Handbook
… So the handbook that Sessions puts out that—our understanding is it’s a Stephen Miller policy document, [“Immigration Handbook] for [a] New Republican Majority” was the name of the document, I believe.This is the—
Yeah.Sorry.Do you want me to just talk about that?
Yeah, so as a precursor to what’s to come, without jumping ahead, if there’s a way to describe the document, describe the origins of the document, and what are some of the initial policies that they’re hoping to achieve.
… I’m aware of it; I never read through it.I think the most significant thing about the—so as Republicans come around to this realization that immigration is going to be a big thing for them, a bigger thing for them than they thought, Jeff Sessions has been working on this from this point of view for a long time, and Stephen Miller considers himself to be an expert both in the policy and in the communication strategy around immigration.
So he kind of compiles this document to share with other Republicans about how you talk about this and also how you might go about trying to enact this agenda.It’s not really a document of must-do items that we’re going to tick down this list.But his idea, and I think Sessions’ idea, is we can’t just be on the margins throwing barbs at Republicans and Democrats who are trying to do comprehensive immigration reform; we have to have our own agenda, and that’s going to be about cracking down on employing undocumented workers; that’s going to be around stricter enforcement; that’s going to be around ending some of this executive action that the Obama administration had undertaken to legalize people like the “Dreamers.”
And so the idea was they needed their own competing message and their own competing legislative agenda, and agenda of executive action if they ever got to that point, to be able to effectively push back against what the overwhelming tide, the direction on immigration had been for decades really.
The Trump Campaign
The Trump campaign launches.Sessions is the first senator to endorse; Stephen Miller joins the campaign.This is really the candidate that Steve Bannon has been searching for; that this is, I think, he says the “imperfect instrument” to carry out the views on immigration that these guys have been pushing from the outside.This is now sort of the big stage.Can you take us there?Can you help us understand the rhetoric that Trump is using on immigration?It’s new to many of us, but not really to these folks.
Right.I mean, I think that the word that Bannon sometimes used was the “vessel.”Trump was going to be, you know, the candidate who took on this issue that he thought was going to be so powerful for a Republican candidate and really ran with it.And the moment when Bannon realizes this is the moment when he’s at a rally with Trump, and he is talking about how immigrants can be rapists and criminals and how immigrants are ravaging the country because they’re taking jobs that should rightfully belong to American workers.
And what’s so powerful, I think, to Bannon in hearing this rhetoric is how willing Trump is to say it and the kinds of language that he is willing to use, which are not—it’s not politician speak.It’s not even—I mean, forget poll-tested.It’s things that most elected leaders, most public officials, would be ashamed to say out loud.And Bannon knows it, and he loves it.And he gets, and I think he understands on a visceral level, how powerful it is for those audiences.He can see the reaction, and he can see, I think, in Trump how much he feeds off of that reaction.
And so he is witnessing this feedback loop—that ends up powering in a big way the entire Trump campaign—of Trump’s willingness to say these things about immigration and immigrants, the powerful response he gets from the crowd, and then his desire to kind of double down on that and go even further.And that’s the exact instinct that he seizes on and that he thinks is going to be—is what’s going to make Trump a successful candidate.And to a large degree, he’s right.
There’s also transformation happening at Fox.Way back when, they are actually sort of pushing, or the debate, or the discourse is much more related to perhaps pro-immigration.At this point, there’s kind of a bend.Fox is now running a lot of anti-immigration coverage more in the vein of that early ’12 Breitbart coverage.So there’s a bend happening.Things are trending towards the Bannon wing, the Sessions wing, the Trump wing of this emerging faction within the Republican Party.
Right.I think you see Fox seizing on some of this energy as well and realizing how powerful it is.They’re covering Trump’s campaign rallies; they’re seeing the response.And more and more, they’re booking people who are bringing this point of view onto the airways.You’re not hearing as much about comprehensive immigration reform and legalizing various groups of immigrants like the Dreamers.You’re hearing a lot more about building the wall, deporting criminals, the dangers of immigration, the costs of immigration.And, you know, in a lot of ways, you can see that shift happening as the Republican primary is shifting toward Trump.
The Trump Transition and Early Executive Orders
The early EOs [executive orders], you had mentioned that administration officials are working with folks on the Hill to craft some of these, and you had a nice analogy about the options that are given to them.So if you could tell me that story.
Yeah, so after Trump wins, there’s a panic, because nobody expected him to win.It’s not like the normal transition where they’re flooded with all of these people who have been promised jobs and who have been vetted.They basically have nobody.So Gene Hamilton quickly signs on to help out with the transition, and he’s going to lead this effort, which is of course overseen by Bannon and Miller to get in train a number of executive orders on immigration that can be ready to go on day one.
And so who does he turn to?He turns to the same people on Capitol Hill who he’s been working with for years to push back against comprehensive immigration reform and push forward on more restrictive legislation.So it’s people from Bob Goodlatte’s office, people from Chuck Grassley’s office.He kind of gets them all together in this informal kind of working group.They all have to sign nondisclosure agreements because that’s how Trump rolls.And they kind of go to work on, “OK, well, now we have the presidency.What would we do?What could we do?What can we give the administration and give President Trump to carry out the promises that he’s been campaigning on?”
So they draft a number of these executive orders.One of them is the one that will become the travel ban.Another one is the one that will become the interior enforcement executive order—really far-reaching changes that they’re basically suggesting are possible to be made.
But at the end of the day, at the end of the process, which is a very sort of frenzied process—they don’t have a lot of time; they don’t have a lot of resources—all they can do is sort of give the president and his inner circle a list of things that he might want to do.So they draft up potential executive orders, but they never expect that everything that they have suggested is actually going to come into force.
And what ends up happening—one person described it to us for our book as they had sort of put together what they considered a menu of options for the incoming president to pursue if he wanted to get a handle on foreigners traveling to the United States, immigrants coming into the country, and instead of picking from the menu, they sort of ordered the all-you-can-eat buffet.And that ended up being the travel ban, and you saw the legal problems and logistical problems that immediately followed from that.
Trump Delays Action on DACA
Can you help us understand why DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] is not the seventh EO that happens around this time where they don’t deal with the Dreamers?
Yeah, so one of the executive orders that they draw up during this transition period is an executive order to rescind DACA.And in fact, at one point early—right after Trump is inaugurated, it leaks.And there is an actual executive order that is sort of ready to go.But this is something that the president was already pretty conflicted about.He had his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump arguing against it.He had Gary Cohn, his NEC [National Economic Council] director, saying it’s a bad idea.
Of course, Bannon and Miller and Kris Kobach, who had been informally advising him, were very much in support of having this be one of the first things he did.But there was a decision made early on that this was not the way to go.They were hearing from the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.They were hearing from Republican officials all over the place that this could really be disastrous.
