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Ken Cuccinelli

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Ken Cuccinelli

Acting Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Ken Cuccinelli is the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a role he assumed in June 2019. He served as attorney general of Virginia from 2010 to 2014.

This interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on July 10, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Zero Tolerance

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Rejecting the Republican “Autopsy”

So it’s 2013.Mitt Romney has lost.Reince Priebus and the other Republicans in the establishment have said, “We’ve got to do something about getting more Republican voters.”They organize the idea of, let’s open up—let’s be a little more open to women, to brown people, to all kinds of other people in the country.And what are your thoughts about that?

Well, you’re referring to the “autopsy” after 2012, and, you know, it’s always worth looking back and learning.But most of the Republican establishment didn’t utilize the supposed lessons of 2012 unless doing so fit other motives.And I saw that supporting conservative candidates all the time.You look at Darryl Glenn in 2016, a spectacular African American conservative candidate in Colorado, graduate of the Air Force Academy, elected in one of their largest counties, got no help or support from the Republican establishment, lost by three points in one of two winnable states.Well, where were the conclusions of the autopsy in Darryl Glenn’s race?They were absent.

What was your position on immigration at that time?

Rule of law.Not much different than it is now.I have the same concerns many people do about security at the border and visa overstays.And I don’t know that I’ve changed very much.The politics has changed around us quite a bit on the issue.And frankly, the issue of immigration has helped drive some of the changes in politics.

It sure has.It’s like—if the idea of the autopsy was to kind of remove politics from it and just kind of make it better, it had quite the opposite effect.

Yeah, I don’t know that the autopsy ultimately had much effect on how most individuals in positions of influence addressed immigration.I think it was looked to more to address candidates and campaigns.And to your point, it wasn’t really used for that.

It’s interesting.We’re following [Steve] Bannon, [Jeff] Sessions and [Stephen] Miller as they sort of get their feet wet on the issue.Breitbart starts to report it back in ’13/’14. …And the way that they look at immigration as an understanding of who is the forgotten base out there that will eventually become Trump voters and people who want to get involved in immigration and have a different opinion than the people they were talking about in the autopsy, is what I mean by that.

Yeah. Well, and the leadership of both parties, in my view, is out of touch with that, and as your question implies, that led to political course that ultimately led to President Donald J. Trump.

Defeating Eric Cantor

Let’s talk about one of their first motions.We’ll move along quickly, but I want to try to cover what happened with [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor.What was that message that his defeat sent to the Republican establishment?What did you see?

Well, of course I was in Virginia and watching that race, and until the very end, nobody gave Dave Brat a chance, being outspent the way he was and so forth.But Dave was extremely straightforward in his issue set, and he did address immigration.And Eric Cantor was in the Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment.And when I say “Republican establishment,” I mean in 2013 in that lane.I think there’s been a lot of changes for a lot of those folks in the last couple of years, but back in 2013, Dave Brat’s position was a real exposure of the political weakness of this open-borders/driven-by-business, big-business immigration policy, which really was almost no policy at all.

How shocked were you that Brat won?

I was surprised, but I wouldn’t go all the way to shocked.I had some reporters ask me beforehand, you know, “What do you think’s going to happen?”I said, “Well, I’m not going to say Dave is a favorite, but all of you who are writing this isn’t possible need to check your premises.”And I wouldn’t go any farther than that.I don’t want to suggest I had a better crystal ball than that.But Dave was clearly tapping into a tremendous grassroots vein that hadn’t really been tapped singularly like he did up to that point.

What do you think the power of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Breitbart, all of that was on that particular race?

Well, there’s no question if you’re Dave Brat, having outlets with already established pipelines of readers and listeners, as Laura Ingraham had, Ann Coulter and Breitbart and so forth, was a boon, because the mainstream, the usual stuff, if you will, defaulted to the “Well, Eric Cantor’s going to win” position, the presumptive position.And it was others who were willing to question that, particularly in light of Dave’s intelligence and how cogently he brought across his positions and how strong he was, not just on immigration, but on other economic issues that matter to average Americans.And that’s a key element of this.

