The FRONTLINE Interviews

Leon Rodriguez

Former Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Leon Rodriguez is a lawyer who served as the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014 to 2017.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 7, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Zero Tolerance

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Leon Rodriguez

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The Trump Campaign

So you’re at DHS [Department of Homeland Security] during the presidential campaign. You’re listening as Trump is adopting immigration as a central issue: the Mexican rapists statements after coming down the escalator; the “Build the wall, build the wall”; this guy Stephen Miller being his warmup act out there on the stage, talking about immigration. What are you thinking when you’re watching that presidential campaign go down from your perspective at DHS?

I’m associating him with people I’m already facing when I go up to the Capitol Hill.So I’m not quite seeing him as the tsunami he turned out—the political tsunami he turned out to be.You know, by that point I’d had a—I’d crossed swords with [Sen.] Chuck Grassley and [Sen.] Jeff Sessions and [Rep.] Steve King, all at different points.So what I’m hearing from him seems very much in line with what I would hear from them and the criticisms they had of me and the way, you know, I and colleagues were running the immigration system.

And I viewed them all as fringe, to a degree.You know, this is—and I think a lot of us did; in other words, representing maybe a sort of, the right quarter of the Republican Party, not as really representing enough to actually win even a primary at that point.

So I mean, I think I was viewing it as, yeah, this guy makes a lot of noise, and he’s saying some pretty inflammatory things, but he’s not going to actually be the nominee.And then, you know, I went back to worrying about the guys I had to worry about, which is Sessions and Grassley and Steve King and others like them.

Jeff Sessions as Senator and Attorney General

What was Sessions’ reputation then when you were having to prepare to deal with him?

Interesting, because his—part of his reputation was a divide between his indoor persona and his outdoor persona.So he’s actually thought of as a nice guy, dealing with him one on one.He was, until sort of our later clashes, cordial toward me.But his, you know, his political persona was very much, on this immigration issue and sort of generally on issues that have a similar flavor—civil rights issues, as being very much a contrarian, very much to the right of the party, very inflexible, very much disinclined to deal, to meet halfway on any of those issues.

Did you ever think the day would come when he’d be the attorney general of the United States?

You know, if you had asked me at the time is that possible, I would have said yes, only because I knew his background as a U.S. attorney.So he would be, for a certain kind of Republican, he would be a very logical attorney general.I didn’t find that shocking when it happened, to be candid.

What did you think the implications would be?

I mean, the implications would be what they turned out to be in terms of the immigration issues that we’re talking about, which those became very much signature issues for him in terms of the way he ran the immigration courts, in terms of the way he used the criminal justice system much more aggressively than anybody ever had before as itself a tool of immigration enforcement.Those are things that I, you know, would have been very foreseeable.You know, if you connect the dots from the Jeff Sessions we knew as a senior senator on the Judiciary Committee to attorney general to what’s he going to do as attorney general, those would be really easy dots, actually, to connect.

Did you ever cross paths with [Stephen] Miller?

Never.You know, if I crossed paths with him, he may have been sitting behind Sessions, along with 21 other staffers, and I just never—I don’t believe I ever met him or clashed with him or anything of the sort.

Trump on DACA and DAPA

When they’re running, there are references to DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals].Seems to be a thing they love to complain about, President Obama’s EO [executive order] on this.This is an example of executive overreach.Lots of other, some other specifics during the campaign.Not a surprise to you?

No, no.I mean, we had been getting called on the—we got called on the carpet a lot, not so much for DACA.DACA in the end was, you know, I think even sort of most establishment Republicans realized it was a pretty popular program.So to the extent it was attacked, it was sort of attacked around the margins.But remember, we went another pretty large step beyond in the creation of, you know, one, the DACA expansion and, more importantly, the Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. Citizens [Americans] and Legal Permanent Residents [DAPA], which would have potentially added 5 million more people to this deferred-action caseload.