Trump had a meeting during the transition…a person, said to him: “By the way, if you end DACA, it’s going to be a disaster.Don’t let that be your first thing that you do.There’s a way to solve this.There’s a way to figure this out short of essentially ending the program and opening all of these people to deportation,” which is essentially what would have happened.And that argument ends up carrying the day, at least temporarily.
Bannon loses the fight, which is sort of the first kind of rebuke of him.
He does, and in fact during this time, Bannon was actually really struggling because he—his goal was, he would say, “Flood the zone, flood the zone, flood the zone.”He wanted the president to be signing five executive orders a day, and he would have been thrilled if they could have all been about immigration and slapping more restrictions on immigration and rolling back what they considered lax immigration policies like DACA.But he does, to some degree, lose out, because not everyone in the White House agrees with it.
And also, just practically speaking, it’s hard to flood the zone that much when you’re an incoming administration.They were figuring out how to implement things.There were very few people in Trump’s inner circle who knew how to do this at all, who knew how to govern, who knew how to put things through the process of vetting and legal review and rolling out policy.It’s complicated.
And so he lost, I think, both in terms of the substance of the DACA argument, but it was also just a bureaucratic loss in some ways, because the realities of implementing these things were harder than anyone, I think, expected them to be.
Jeff Sessions as Attorney General
But they have a general who’s over at Justice who during this quiet period after the flurry of EOs is Jeff Sessions, and he’s looking at the Justice Department in a totally new way in terms of immigration.What does he begin to work on during that time period?
So during that time, Sessions is really focused on a few things.One of them is this idea of—that was in the initial executive order for interior enforcement—of that they’re to surge their resources toward making sure that nobody is in the country who shouldn’t be in the country.So he’s trying to figure out ways to make that happen.He’s trying to figure out ways to surge immigration judges to the border so that they can work through this backlog of people that they have awaiting adjudication of their claims, and essentially get rid of people who he thinks shouldn’t be in the country, or at least dispense with their cases so that they can move on.
He’s working on sanctuary cities.He’s trying to figure out a way to essentially starve cities of funding unless they’re willing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.And he’s also working on what are basically the beginnings of the “zero tolerance” policy, where he’s trying to prepare the department to really essentially prosecute anyone who crosses the border unlawfully in a way that hadn’t been done in the past.And so he wants to be much more aggressive on these prosecutions and try to figure out how to really get a handle on the influx at the border.
The other thing that he is involved in, in a way that the attorney general hadn’t been as much involved in the past, is the process of figuring out how to limit the refugee program, which, as a senator, he also pushed back against.Now he’s in a position to be in the discussion about how many refugees the United States should be admitting in the next year.
And so he weighs in on that process, and Gene Hamilton, who’s now over at the Department of Homeland Security as a senior adviser, weighs in on that process in a major way.
In just a year, so much has changed in terms of their positions.
Right.I mean, they’re now, instead of being sort of at the fringe of the debate on Capitol Hill, kind of pushing back against an administration that has a very different bent than the Trump administration, now they are the administration.Sessions is the attorney general; Miller is very powerful—in a very powerful position in the West Wing; Gene Hamilton is in a very strong spot at the Department of Homeland Security.And they’re kind of in a position to implement exactly what they had talked about a little more than a year before on Capitol Hill.
Steve Bannon in the White House
And Steve Bannon, the most unlikely federal employee, is also in the White House during this time period as well.
Yes.And Bannon has this whole whiteboard of promises that Trump made, many of them immigration-related, in his office, and he is just obsessively looking at that whiteboard and trying to figure out what can they tick off the list next.And he is really sort of encouraging this process of “Let’s be as aggressive as we can on as many fronts as we can to really show people that Trump was serious about this immigration message.”It wasn’t just something to say; he’s actually going to do it.
The Dreamers and DACA
And going back to Dreamers for a moment, things aren’t exactly quiet into the spring and summer of ’17 on Dreamers.I mean, there is a different sort of—there’s meetings happening in the Roosevelt Room about what to do about the Dreamers, how are we going to claw back.Who’s in those meetings?How is that strategy developing?I’m getting towards the collaboration potentially with the attorneys general.
So actually Bannon—having, as he pointed out, lost the skirmish on Dreamers early on—he did not get what he wanted in terms of an executive order to just end DACA outright early on, but he realizes after talking to Trump about this a number of times, and talking to people around Trump, that Dreamers are kind of a soft spot for him.Trump is actually saying it out loud.He said it in a news conference early in 2017: “These are incredible kids.We have to deal with them with heart”—just a totally different sort of sound than when he would talk about the wall or he would talk about other immigrants, any other immigrants.The Dreamers he would sort of talk about in these very kind of gentle ways.
And Bannon could tell—and he was right—that Trump was conflicted about this; he doesn’t want to seem like a bad guy.And this is a common thread that you find with Trump, which is a little bit surprising, but I think definitely true, that as tough as he talks at rallies and in public about some of these issues, he really does not want to be seen as the bad guy, and particularly not when children are concerned.
So he has this soft spot.Bannon considered it, I think, a blind spot for Dreamers.And so Bannon knew that if something was going to get done on this, it had to be in a way that Trump was not going to have to feel responsible for it.
So he starts having conversations with all of his allies, and one of whom is Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, who as it happens, has been trying to figure out a way to take down DACA from the day that it was signed by President Obama.So he has been talking to a number of attorneys general who are likeminded about their desire to bring a lawsuit to essentially challenge the constitutionality of DACA.
Sessions makes it very clear that his position is that DACA is unconstitutional; it’s illegal, and he can’t defend it.He makes that clear to Bannon; he makes that clear to Trump and to everyone at the White House.So Bannon and Kobach figure if they can get the attorneys general to sort of band together and make it public that they are going to sue on this, that essentially Trump will have no choice but to act, because if you have state attorneys general who are going to bring a case, and an attorney general of the United States who’s not going to defend the policy, what are you going to do?You have to do something.
So that is, in fact, what happens.The attorneys general, led by the Texas attorney general, write a letter that I think arrives at the White House in June that says, essentially: “We consider DACA to be illegal.We’re going to bring a lawsuit challenging it all together as these states, and you have until Sept. 5, essentially, and if you haven’t ended it by then, we’re going to sue.”
And this is a bit of a gun to the president’s head.
Right.And it was designed to be that.It essentially gave him a deadline for a decision that he didn’t want to make.And so then what you have behind the scenes is this whole policy process that goes on about what to do about the program.In the middle of this, John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, goes over to the White House to be the chief of staff.At around the same time, Bannon leaves.The Charlottesville riot happens.Trump makes those comments, and Bannon is out.
So you have Stephen Miller, though, still at the White House, very much focused on getting rid of DACA.You have Sessions at the Justice Department, also on board with that.But now you have Elaine Duke, who is acting as the Homeland Security secretary.And she is not a political person.She’s a procurement expert.She was put in her position because she was a veteran of the department.They thought she could help with acquisition and the wall and all the sort of technical aspects of Homeland Security that needed to be attended to.She was not a person who had engaged in these highly politicized debates about DACA and Dreamers and immigration policy writ large.