When you talk to Miller, Sessions and Bannon about it, they say this was the moment where the establishment finally got a message that there was this base out there, there were these active Republicans, and they were going to vote a certain way, and you’d better pay attention to what we’re saying about immigration.

Right. And that could convert this issue into a vote switch.You know, you talk about issues as a candidate.In Northern Virginia, we talk about transportation.Well, if you’re talking about transportation, you care about it.That gets you a long way with most voters.The real question if you want to win an election is, what issue moves the needle, moves votes?Well, Dave Brat proved this issue moves votes.And if you want evidence, all you have to do is look at what happened from June 11 to the end of June 2014 in terms of Republicans getting off the then-popular immigration bills, which were really open-borders-style bills.

It really did turn it around, didn’t it?

Absolutely. It was no question.It was a turning point on the immigration issue.

The Trump Campaign

So the way our three main subjects in this film tell the story, they then went looking for a candidate for president of the United States, believe it or not.Talk about a pipe dream.They go looking.They talk to Lou Dobbs first, but very quickly they land at Donald Trump.Why?

Well, you’d have to ask them that.

But what did you see? I mean, there is–

I mean, obviously we had a very crowded field on the Republican side.And there were only a few who had a track record that could appeal to what Dave Brat appealed to.It was a relatively small number of those 17 candidates.I was with one of them, [Sen.] Ted Cruz.Donald Trump, of course, made this a cornerstone issue, even as he came down the golden escalator, you know?And—and it launched him.And it is no accident that one of everybody’s favorite clips about the retrospective on Donald Trump is, “Oh, who’s going to win?,” and it’s Ann Coulter being laughed off the stage in one of the television interviews where she says the next president will be Donald J. Trump.And they all laugh hysterically.And we all still enjoy that video clip to today.

What button did it push, immigration, in the base that helped Trump ascend?

It taps into two things, first of all, how most of the power structure, particularly the farther up the power structure you go in both parties, ignores ordinary people.Totally unideological.Just an element of “the swamp.”This is something regular people care about, and they can see the effect.It isn’t hard to explain to people how it affects them and for them to understand it.That is the single biggest factor.And it’s a non-ideological factor entirely.

Of course, as the years have gone on, the differences between Republicans and Democrats, at least their bases, has gotten wider on immigration, not narrower.It used to be a relatively—you look at Bill Clinton clips, you look at [Joe] Biden in the Senate and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid and all these kinds of people from the ’90s and early 2000s, and you could quote, you know, Harry Reid, and it sounds like [Sen.] Mike Lee today.And there was a fairly strong bipartisan consensus that we need to protect our laws, that we need to protect our borders, and we need to have in place a system to make all of that work.

And now we are in a place that is very different from that.Really only one side of the discussion wants to make it work.The other side sees advantage, it seems to me, in failure in the immigration system.

When Trump is running, when do you know—I know you’re a Cruz guy, but when do you know that the immigration thing is really landing for him?

Oh, I knew that part was landing for him early on.He, you know, he got traction pretty quickly.That issue is why.That issue is why he got traction as quickly as he did.Maybe as an unconventional candidate he works his way in and works his way up, but he really shot up there quickly because he focused on this issue that was a vote mover.And even in that Republican field of 17 strong candidates, it was a differentiator, and it was a big differentiator.

How much does it matter that Sessions was the first senator that put the cap on and supported Trump and brought with him Steve Miller?

Well, certainly, if you’re an unconventional outsider candidate like Donald Trump, you actually do want some people who are part of the system to validate your legitimacy.And that was Jeff Sessions’ most important role, in my view, in the success of President Trump.And by that I don’t mean it was the most important thing to President Trump; it was the most important thing Jeff Sessions did for President Trump—now-President Trump, then-candidate Trump.

And he and Miller really brought a kind of idea, a kind of burning idea they’ve had for a whole long time about what needed to happen with the immigration issue.

Well, they certainly did, but they also found a person in Donald Trump who agreed with them.And obviously that’s critical; that’s why they got on board with him.And the potency of that politically proved itself out.

So he wins.To your surprise?