And so we knew that that was unpopular.You know, once we had seen enough from Donald Trump in particular on the campaign trail, it was certainly no surprise that he even went after DACA as he did, although very interestingly, once he was elected, I always found it fascinating that he was in no rush to actually terminate it.In fact, it appeared to me that in a way he either was cornered into doing it, or it was choreographed that it came to appear that he was cornered into rescinding DACA as he did.

Explain the cornered strategy.What would that be?

So what you have happen, if you recall, you know, now President-elect Trump says: “Well, DACA’s wrong.I know DACA’s wrong, but we’re going to find a solution.It’s going to be a solution with a lot of heart.”I remember, that phrase always stuck out in my mind that he used.And I remember as director of USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], personally I did not mourn the morning after the election.What I did was I ran to work and made sure that we would not take the foot off the pedal at all, particularly in terms of DACA renewals, because I expected that on Jan. 21, based on the rhetoric I’d heard during the election, that DACA would be canceled that day, and I figured it would be much harder to undo existing DACA grants than to just stop giving new ones.

So you figured you’d get as many people in the gate as possible before the gate got locked?

You know, I certainly wanted to make sure we didn’t take the foot off the pedal because of the election.Then the Inauguration Day comes, and he’s, you know, very focused on the travel ban, and that ends up kind of sucking up a lot of their energy.And it really doesn’t seem like he’s in a rush at all to rescind DACA.

The Trump Transition

Let me ask you something, before we go further, but let’s get right back to that.It’s the transition.We’ve made other films about that moment.You’re there at the office.In transitions, often the other side comes, and you’ve spent a lot of time getting ready for them, and you explain to them what it is.Tell me the experience you had with the incoming Trump DHS team.

I had no experience with them.

What do you mean?

Which was stunning.I never met, nor did any of my senior staff, including career staff, ever meet anybody from the Trump transition.There was no transition team right up—frankly, I think they only really started coming in actually after Inauguration Day.So there was no—you know, I remember, I was actually on the Obama transition for the Justice Department.We were in the building the morning after the election.We had already been planning three months before what everybody’s assignments would be, what questions we wanted to ask.And so we were in the building the day after, and I think by the day after that, we were already up meeting people throughout the Department of Justice.

I never met nor was aware of anybody coming to my agency during the transition period.

But this is their number one issue.

Yes, that is true.I have been repeatedly entertained by the idea of, you know, “We’re the private-sector people; we’re the businesspeople; we know how to run things.”I have been repeatedly entertained by how poorly so many things have been executed.And that was one of the first things that I saw that just left me kind of baffled: why they didn’t send anybody in.

So even though you know or fear DACA may be a thing that’s got a bull’s-eye on it, and you think it’s going to happen quickly, and you think it’s going to happen at the stroke of noon or something, right—

Yeah.

—but nobody comes to you.Nobody says, “Help us write the paper,” or, “We intend to write a paper.”Do you get wind that they’re preparing EOs and stuff about DACA?

No, I don’t think so.I don’t think so.

Ending DACA

… OK.Sorry to interrupt you, but it’s a good thing for me to know that they were—just like it’s stated, just like every place else, there was nobody coming over to find out what was happening.

So nobody does anything about DACA until I think June rolls around.And the attorney general of Texas—who had already, remember, led the lawsuit that leads to the ultimate injunction against the DACA expansion and deferred action for parents, but somehow fails to include DACA in that—now sends a letter to the attorney general saying, basically, unless you basically stop giving new DACA grants by some day in September, we’re going to sue you.

I think Sept. 5, right?

Sept. 5, right, because that’s actually the day—literally, I think they wait till the last moment before they issue the rescission, “We’re going to sue you,” you know, which now puts Attorney General Sessions in this very interesting position, because it is unimaginable that Attorney General Sessions would have actually opposed them in court.And that would have been quite the circus had it gone that way, where basically the Justice Department now goes in and essentially confesses this program—“We agree with you; this program’s illegal; Judge, rule as you will.”That wasn’t going to happen.