But there she is, and she has to be the one to make the decision.So there’s this very kind of intense meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in August where they’re talking about the fate of DACA, and Miller is there; Sessions is there; Gene Hamilton is there; Don McGahn, the White House counsel, is there; and Elaine Duke is there.And she’s coming into this meeting believing that this is going to be a debate over what should we do:Should we end it, or should we not end it?If we ended it, when would we end it, and what would the conditions be, and what would the caveats be, and would there be carve-outs?
And the rest of the room, you know, led by Miller, is primed to end it.To them, this is a meeting about how we wind down DACA, like how do we get rid of it.And so she comes into this room, and it feels to her like an ambush, and it feels to them like she’s on another planet.Like, what is she even talking about?She’s acting like it’s still a discussion, that maybe we’re not going to end this program, when in their minds it’s a completely done deal.And she feels bullied and pushed and is really torn about it.
So they have this very intense discussion, and it goes on—there’s no resolution at that meeting.It goes on for another several weeks, couple of weeks.And then ultimately they get to a decision that they’re going to end the program with a six-month wind-down period.And Trump is not happy.He feels like no one’s going to be pleased with this.He’s still going to be made out as the bad guy.The decision had begun to leak, and he had seen some of the stories, and he did not like the way it was playing in the press.No one was sort of giving him any credit, he felt, for giving some time to wind down the program and have Congress come in and do something to preserve the protections.So he felt like he was getting the worst of both worlds.He was going to have the hard-liners mad at me because he didn’t just shut DACA off day one, and then he was also going to have all the people who supported DACA mad at him for ending the program.
And so the day before the announcement, which is Labor Day, he spends most of the day in the Oval Office writing and rewriting and rewriting this statement he’s going to give announcing what his decision is, and he’s just really—he really feels like this is a bad position for him to be in, and he doesn’t like it.In the end, he decides not to actually make the statement, but he puts it out as a written document, and Jeff Sessions is the one who announces it.
… We had heard at one point that the White House hadn’t been briefed on the remarks that Sessions gave on Dreamers, but it’s clearly a—
Yeah, no.Actually, yeah, he—Sessions was really the only one who was willing to do it in the end, which in a lot of ways is typical of the role that he played.He was completely unapologetic about his position.He believed that the program was illegal, he believed that he should be ended, and he was not shy about going out there and talking about it.Elaine Duke did not want to be in that position, and as it turned out, President Trump did not want to be in that position.
The other interesting thing about that is the White House had told congressional leaders that the president was going to make a statement, and a lot of them were very happy about that, because they felt that if, in the end, they were going to be called upon to move some legislation to actually preserve DACA, which was essentially what the president was saying, that they wanted him on the record, on camera, calling on them to do it, because they felt that that would give them the cover that they needed with the Republican base, with Republican voters in general, to actually embrace some sort of compromise.They knew it was going to have to be a compromise with Democrats.
So they thought, well, we don’t really want this hot potato, but if we’re going to catch it, we at least want the president out there publicly kind of passing us the baton, saying: “I, President Trump, am calling on the Congress to save this program.It’s worthwhile.Preserve these protections.They’re worth saving.”But they didn’t get that in the end.He did put out the statement, but he never was willing to go out there and publicly say it.
So that was their early indication that he was not going to give them the cover that they wanted on this issue; that they were about to sort of embark on this whole tricky process of trying to figure out if they could write legislation on the Dreamers that would essentially resurrect these protections for the long haul, and the president was not going to be a reliable partner for them in that.
Trump Wavers on DACA
We just have a few more minutes, but I want to get through the two meetings in January, because I think you’re right there….But Tuesday Trump versus Thursday Trump.Can you paint the scene that is the Cabinet Room meeting?[Sen. Dick] Durbin’s to the left of the president; I think [Rep.Steny] Hoyer’s to the right.And there’s a sense that there is going to be a deal done in this meeting, and CNN is there to capture it all.
Right.So this is early 2018.DACA has been ended.There’s all this talk of can they figure out a way to move some legislation that’s going to restore the protections that were in the memorandum initially?And Trump, as he is wont to do, calls in the press to be able to cover the beginning—what they thought was the beginning of meeting with congressional leaders on this.
And he’s got, you know, Democrats on either side of him, Sen. Durbin, who had been working on Dreamer legislation for months with Lindsey Graham, the Republican, is there; Sen. Graham is right across the table.And he starts talking about not just the Dreamers, but immigration writ large.At one point, Trump says he would love to find a way to be able to legalize the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
But he’s clearly saying: “I want a deal on the Dreamers.If you all can cut some sort of a deal, if you can get to a compromise, I want to sign it.”He’s acting very open to all of this.And it goes on for a long time.And he starts to actually get way beyond where certainly Stephen Miller, but a lot of his advisers are, on the substance of what the deal would look like.At one point, [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein raises the prospect of a clean DREAM Act, which essentially would be just legislation to legalize the Dreamers without any border security, no wall money, no immigration enforcement restrictions, none of that.
And the president says, “Oh, yeah, we could consider that, sure.”And so Republicans at the table are sort of panicking.At one point, [Rep.] Kevin McCarthy sort of pipes up and is like, “Just so we’re clear here, you know, we’re just talking about the DREAM Act, and we obviously need to have border security.”And John Cornyn, who is the whip on the Senate—the Republican whip in the Senate says, “Let’s just remember, anything we talk about has to be able to pass the Senate.”So they’re trying to pull him back, but Trump is in a very kind of magnanimous, “I’ll take any deal” kind of a mode.
And then actually, when the cameras leave, somebody passes around a piece of paper that has all of these requirements on it, the must-haves for any DACA deal.And there are things on there that Democrats consider to be complete poison pills, like $25 billion for the wall; ending chain migration, what they call chain migration, essentially the family-based immigration visas; mandatory E-Verify.There’s all of these—the wish list of the immigration restrictionists.And they hand this out, and they say, “This is going to have to be sort of the foundation for these discussions.”
Durbin and the other Democrats around the table are just taken aback.They’re like: “Well, what is all this?We can’t agree to pretty much any of this.”And Trump gets really angry at his staff and says: “Whose is this?I don’t even know what this is.I don’t necessarily agree with this.Just ignore that,” he tells the Democrats.So he’s in this really sort of open frame of mind about this, and his staff is trying to pull him back; Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to pull him back, but he’s kind of out there.And then a couple of days later, you have this confrontation in the Oval Office.
Yeah, let’s do that story, if you don’t mind.Two days later—
… So basically Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin, Republican and Democrat on the Senate side, have been working for months on a potential compromise to essentially codify the protections that were in DACA for the Dreamers.They think they’ve come up with a plan.The president has just had this meeting in the Cabinet Room where he’s [said]: “Bring me any plan, I’ll sign it.I really want to get this done.”