No, I wouldn’t say that.The surprise was initial at how successful he was in rocketing up.But once he had done it and how he did it, really all he did after that was keep doing the same thing.So, you know, if you’re going to say, “Gee, why does that keep working?,” and question it, you know, you’re ignoring the fact that it has worked up to now.

Why was it working?

You know, bottom line, people were so fed up just in the primary level with what they had seen from their own leadership for so long, I think they were ready to take the most unconventional person who was credible and they thought could win and who they agreed with on the most things.You know, there’s no one single item; everybody checks a lot of boxes.But here he was, hitting a sweet spot on an issue that he was in a minority among these 17 candidates in addressing correctly from the base’s standpoint.And he came right out of the box doing that.

The Dreamers and DACA

So he gets elected.What do you understand– What did you understand as his promises list that Bannon had on the wall in the West Wing on immigration and the order that he was going to try to execute them?Did you have a sense of it?

I didn’t have a sense of the order of them.I had a sense of them from a, you know, a concept standpoint where we were going to actually start enforcing the law, which sounds so simple, but you look at DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals].President Obama said 22 times before he effectuated DACA that it wasn’t legal, and he did it anyway.So—and he did a lot of other things like that, DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents], which is now gone via the courts.But that change alone was enormous.And let’s face it: The Republican leadership in Congress didn’t want the law enforced, and I think largely because a lot of donors didn’t want the law enforced.And the same was happening for different reasons on the Democrat side.

So when they—we’ve talked to lots of people on the DACA side who say that at the moment that he gets elected, they all thought DACA’s gone.

Yes, I would put myself in that boat.

Is that right?

Yeah.

What did you think?

Well, it was illegal to begin with, and it seemed to me that was simple enough.Now, what we’ve seen since the day he was inaugurated is an unprecedented violation of the separation of powers by courts in assaulting President Trump’s agenda.We’ve got a bunch of people in robes who want to be president for a day on the particular issue in front of them.And if they want to do that, they really should run for president, not stick with the bench.I mean, you know the numbers, record-breaking national injunctions.And I can tell you as a former state attorney general who used to contend in court with the federal government when they were outside the boundaries of the law, it used to be hard to get standing.Well, that isn’t even a consideration if you pick the right judge on the left.

Explain what you mean by “standing,” for the viewer who doesn’t know.

Sure.If you’re not injured by something, you don’t get to sue.If you are injured, then you have standing to bring a suit.The courts don’t just let anybody walk in: “Hey, I saw Fred punch Joe in the nose, and my name’s Tom.I’m going to walk in and sue over that.”Well, you don’t get to do that.Only the guy who was punched in the nose gets to do that.So if you’re not harmed, you don’t get to sue. That’s standing.

And that was a high threshold.And there’s arguments why it ought to be a high threshold.Otherwise our courts would be clogged with policy debates.And yet here, after President Obama is gone, the courts, especially, most famously, or infamously, the 9th Circuit, have virtually flushed that requirement down the toilet.And it is a terrible violation of the separation of powers to a degree we have never seen, an assault by the judiciary on the executive branch before.

The Travel Ban

… Immediately, within five days, the travel ban is enacted. Bang!It’s not exactly an immigration issue, but it is an immigration issue.

No, it’s an immigration issue, and it’s done under that law.

So what did you think?

I thought it was consistent with how he campaigned, and certainly you look at the targeted countries, which they drew from Obama administration list of analysis, were quite legitimate.So I thought this was him keeping campaign promises; that’s what I thought.

And what happened to DACA in those early days? Do you have any idea?

I don’t remember exactly how that all unfolded.I know in the broader scheme of things, and to my shock as a constitutional lawyer, things that the Obama administration brought into being with either guidance or memorandums, courts block the executive branch from undoing using the same tools.So they put something in place with a memo that’s illegal, and the fact that it’s illegal isn’t enough to stop it, according to some courts.

Now, when these have made it up to the Supreme Court, like the so-called travel ban, the president wins, because—and he’s going to keep winning.And a lot of these judges, I believe, are attempting to wait this president out.And that’s—they know how slow the court process is, and they know, I believe, that some of them are not being consistent with the law or to their oath, and yet they proceed the way they do to impede this president just because they don’t agree with him.