And so they get calls from President Trump that morning saying: “I hear you have a plan for me.I want to hear about it.Come brief me.”And they sort of describe the broad outlines of the plan, and Trump is sounding really positive, and he’s really eager to hear about it.“Please come to the White House.”
So they get into Durbin’s SUV, and they go down to the White House.And while they’re waiting in the West Wing lobby, all of a sudden the doors open, and other people start coming in, people they recognize: Tom Cotton, who is sort of a very, very conservative Republican senator who doesn’t believe in, you know—he has said publicly that the DREAM Act is a nonstarter, he doesn’t want to go there.He’s sponsored legislation to cut legal immigration.He’s clearly on the other side of this issue.
David Perdue, same thing.He walks through the door.Then there’s Bob Goodlatte, who’s the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also in a completely different place.He walks through the door, and they’re thinking, what is going on here?We thought we were having a two-on-one meeting with President Trump to lay out our DREAM deal, and all of these other people are there.
And then Stephen Miller walks in, and before they know it, they’re all in the Oval Office all together.And they could tell, I think, going in, because there were so many other members of Congress who had sort of just appeared in the West Wing lobby, that this was not the meeting that they had imagined it was going to be.This wasn’t just getting Trump to bless their deal.This was potentially something else.
So once they are in the Oval Office, they start to brief Trump on their agreement.So Lindsey Graham starts taking him through kind of point by point, and at one point, he mentions how the visas are going to be reallocated.So some of the visas that are now given out through the diversity visa lottery, which is going to be eliminated, will be given to people who have temporary protected status.And he mentions Haitians, because Haiti is one of the countries whose people were given TPS.
And Trump stops him, and he [says]: “Well, Haiti?Why do we have to have Haiti in this?”He’s clearly pushing back against that; he doesn’t like that.And so Graham continues, and they start to talk about how a lot of these visas—some of these visas, some portion of them, will be going to African countries who are now—many of their citizens are getting in under the diversity visa lottery, but now that will be shifted over to a different form of visa, and again, the president stops Sen. Graham and says: “Well, why are we—Africa?Why?”
And he essentially says what is now his famous “Why do we want all these people from s—hole countries?” at which point everyone kind of stops, and they don’t know what to say.And Sen. Durbin says something about, “That’s not what this country is about.”He says something about the Statue of Liberty.And Lindsey Graham says to him: “You know, my parents came from what you might consider a ‘s—hole country.’ They were uneducated; they were poor.And that’s what America’s all about, and that’s what our—this is the diversity that makes our country great.”And he kind of pushes back.
And Trump is—you know, he just doesn’t get why you would want to do things this way.He keeps on talking about, “Well, we need a merit-based system,” and, “Why can’t we be more like Norway?”He had just seen the prime minister of Norway the day before, and they had a conversation in which she had talked about how “Our people are the happiest people in the world, and we have all this economic growth and very low crime, and everyone has all these great skills.”And Trump just—he doesn’t understand: “Why is it so controversial that I’m saying that we don’t want people from these countries?We want, like, the best people we can get.Like, why is that so controversial?”
But the reality is, by using that language, he has injected this really toxic ingredient into these negotiations.
And Stephen Miller’s role in this meeting?
So Miller is not saying much.I mean, Miller’s in the room, and he is the one who, along with John Kelly, the chief of staff, sort of got nervous when he got wind of the fact that Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin were going to be coming over to brief the president on this, because one of the recurring themes that you see with Trump and immigration is that his advisers really don’t trust him to be consistent and to push back against what they consider to be a bad deal.
So they’re constantly worried that if Trump gets in a room with Lindsey Graham, who they consider to be way too liberal on these issues, and a Democrat, Dick Durbin, he’s just going to give away the store.So they sort of I think did more of the work before the meeting in making sure that other Republicans were going to be in the room, and they had sort of backup to push back against whatever this was, if it ended up being a bad deal as they expected it would be.
But inside the Oval Office, they’re pretty quiet.
A Surge at the Border
Something happens around this time, though, after the EO to end the program [zero tolerance], which is the numbers at the border start to increase.There’s an effect that you describe. What is that, and what does it look like?
So as Nielsen feared, the ending of the policy has a pretty pronounced effect on the numbers of people showing up.The word gets back to Central America via the smugglers, via the news, however it gets there, that zero tolerance is not really zero tolerance anymore; that if you come with a child, in fact you will not be separated from that child; that they’re going to have to figure out a way to either hold you or release you, which was always the case in the past.
And so the numbers start to rise.And what they’re starting to see now is because the numbers had already been going up, and it all has a cumulative effect.The CBP facilities and the facilities where they’re holding unaccompanied children are starting to really fill up, and they’re almost at capacity.And it’s starting to hit a real crisis point in terms of resources, where they’re essentially still holding people because the president does not want people released in the way that they used to be released while they await the adjudication of their asylum claims, but people are continuing to come.
So you have facilities that were never designed to hold people for as long as they were holding them, that are overloaded.And the numbers at the border keep ticking up, ticking up, ticking up.And the president is now becoming even more enraged that he is unable to stem the flow here.And he’s looking for ways, particularly as the midterms approach, to—“What can I do, you know?Can I do an executive order?What resources do I have to bring to bear to make this stop?”
It’s a boomerang effect, is that right?
Yeah, it was—they called it the reverse boomerang effect, because instead of doing what they had wanted to do all along, which was to start to see the numbers crater, the numbers had cratered, and then they all of a sudden started, you know, going in the other direction in a much more pronounced way, because it was exponential.It wasn’t just, oh, they stopped coming; now they started coming again.It was like, oh, they stopped coming, and now they started coming in even greater numbers.
The book starts where our film starts, which is the Embassy, the “Breitbart Embassy” dinner.… Who were in that place in that Embassy that night?
Well, you have Steve Bannon, who is the head of Breitbart, the “alt-right” web publication that has been really covering immigration in a way that hardly any other news outlet had been, in a really sharp way, very much anti-establishment, beating up on Republicans who supported any kind of comprehensive reform, really sort of touting restrictionism as the way to go.You had Jeff Sessions, the senator from Alabama, who didn’t actually originally set out to be a leader on immigration but had decided, about a decade before, a little less than a decade before, during an attempt by George W. Bush to pass comprehensive immigration reform, that it was going to have to be him; if there was going to be a conservative who was opposed to this kind of change, legalization for undocumented immigrants who were already here, sort of relaxing restrictions for the rest of the system, that that was going to have to be him.There was no one else in the Senate, he thought at that time, that was going to be willing to play that role.
So Sessions and Bannon and Stephen Miller, as—as Sessions’, you know, top aide on these issues, had really already established this alliance.And it was a very kind of symbiotic ecosystem that they had going on, where you’d have discussions going on in the Senate, Stephen Miller trying to derail some of these compromises, these bipartisan compromises that were taking shape, Sessions going out on the floor just to talk about them and how bad they were.And then privately, Stephen Miller would keep in touch with Bannon and some of his reporters at Breitbart, feeding them stories, feeding them statistics, feeding them documents that would sort of make the case and be the fodder for their stories that would go up on Breitbart, saying, you know, what a travesty this is.
They developed their own sort of feedback loop.And so they had this very well-established alliance, and I don’t actually think at that time they necessarily believed they were going to be able to accomplish everything that they ended up accomplishing.And at the time, I think Bannon had recognized that, in terms of the idea of taking over the White House and getting the presidency, this was a pipe dream.It was very much on the order of “Wouldn’t it be great if …?” and, you know, “Jeff Sessions wouldn’t it—you could be the guy.”And he kind of laughed it off.
It wasn’t a meeting to actually plot out a step-by-step strategy to get to the place where they ultimately got, but it was very much kind of their first batting around of these ideas, and, you know, no question, even though they didn’t have a specific plan of action, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and I think to a little bit lesser degree Jeff Sessions, were very ambitious and felt like if they could get the message right, that this might all fall into place.
They knew the “forgotten” were out there somehow.And even though the “autopsy” and others had said, “Hey, Republicans, let’s be a little more moderate,” they had their fingers on a different pulse.And there was life in that body.
Absolutely.And they just took a completely different lesson from the 2012 elections and [Mitt] Romney’s loss than the whole rest of, well, the whole Republican establishment did.They consider themselves, you know, outside of the Republican establishment.And their—their takeaway was that the reason that Romney lost was not because he wasn’t, you know, sufficiently appealing to a broader swath of voters that includes Hispanics and younger voters and people of color, but because he didn’t appeal enough to the white working class, and that if you could find a candidate who was willing to carry a message about immigration and trade being dangerous and harmful to the white working class, that people would really respond to that, and that there was a lot of pent-up anger that was sort of there to be tapped.
Writing About Immigration and the Trump White House
… So first, tell me why the book?And why these guys?And why immigration?
So I had been covering immigration on and off for 15 years when Trump became president.And I was covering the Obama White House, so I wasn’t really involved in the campaign.I had never attended a Trump rally.I hadn’t really looked closely at any of his immigration proposals.I was, you know, obviously aware of the fact that immigration was at the very center of his message and of his campaign, and it was sort of this really vital part of his brand.But I hadn’t really honed in on, you know, where is this policy coming from?What’s the actual sort of rationale for it?
And the more I drilled down when he first took office, and because I had covered Stephen Miller when he was on Capitol Hill and knew that he was very much steeped in these issues, if not the policy part, then definitely the message part, it became clear to me pretty quickly that this was, if you understood Trump’s approach to immigration, you would be able to understand Trump.It was not just the fact that he—there was such a big part of his campaign message, although that was part of it.But it was almost a symbol of the kind of candidate and the kind of political figure he is in that he is about being provocative; he’s about saying things that no one else is willing to say.And so when he came down that escalator and made those comments about, you know, Mexicans coming, and they’re rapists, and they’re criminals, that obviously had a policy implication.But it was also just a sort of indication of how different of a political figure he was going to be.He was going to say things that no other politician would ever dare to say.And then the public was going to actually accept and embrace it in a way that we hadn’t seen before.So that, I thought, was a really important aspect of understanding why he became president, and if he was going to be successful or not, this issue was going to be a big part of the reason why.
So that’s a book.
Right.And then it was sort of after—after covering him for about a year, the White House team at The New York Times decided to do a series about the Trump presidency after one year.And Mike [Shear] and I pitched that we would do one of the stories about immigration, because it had been such a big part not just of the campaign but, as it turned out, a very big part of his first year in office.And we did a big story that sort of tried to pull back and look at the motivations where this all had come from for Trump and then how he tried to put it into practice.And the story ran at the very end of 2017.And after it ran, I think we both felt like, there’s a lot more here, and it’s not necessarily something that’s simple enough or, you know, that would necessarily lend itself to newspaper stories only.We felt like there was a rich vein there to be tapped.
Well, it’s so rich with characters.… And here you had three guys who really were outliers until that lightning struck on Nov. 8.
Well, that’s true.And also, because the campaign had been so haphazard and, frankly, underestimated, and nobody really thought, including Trump, that he was actually going to become president, they hadn’t done what campaigns usually do, which is to line up a whole pipeline of policy professionals and experts and analysts who could start on day one, just implementing, implementing, implementing.They had done almost none of that work going in, and so there were really only a few people who were familiar enough with the president’s vision on this, and in powerful enough positions to sort of execute on it.
And ironically, those people were not exactly the most effective internal players when it came to policy.They—they learned very quickly that they did not have the tools at their disposal to do what they wanted to do in a—in a quick way.
Stephen Miller’s Influence on Trump
How shocking was it to you that Stephen Miller was that close to the president of the United States throughout this whole saga, really the last man standing in lots of ways, of whispering in the president’s ear through everything that’s in the book?
Well, Stephen’s a really interesting figure.He can be very brash.He can really be offensive to people.He rubs a lot of people the wrong way.But when people like Stephen, when they—when they can relate to him, they really love him.And so it was pretty clear to me going in that he had somehow acquired that status with Donald Trump during the campaign, during all of those arena rallies that he would open for Trump.And you could tell, I mean, Trump being the showman that he is, you wouldn’t give that kind of a job to someone you didn’t really trust and think was fantastic.
He was the one who would get up there before Trump came in to speak and sort of rile up the crowd and, you know, talk about America first and talk about some of immigration, but trade, and lots of these issues that Trump was really trying to drive home.And so seeing that he had that role during the campaign, I could tell going in that he was going to have a very special place in the White House.
What was a little bit surprising is, as the policies kind of unfolded, as some of these things were public embarrassments, like the travel ban, and, you know, a lot of these disputes that came to light about things that Miller was involved in, that he never fell out of favor.And what became clear to me reporting on the White House for the newspaper, but also even more so when we went to do the book, was that he is a very effective internal player.He always kind of kept his alliances in the West Wing very, very carefully.He made a point of being friendly with and not adversarial to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.He wasn’t obviously ideologically aligned with them, but he tried to sort of message to them in subtle ways that he wasn’t going to get in their way.
He stuck to immigration and made it pretty clear to a lot of the other senior people in the West Wing that if they just left that to him, he would stay out of their stuff.Like he would stay out of Gary Cohn’s hair on economic stuff, and he would stay out of, to some degree, out of trade.He would not try to intervene too much on national security stuff with H. R. McMaster if he could have the refugee issue and all the other issues that sort of touch national security, that dealt with immigration.