Jeff Sessions

It’s interesting that Sessions becomes the attorney general.What do you think the effect—and his number one issue is immigration.What’s the effect of having the attorney general—of having Jeff Sessions as the attorney general on this issue?

Well, he certainly brings someone committed to pursuing the president’s agenda in this area in one of the most important positions in government, regardless of the issue, attorney general.Also, somebody known to the Senate; of course he was confirmed.And he was assertive in the immigration space, and for some time.

What did he do that we don’t know about, really?I don’t mean secretly, but what did he do? What did it matter that he was doing besides–

A lot of people don’t know the structure of how immigration is treated, and it’s very messy.But the immigration judges, which really are just administrative law judges, are in the Department of Justice, and they have delegated authority from the attorney general.And that means they’re doing work given by law to the attorney general, and the attorney general is allowed to then delegate it to these administrative law judges.

But ultimately, these are decisions of the attorney general.And so he, rather famously I think, but people don’t know the process, reverses some precedents related to asylum cases in particular, which is the area where—one of the areas where we have the biggest backlog.We’re at about 325,000-case backlog.And part of the reason for that is we have so many fraudulent claims—or at least claims that are totally inconsistent with how America has granted asylum in the past, that are swamping the system—and they swamp the system where the fake asylum claimants are clogging up the same pipeline used by legitimate asylum seekers who are persecuted on a variety of bases that have a long history of being granted protection here in the United States.

How important was what he did?

I certainly think it was very important, in part as a simple matter of bureaucratic culture.People at DOJ and across the federal government aren’t used to things changing.And here, instead of grousing about it and wringing his hands, he actually made a decision and—and changed how those cases are decided, which was entirely within his authority and entirely appropriate.

But again, so there’s the legal change, but there’s also the cultural shock in a bureaucracy of just having someone with the guts to finally do what they said they were going to do.

Ending DACA

Let’s talk about DACA now—then.It’s Sept. 5; the clock is ticking.There have been attorney generals [sic], certainly [Ken] Paxton from Texas has come forward and sent a letter.Sessions goes over to the White House.Tell me what’s in play at that moment in terms of what’s going to happen with DACA.

Well, of course, having been an attorney general, I know how they’re approaching it.And they had a position where DACA, the DACA lawsuit was essentially a do-over of the DAPA—much less famous—lawsuit, which was won by the state attorneys general to block the DAPA program.Again, same legal basis, everything pretty much the same except parents instead of children—P instead of C.And famously that one was tied in the Supreme Court 4-4 because Justice [Antonin] Scalia had passed away, and so the 5th Circuit’s injunction against it was upheld.And then along comes the DACA suit, same basic legal premise, should have the same outcome.And—but you have a new administration now.And so the attorneys general said, look, if you all fix this, then we don’t need to go forward with the litigation.

And presumably—I obviously don’t have insight into this—but presumably that was what Jeff Sessions was having conversations with the White House about and how they were going to manage that, both the litigation side of it and just dealing with the policy in the fashion they wanted to.

It’s obviously a hard one for the president in some ways.

Well, when you’re being sued and you are now in the government, the natural instinct is to defend against the suit.But that’s not always the correct position to take.Ninety-nine percent of the time it is, but if, you know—I’ll ask it in the form of a question: Should you defend an action that you understand to be illegal?The answer is, probably not.I mean, maybe you can come up with an argument, but if you know sincerely that’s not a legitimate argument, lawyers aren’t supposed to make those arguments.

When Sessions makes the announcement, what did you think?

Well, I thought, again I thought it was the—it was what I expected coming out of the campaign.I mean, President Trump was not a wallflower in what he said he was going to do.And here he was keeping his promises.

Then he gets killed by Rachel Maddow and MSNBC and The New York Times.He gets whacked around.

Yeah, well, I think they expected that.I don’t expect to see any different.And unlike many of his predecessors, this president doesn’t sit in the corner sucking his thumb in the fetal position worrying about what The Washington Post and New York Times think about him.He presses ahead to do the work of his office as he said he was going to do.