And for the most part, that worked.And so his ability to do that and still kind of keep favor with Trump I think just gave him amazing staying power.And Trump really, in the end, told us that he felt that Stephen Miller was misunderstood, and, you know, he was much—he was brilliant, and he was not what his media reputation was, and he wasn’t a bad guy.And I think, you know, as Trump does, when he gets close to people, he felt some sort of responsibility for the fact that Miller has this reputation as this evil genius.He agrees with the genius part, but not the evil part.
Interviewing Stephen Miller
When you guys do an interview with him…the word you used—I reread it last night—was “defiant,” as you went in and talked to him…Tell me a little bit about that interview and about his aspect during it.
Yeah.So this was, as you say, was at the height of the family separation mess.It was just starting to become clear that this had really become unsustainable; that, you know, there was a major problem, and the public was starting to be aware of it, and the administration was starting to understand that they were going to have to do something about it.And we expected Miller to really try to smooth over the rough edges and, you know, “Let me explain what this really is.”But very quickly it became clear that that was not what he was about, and that’s not what he’s about.He doesn’t apologize for things.He basically just, you know, he was calm.He wasn’t ranting.But he was very, as he usually is, he was very confident in and defiant about sort of the rationale for this policy.
And he wanted us to understand what he thought was the driving factor here and that it wasn’t about, you know—he actually wasn’t saying, “We’re not separating families.”He was saying: “There’s a reason we have to do this.And you know, there’s a crisis at the border.Democrats won’t do anything about it.”And the essential formulation that he was putting together, which is something that was familiar to us from having dealt with Miller in the past, was almost like a blackmail situation where, you know, if the Democrats—if the public thinks that this is so bad, then they should let us do what we want to do to reform the immigration system.And if they’re not willing to do that, then we’re just going to have to do what we’re going to have to do to keep the integrity of the system.And that was kind of his position, and he was not letting go of it.
You’ve got to break eggs to make omelets, huh?
Yes.
Reporting on Gene Hamilton
… We came across Gene Hamilton, and you came across Gene Hamilton.My question is, how do you write about that?Here’s a guy who doesn’t want anything to do with the press.… How do you find him?And what efforts do you go to to try to get some work product from him, do whatever it is you have to do to tell the story of Gene Hamilton?
Well, it’s interesting, because unlike Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, you know, was not about being public; he was not about being in the press.You know, Miller also didn’t like to talk on the record, but his background is in communications, and he’s very much like, almost I think enjoys the whole cult-of-personality aspect of this.Hamilton is very much the opposite.We came across him because, as you know, as we did interviews with various people at the White House, at DHS [Department of Homeland Security], at DOJ [Department of Justice] about how these policies took shape, almost invariably Gene’s name would come up.It would be “Gene this and Gene that,” and “Gene called,” and “Gene did this.”
And his alliance with Miller was very important.And you—we very quickly got the sense that when Miller wanted something to happen in one of the key agencies, Gene was like his go-to.One of the other reasons that Miller ended up being, I think, successful in keeping his position in the White House was he was very careful to keep his fingerprints off of things.So he would always have an aide from the Domestic Policy Council, or sometimes Gene Hamilton, sort of do the work on his behalf.He would, you know, have Gene make the call or have Gene send the memo, have Gene send the email.
And it was hard.Gene was not a person who—who wanted anything to do with the press.He did not want a public reputation for these things.We tried to talk to as many people as we could who had dealt with him and get a sense of where he was coming from on some of these key issues, and got the sense, you know, early on, that he—one thing that he and Stephen really have in common is he’s a very loyal person.He was extraordinarily loyal to Jeff Sessions, and he—
And they had both worked there.
They had both worked there, yes.And in the course of reporting the chapter—the chapters about refugees, I had gone back and rewatched some of the hearings that had happened on Capitol Hill in 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to increase the refugee ceiling.And there was one hearing where Sessions was presiding, because he was the chairman, and over his right shoulder was Stephen Miller, and over his left shoulder was Gene Hamilton.And lo and behold, a year later, or a year and a half later, here they are, and they’re actually driving everything, from the White House and from first the Department of Homeland Security and then from the Justice Department.So he was a really crucial cog in that whole machine.
Understanding Kirstjen Nielsen
Talk to me a little bit—help me characterize Kirstjen Nielsen, who finds herself definitely in the hot seat.Give us a sense of her.Bring her to life for us, will you?
So Kirstjen Nielsen had been an official in the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration.She had a background in security, but mostly cybersecurity.And so she was coming to the job with, you know, some experience in some of the aspects of the Department of Homeland Security, but not so much on immigration.Her real, I think, primary qualification, the reason she got the job was because she had forged a very close alliance with John Kelly.She had been brought in early on to be his deputy, and they had kind of bonded while he was Homeland Security secretary, and then she came over to be his deputy when he went to be the chief of staff.
She is a very tough person.She had very sharp elbows in the White House.There were a lot—there was a lot of griping about her, about how she tried to kind of muscle other people out of the way.And she was, you know, she was a hard-—.I think one of the reasons she and Kelly got along is because she has a very kind of military approach to things, you know, very process-oriented, like, let’s do this the right way.She wants to check all the boxes.And so she was never a person who kind of had a worldview on immigration that matched with President Trump’s necessarily.
But she did understand that she had a job to do, and she was about trying to get it done in the most straightforward way she could.She understood what the mandate was.She might not always agree with it, but she had to figure out a way to get from point A to point B, and she was very kind of goal-oriented in that way, and how can—how can we—how can I work with what I’ve been given, even if it’s a raw hand, and sort of come out with something that makes some sense?
But I think that she found it very difficult to deal with President Trump, and one thing that she would do that not everyone would do, that got under Trump’s skin, would be to talk back to him.When he would berate her, which happened often at some of these cabinet meetings, and in one-on-one meetings, meetings in the Oval Office, she would get back in his face and say, “Well, no, sir, that’s not right,” or, “We can’t do that,” or, “I’m not able to.We don’t have that power.”And that just really rubbed him the wrong way.
But that’s very much in keeping with who she is.She’s not a shrinking violet.She’s not going to say, “Oh, yes, sir, absolutely, sir,” if she thinks it’s something that is fundamentally not doable.So I think that, you know, she’s another one who, in the end he—Trump said he felt sad about the fact that she had to go, but she just wasn’t like—it just wasn’t working out with her at the helm.But he really gave her an impossible time.
And in the end, one of the—one official that we spoke to, that I spoke to for the book, said to me: “You know, her downfall was there’s a piece of paper every single day that has numbers on it, and that’s how he’s going to evaluate her work product.And it’s how many people are crossing the border.And if those numbers don’t say the right thing, like, she’s going to be toast no matter what.”And I think that was ultimately the reason that he ended up—
And that piece of paper is sometimes, frequently, often passed to him by Stephen Miller.
Very often, yes.He’s a fan of statistics and pieces of paper.And they often rile up—they often would rile up, you know, the president, and in a way that was not great news for Kirstjen Nielsen.
Miller was no fan of Kirstjen, I gather.
He wasn’t.I mean, I don’t think they clashed directly all that often.But clearly he saw her as part of the problem, the problem being a bureaucracy that was just unwilling to do what needed to be done.
Yeah.
He had this very expansive view of presidential power—has this very expansive view of presidential power, where essentially his belief is that if the president wants it done, it should be done, and there should be a way to get it done.And that’s not necessarily always the case.And certainly the people who were advising Kirstjen Nielsen, and Nielsen herself, understood that you had to have a process; you had to have some way of justifying what you were doing.You couldn’t just say, “Well, the president wants this, so it happens.”
And so he got very frustrated with her.And there was a lot of tension, you know, between Miller, who had all these grand ideas of what could get done, and Nielsen, who was like in the trenches trying to get things done and telling him no, like, these are—these things are not possible.
Who is Kris Kobach?
Tell me who Kris Kobach is, and then what was his role, as far as you could learn, in inciting the attorneys general, especially Texas’ [Ken] Paxton, to push hard on the DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], on the DACA moment that allowed Sessions, at least from our outside perspective, to put the president’s feet to the fire on that issue?
So Kris Kobach was the secretary of state of Kansas and had kind of built a reputation for himself as a proponent of these very harsh voter ID laws that essentially were seen by critics as ways of suppressing, you know, minority voters, immigrant voters from voting in elections.And he had, outside of Kansas, kind of developed a national reputation as somebody who—a conservative who was very anti-immigration, anti-immigrant, and had found ways to both design laws, state laws at the state level, that would make it more difficult for immigrants, and also to devise legal strategies to defend those laws in court.
Now, he had not been all that successful.He’d been slapped down several times by many federal judges.But this was kind of a cottage industry for him, and he was known as, you know, a leading thinker on some of these restrictionist laws at the state level.And he had—you know, Miller knew him, and Sessions knew him well, and he had sort of been in contact with them during the campaign.
And Bannon, yes?
And Bannon, yes, absolutely.And so then during the transition, he—Kobach, you know, very much wanted to be part of the administration.And during the transition, he was one of those people who we saw, you know, paraded into [Trump National Golf Club] Bedminster.And in fact, he was carrying a list of talking points into—when he went in to see Trump that, you know, we wondered later whether that was deliberately or by accident that it was facing out.So you could see all of the things that he was advocating.But they were all sort of the wish list of immigration restrictionist, you know, and DACA and, you know, impose these—impose new bans and all the things—many of the things that came to fruition, although some of them only develop later.
Early on in the—in Trump’s first year in office, it became clear that he was really waffling on DACA, and he was being told by the entire establishment and, you know, tech executives and his own daughter and son-in-law, like: “You can’t end this program.It would be horrible.It would be really disruptive.These—you know, the ‘Dreamers’ are essentially American kids.They weren’t born here, but they were brought up here, you know.This would be really bad.”
And Bannon was getting really worried that this was actually becoming a problem, that Trump was not moving quickly to end it, and he was actually seeming to be reluctant to do it at all.So he and Kobach got together, and as it happened, it was actually kind of, I think, it was described to me as a happy coincidence that Kobach had already been talking to several attorneys general in some of the states that opposed DACA, who wanted to bring a legal challenge.
And so they decided that, you know, this was going to be—this was an important thing to elevate.Trump needed to know that, if he didn’t do something, these attorneys general were going to go ahead and challenge the law.And so, you know, there were discussions among him and those attorneys general.Sessions always said that he never discussed it with the attorneys general himself, but it was pretty clear that there was an alliance there.And Bannon was very much convinced that Trump had to have a date certain to make this decision, and so they did end up sending a letter in June of 2017 saying, “If you don’t do something, we will sue by Sept. 5.”And so that ended up being the forcing mechanism.
The Influence of Conservative Media
Let me ask you about the power of influence from Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, obviously, the Fox evening anchors, [Lou] Dobbs and the obvious one.
[Sean] Hannity, yeah.
Yeah.And Mark Levin, and all of it.We see it happen around the DACA, the two days between Jan. 9 and Jan. 11 meetings.We see the pressure mounting.We see the president, who seems to be on one side, then on another side, going back and forth, all throughout all of this story.And you must have seen it, too.How does it work with him?What kind of sway does that side of the political discourse exert on this president of the United States?
It has huge sway.He—what he sees on Fox, in many ways, is more important than anything else in terms of how he’s thinking about the effect of his policies, whether he’s popular or not.He really sees it as a proxy for approval more broadly, what he’s hearing about his own administration and about himself on Fox News.And so when Laura Ingraham, you know, criticizes a spending deal because it doesn’t have wall money in it, that is like a—that’s a crushing blow for him, and he gets really angry.He would say to Nielsen often, you know: “Lou Dobbs hates you.Laura Ingraham hates you.”And that was sort of code or shorthand for like: “My people, my base, my—you know, the source of my power doesn’t like you.And you’re not, you know, performing the function that you need to perform for me, which is essentially to get me validation from that group.”
He, I think, very much saw them as a proxy for his base, you know, for the voters who got him to the White House.But also it was personal.He—he would often say things like: “You know, my friends are making fun of me.My friends think that you’re, you know, ineffectual and weak.”And he does—I mean, he I think regards Sean Hannity as a friend.He regards Lou Dobbs as an ally.And—and when your friends are criticizing you, to President Trump, that’s the worst possible scenario.
So he was, you know, they could be very influential in his thinking about things.And the White House, you know, senior people in the White House came to understand that and spent a lot of time trying to control and influence what was going to be on Fox News, because they understood that that was going to affect what the president was going to think and what he was going to do.
So for instance, during the—right before the shutdown, when there was talk about possibly the president dropping his demand for border wall money and sort of letting it go into the next year and not shutting down the government over it, there was a whole scene where he got wind of the fact, because there was a headline on Drudge that said that the U.S. was going to be sending $5 billion in aid to Mexico as part of this development package that had been being negotiated at behind the scenes.
And the headline was something like, you know, “Trump or U.S. to give $5 billion to Mexico.Won’t get $5 billion for the wall.”And he is handed this headline, and he goes crazy about it.And for the next few hours, three—Bill Shine, who is a former Fox executive who was, at that time, communications director; Jared Kushner; and one of Nielsen’s top aides—spend the next few hours calling around to Fox and other places saying, “Please don’t run with this headline; please don’t run with this headline,” because they knew how influential it could be if he saw it on Fox.All of a sudden it was true, and it was going to be a problem.
…Is immigration even more, in some way, vivid for him because it’s a border, because numbers come across every month, because he promised so much from the wall, to everything else?Does it feel to you like we’re at a sort of central moment with him around immigration?