He has a meeting with [then-House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer and sends out a tweet the next day that says, “Don’t worry ‘Dreamers’; we’re OK.”What did you make of that?

That was certainly a confusing step.He’s obviously being friendly with Schumer and Pelosi, and I understood that was going on.And you know, for all of his rambunctiousness, he appears to me to be a person who tries to get along with the people he’s interacting with at any given time.So—but on a policy level, that was confusing.And they of course-corrected pretty quickly.

… In January there is the– There is the last DACA things, there is the televised meeting, the “Art of the Deal meeting” they call it, where [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein and he—and he starts in, “Write something up; bring it to me; I want to help out here."Is this, again, a case of him trying to please whoever's over at the–?

Well, at that point I think he was in a situation where, if I remember correctly, it was more “What can I get in a broader deal for this?”And you know, I don’t think we’ve seen a final deal yet that’s been worth taking, but I know the president has been working on one.… It won’t address everything in immigration, but it will be the first time I think you’ll have seen a really thorough legislative push that doesn’t deal with one discrete issue, but deals with a whole bunch at once.

Who’s behind what all of that is?

The president is behind all that.

You feel like he’s involved in it in a kind of—

I think it’s very clear that he’s driving all of that, yes.

When do you start to personally say, “I want to head in to government; I want to put my oar in the water on this issue”?

Well, of course I was deeply engaged in criminal justice reform and have been for years and years, though in the last two years, that began to be focused at the federal level, not just in the states I had worked in on the subject.And so I spent a lot of time with the president’s whole team on that issue, especially as we got near the end.

And—and we were successful.The president’s willingness to do what his predecessor wouldn’t do is—and that is actually move to solutions instead of just talking about an issue to use it politically—made all the difference in the world.And I think it provided some momentum of success that we hopefully will see rolled into the immigration issue.I think you see a lot of the tactics, just the conversation across the aisle being used to try to grease the skids, if you will, and make that possible.

But the reality is, it’s such a tough issue that it’s going to take a lot of work to get all the way through a legislative solution.

The 2018 Midterm Elections

When we’re heading for the 2018 midterm elections, the talk of caravans, the talk of [murdered student] Mollie Tibbetts, the talk of all of the things that were happening then, how important was the push that the president was and Steve Miller and others were involved in at that time?What were the stakes in there?

Fundamentally, if particularly the House, then majority Republican, had actually moved forward with good bills instead of some of the junk the leadership got behind, and things more in line with the president’s own agenda, I think they’d still be in the majority.

That central.

Absolutely. Absolutely.It was central in a way—think of Obamacare as not a bad political analogy.The 2010, ’14 and ’16 elections were won heavily with the involvement of that issue.Now, obviously we talked about ’16 and immigration also, but here’s an issue that was timely, contemporary, they had the ability to address, and they didn’t do it.And the president has been left to do more of it within his administration because he’s not getting congressional help.And it’s still true from the House, now run by Democrats than run by Republicans.

Help me understand.What is the problem? What is the conflict?Where– What is the sharp point right now?

Well, when you ask it in such a way to identify a sharp point, it almost suggests there’s binary answers—zero, 1, yes, no.And one of the challenges with an issue like immigration is there are so many aspects to it.And my own experience teaches me that legislators tend to vote no before they vote yes.So they may like 90% of a bill, but if they don’t like that 10%, it draws their no vote instead of being outweighed by the 90% for their yes vote.

And so when you’re trying to stitch together constituencies to get to enough yeses, to get a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, that, on an issue that is not binary—do this; don’t do this—that has all these different elements, it makes it much more difficult to get over that line.

That’s why I think it’s so important that Congress get back to simpler bills.Do a Flores family fix that the Obama administration supported.Do a child/human trafficking fix that the Obama administration also supported.I can show you those two fixes on one piece of paper, total.It doesn’t take a committee meeting.And supposedly we’re all for children and against trafficking, and we’re all for keeping families together.Well, I can give you one piece of paper that would let Congress do that.And they’re not doing it.And especially now in the House, as we talk in the summer of 2019, the House is more of an obstruction here.Sen. [Lindsey] Graham over in the Senate has been talking about and working on an asylum bill, but nothing like that is going on in the House.