I think it’s very personal to him in a lot of ways, because he did build up his political brand around it, and he sees it as kind of a litmus test of his effectiveness.You know, if immigration is—if he is performing on immigration, then he’s doing a good job, and if he’s not, then he isn’t, because I think he understands the power of the issue for his voters.And he also, you know, he’s a very effective demagogue.He’s—this is—this is one of Trump’s big sort of talents, if you want to put it that way.And immigration is very easy to demagogue.You know, it’s—there’s a lot of gray areas.There’s some black and white.It’s very easy to make all of it seem black and white, but it’s really not.It’s very nuanced and complicated.
I’m not convinced that he understands many of the nuances, even now.But they don’t matter to him, because he understands the emotional and the visceral kind of reaction that they can spark among people, and not just his base.He knows that, you know, when he talks about undocumented people committing crimes and sanctuary cities, that that is—that is scary, not only to very conservative people who are anti-immigrant, but also to independent people who are more in the middle of the road, but who just are concerned with security and want to be safe.
And one of the things that he said to us in the interview was, you know, “I don’t—I don’t want just like anyone being able to come across the border, and neither do you.”You know, and that’s a totally true statement.That’s true of me.That’s probably true of almost every American.So—so I think that’s part of the reason it’s so important to him, because it allows him to make this very black-and-white case on an issue that is really central to his political identity and, you know, to stoke a lot of fear.
The 2020 Election
And we’re on the edge of the 2020 presidential election.It feels like Miller, who manages to survive when all others fall, and Trump are going to carry immigration as a central pillar of the reelection campaign into 2020.
I think they definitely are.I mean, you know, he is already talking about how much he has built the wall, and the wall is great, even though he really hasn’t succeeded in building very much wall.And because Congress has not been able to act and do anything on immigration, I think he will really, you know, use that as a major attack against Democrats, and even probably against his own party to say that, you know: “No one’s willing to do what needs to be done.I need to have a second term so that we can actually do what needs to be done.”And I think he’s going to really hammer at that message.
And the more there continues to be a humanitarian crisis, and the huge numbers of people showing up at the border, the more he will be able to point to it as, you know, a salient thing.And already we are seeing that, you know, immigration has risen immensely in sort of the minds of voters as an important issue.Where it used to be, you know, it wasn’t the top issue for most voters, he has really, you know, rocketed it up to the top of the conversation nationally, and that is, in and of itself, somewhat of a victory for him.
In this—I suppose you can tell me if it’s part of the strategy, is the attack on “the squad,” the Ayanna Pressley, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] attack, is it part and parcel of the immigration issue in some way in his mind?
I think it all comes from the same place, which is a sense that, if you can get voters thinking about us versus them, what’s good for me versus people who are different from me, who, you know, maybe don’t share my worldview, who maybe look down on me, that that is good for him.That’s the kind of case he wants to make for—make to people.And I think he is trying to do that with the squad.
And I—you know, it’s not just immigration.I think he is—his part of his point is to essentially, you know, paint all of the Democratic Party and whoever ends up being the Democratic nominee with this broad brush of being radical and being leftist and, you know—but it is a very similar vein to a lot of the attacks we hear from him on immigration, and that it’s about fear; it’s about them being dangerous.They hate America, he says.And it’s—it almost kind of hearkens back to the whole birther message that, you know, was a big part of why his initial advisers thought immigration would be a good place for him to build on his base, because it is inherently about like, who is the most American, and who deserves to be American?And, you know, do we trust—do we really trust people who aren’t native-born?And that’s kind of the root of all of it.
Jeff Sessions’ Lasting Impact
…What was the effect of Jeff Sessions as attorney general before he flamed out?What was it?
Well, you know, ironically, Jeff Sessions was probably the person in the administration who did the most substantively on immigration along the lines of what President Trump wanted.I mean, the “zero tolerance” policy was what drove all of what we saw happening in 2018.It did actually start to have its intended effect before the president decided to pull the plug.He—you know, he worked very hard to try to figure out a way to defund sanctuary cities and was not able to do that.But he changed a lot of the policies around asylum so that it made it more difficult to claim asylum effectively.And he was able to use the levers of the Justice Department much more effectively than anyone else in the administration to actually deliver to Trump what he wanted.
And the end, the travel ban did survive.A version of the travel ban did survive.And it was, you know, in large measure, he, working with the Department of Homeland Security, who was able to make that happen.He consistently pushed forward on these things when other members of the administration were not willing to.And unique among them, he was willing to really own it, because that was already his political profile; that was already his brand.You know, at various points, Kirstjen Nielsen, Elaine Duke, even John Kelly were much more reluctant about being the public face of a lot of this stuff.Jeff Sessions was willing to do that for Trump.And his thanks was to be run out from it because of an issue that had nothing to do with it.But it was—it was ironic in the end, because that is why they first forged their alliance.It’s why he ended up as attorney general.And so, you know, Russia aside, he actually was able to be pretty effective while he was there.
Steve Bannon’s Legacy
… When he looks at his report card, or we look at his report card, or you and your book look at his report card, even though you don’t do that, where does Bannon land?
I think he was very successful in influencing Trump to stay on this issue of immigration and not let go, to really put his foot on the accelerator on some key issues.But I also think that he overshot, as on so many other issues.He ended up being associated with some of the really botched pieces of this policy, and because he was so willing to be public about where he stood, allowed Trump to be characterized in ways that were not always helpful to him on immigration.So, you know, the travel ban, he was saying like: “Go, go, go, go, go, let’s do it.We don’t need to show the bureaucracy.We don’t need leaks.You know, let’s—let’s go full bore.”That didn’t work out very well in the end, and they had to kind of reverse-engineer that whole situation.
DACA, I think he was maybe a little bit more effective.But for the short time that he was there, I think he spent most of it trying to figure out how to be an effective operator in the West Wing.He didn’t always succeed in that.
Stephen Miller’s Staying Power
And Steve has survived.What’s the short answer on why and how Stephen Miller, of the three of them, is still there?
I think because of his personal bond with Trump that he developed during the campaign, because he has consistently delivered him new ideas.He’s always sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what new policies can we try, what new ideas can we try, and really, the message that Trump wants out there, which is that, you know, I’m going to pull every single lever I can to get at this issue.And so I think that’s allowed him to stay in Trump’s good graces even as other people have kind of fallen away.
If they got together for another dinner, and they were giving each other a sort of, “So this is what we did”—pretty stunning, actually, if you look at it in one way.
Yes.I think that’s right.But I also think there is a recognition of the risks of how this has all turned out, just looking at the sheer numbers.There are more people showing up at the border now than there were ever before, than there were in the Obama administration, and there were, you know—so sort of in the raw materials, they’re in a dangerous place, because Trump has made all these promises—“I am going to fix it.I’m going to build this wall.I’m going to turn all these people away”—and he hasn’t been able to do it.So again, that’s a messaging—potential messaging advantage for the president.But if you’re Steve Bannon, and you set out to, you know, really get your arms around this problem, if you’re Jeff Sessions and you really wanted to like, solve it and have a more lawful system, I’m not sure you think that you are there.And that’s kind of where things are right now.
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