What is the politics of this?

Well, that’s a pretty complicated question.I’m not quite sure how to answer it.Depends what you mean.They don’t divide all the time along partisan lines, though they do more than they used to…There used to be a lot more consensus on immigration than there is today.

Right after the White House meeting with Feinstein, a couple days later there are hardliners from the Hill – Senator Purdue, Senator Cotton – arrived to meet up with Durbin and Graham.Can you help us understand why those folks are there and what they're meant to do?

I don't know that I can, other than the obvious.I think they're there to represent a position that they feel strongly about, which is, frankly, much closer to President Trump's position than some of the earlier discussion that had gone on, and certainly the history of the issue going back a number of years.

The Government Shutdown

… The shutdown over the wall, if that’s something you can sort of help us understand how important that moment was for the president, certainly who’s in his ear during that time period.

Well, I can’t speak to who was in the president’s ear, but I do think his willingness to actually fight for this campaign promise—you know, his other campaign promises have already been kept: taxes, deregulation, his changing the course of discussion on trade.But here on immigration, he’s getting no help or assistance from Congress, very little cooperation.And so he’s having to drive the issue himself.And he did that with his budget authority to a great extent.

And again, I think it was a demonstration on his part that he was willing to fight for what he campaigned on.

… What happened in the spring with the numbers going up?What was the feeling from inside the administration?What was going on there, spring of this year?

Sure. I think you can look back to the inauguration of the president and see what happened to the immigration numbers, the so-called Trump effect, where they just—they really went down quite steadily without policy changes, just an understanding on the part of the rest of the world that things have changed, there’s a new sheriff in town, and it’s President Trump.And that was all quite true.

But when Congress started making it clear that they were not going to go along, they were going to sit more on their hands than the president wanted, and they were not as vehement about these—this issue as he was, that—and some of them, frankly, started advertising, you know, ways in.They talked about loopholes without fixing them.And as it became understood in the potential immigrating community that in fact the system wasn’t being changed that much because judges were getting in the way of everything that the president was doing of significance, that they started flooding here.And you saw the peak of that this spring, in May specifically, with about 144,000 people coming over the border illegally and being apprehended.And over 70% of those, 72% were families and children, so a massive number and a massive proportion of that massive number, the exact kind that strain our facilities and manpower the most, all at once.

Now, mind you, the Trump administration was warning of this back in 2018.And you all heard, and you, frankly, on your news shows told us about people calling it a “manufactured crisis” and not believing it.These are the same people, by the way, who said, “We just want to hear from the experts.”And when they heard from the experts, they dismissed them.And until the numbers cracked 100,000 in March of 2019, went up a little more in April, and then skyrocketed again in May to the peak, and at the same time the president starts getting tough with Mexico in a way no one had before, holding up the tariffs as a real threat, and Mexico has since then been cooperating with us more aggressively than I can ever remember before.

And I think by the time you’re airing this, you’ll see great cooperation with the Northern Triangle countries, [Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador].And I think it’s actually affecting the people down there.Look at who they elected in El Salvador.Here’s a new president who is actually going after MS-13, something that a lot of people dismissed—“Oh, they can’t do that; it’s impossible for them.”Of course they can do it. He’s proving it by doing it.And his approval rating in his country is going through the roof because he’s willing to tackle the circumstances that frankly create the worst aspects of his country, the violence and the crime there.But as you all know, and as I can say from a Virginia attorney general’s perspective, MS-13 was the most violent element of our criminal element in Virginia.And I know other states can say the same thing.

It matters in my home state in Virginia, and it matters in my current role as the head of the legal immigration system and the asylum system that the president of El Salvador is actually cracking down on MS-13 and on criminals in his own country.It affects this immigration issue.And I believe Donald J. Trump had an enormous amount of impact in making that happen.

Trump’s Immigration Record

At the end of this, the president ran on a lot of immigration issues, but ran into a lot of the challenges that you talked about, from judges to Congress to the realities.What is the feeling for the president, for the administration of where they are on this issue at this point?Does he feel like they’re succeeding, like he’s delivering on the campaign promise?

Certainly they know that they’re fighting for it.Certainly there’s a lot of frustration at the separation-of-powers violations by judges in a lot of these cases that are naked exercises of executive authority, that individual judges are stepping in the way of.But I will say this: It is not stopping this president from continuing to push ahead and to be creative in looking at ways to solve the problems we’re facing in both our legal immigration system, which I oversee, and our illegal immigration handling system, if you will, which we’re one participant with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] and the Department of Justice and others in contending with.

You talked about how important this was back in 2016, and in fact was an important reason why the president won.Where do you think—what role do you think it will play in 2020? As we head to 2020.

Well, in the next race, certainly it’s going to be a look-back perspective: What did you promise?What happened?Why did it happen, or why didn’t it happen?All of those are going to play a role, and along with just the president’s determination to press on an issue that, as we’ve discussed, clearly matters to a lot of ordinary Americans, whether they consider themselves, you know, Democrat, Republican, libertarian, vegetarian, whatever it is, they care about this issue in numbers that I don’t think the political world really understood until President Trump came along.

And at this point, the important role that Stephen Miller continues to play, when you look at his role, how would you define it?

Well, certainly within the White House, I think that Stephen Miller is the long-term point person at the president’s side on the immigration issue.Other people work on it, too, but he is a driving force in—and he has an awful lot of knowledge in how the system works and doesn’t work that he brings to bear at the president’s right hand.

Do you hear from him?

I do hear from him, yes.I talk to a lot of people in the White House with great regularity on this issue.

… So Miller came in, Sessions came in, Bannon came in, Trump came in with a mandate?

True.

Some power.Not as much as—a president always learns not as much as they think they have.And here we are heading into the home stretch of the first term.Let’s give him a rating.Let’s talk about what worked and what didn’t work.Where do we stand?

Well, there—certainly A for effort, A-plus.And that’s an issue, I can tell you from a grassroots ordinary American perspective, there are so many people who were just fed up with people, candidates running on an issue and then it being left behind.Well, this president didn’t do that.He certainly gets an A in that regard.

The things within their control have—get an A grade.The things out of their control, like the behavior of judges, the historically unprecedented behavior of judges in impeding this president’s agenda in the immigration space is something they don’t control.They have continued to appeal and press forward, but the court process is very slow, very slow.And it’s part of what some of these judges are clearly counting on, is to ride out the clock, if you will.And that’s going to be an issue going forward, I think, with every new case that arises.

And where’s DACA?

Well, DACA is on the Supreme Court’s agenda for the fall.Presumably it will be decided by about January or February.I don’t really have any doubt about how it will come out.As I said earlier, it’s a do-over of the DAPA case.The law is very clear here.This was never legal, as President Obama himself said about two dozen times before executing DACA.So in that sense, it’s been a long, long journey on DACA.But I think that journey comes to an end next January or February.

And the crisis on the border now?

Well, here in July, in the summer of 2019, the numbers are coming down from May.But look, that’s going from the plague to the Spanish flu, you know?I mean, we’re still at crisis-level numbers.However, the “return to Mexico” [sic] policy is expanding.Our relations and cooperation with Mexico and Guatemala are improving.The efforts being undertaken by El Salvador in their own country are changing the dynamics and the circumstances in a way that is very favorable to continuing to improve in this area.

If Congress will just get on board and do some very basic things, including some things that President Obama himself was asking for, we could really see long-term change in the flow of illegals coming across the border and turn our attention back to fixing the whole system rather than just dealing with plugging the dam on a very severe problem at the border.

And the wall?

Ah, still being built.It’s still pressing ahead.It’s plodding ahead one mile at a time, two miles at a time.And you know, it’s an important element, particularly in certain parts of the border of the whole security equation.And it’s easy for people to understand.And where we have them, you can look at how effective it’s been.You look at parts of Southern California before there was a border and then after—meaning a wall—and after, and it changes the dynamic there tremendously.

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