… And then by Sept. 5, he either shows up at the White House or informs the White House that he cannot support DACA; that it’s unconstitutional, it’s not lawful.You could look at that as forcing the president’s hand to do something the president hasn’t wanted to do since January.As you say, maybe the president doesn’t want anything to do with DACA; it’s too emotional, it’s too whatever it is.Maybe Miller wants to; maybe Bannon wanted to; maybe Sessions wants to…

Oh, one thing that we know Trump is hearing during all this time is from the business community telling him that the cancellation of DACA will be a problem, that it will actually have a significant—you know, remember, this is workforce; these are consumers.Many of them are heads of families.So this actually, you know, if you suddenly knock 750,000 young, able-bodied people out of the workforce, which is what the impact of that would have been, that’s got a pretty serious impact on the economy.So that’s something—there was a lot of the business community telling him this is a really bad idea.

So the president’s between a rock and a hard place.

Yeah, and he may have been influenced by that as well, yeah.

John Kelly

… OK, I had one other question about the arrival at DHS of the other side: [John] Kelly.Did you ever know Kelly?Did you meet him?Did you interact with him?Did he ask you any questions?What was the scuttlebutt around the place?Are you talking to people who are permanent fixtures there who tell you stories?

Yeah, I never had met him, nor did I ultimately meet him.He is somebody who did command a lot of respect.Actually, our secretary, Secretary [Jeh] Johnson, had worked with him at the Department of Defense.I know that Secretary Johnson respected him quite a lot, you know, so on the whole, that was seen as, you know, among sort of the career national-security crowd, that was certainly seen as a positive, seen as somebody who would be sort of levelheaded, could potentially be a buffer against sort of the worst excesses of the president himself.

That’s all I knew about him.He also wasn’t an immigration guy.And so, you know, there were just sort of general questions of how, you know, how is he now going to wrap his arms around this surprisingly complicated area.We just didn’t know.Nobody knew.

The Dreamers and DACA

… So let’s go back to DACA for a minute, or the “Dreamers” for a second.The president virtually immediately runs into lots of trouble from television—not Fox and not Breitbart, but the other television—with pictures of crying young people: “I don’t know where to live”; “I don’t know how to speak Spanish”; “What are you talking about?This is breaking faith with what I’ve believed all my life, and I want to be Marine and save America, and now I can’t do it,” those kind of videos and stories.And it seems to have a profound effect on Trump emotionally, from what we hear.How much of what the reaction is to that could you have foretold given what you knew about the issue and the thicket they were walking into?

Oh, all of it.All of it.You know, the one thing that I realize, and I think a lot of people realize, is the election of Trump meant, particularly for a lot of us on the Democratic side, meant that there were things about the country that we didn’t fully understand and sort of political forces that we didn’t fully realize [were] there.So we probably realized their existence but not their magnitude.On the other hand, that reaction, having, you know, dealt with that movement a lot ourselves—and by the way, having them be frustrated with us, too, because we didn’t necessarily move at the pace they were seeking either—that all could have—was very foreseeable.

There’s that incredible two days of meetings.The first one, Trump invites—he’s trying to decide what to do, and he’s trying to negotiate what to do, and he has the TV cameras come in, and he has a sort of meeting in front of the cameras.[Sen. Dianne] Feinstein is there.

Oh, yeah.

Lots of others are there.And he’s clearly trying to “Let’s make a deal.”Did you see it?

I did actually.I remember that.It was very interesting.

What was interesting about it?

I hesitate—I’ve only ever been a political appointee in the Obama administration, so I have no real point of comparison.Our discipline was formidable.The degree to which you—if you were going to be making public statements, if you were going to issue a press release, the degree of sort of top-to-bottom coordination was something I just assumed that’s the way you do this; that’s how you run things.And your deliberations occur behind closed doors.You don’t have Cabinet meetings or presidential meetings with senators for the world to see.You might have a little press—what do you call it?—a pool spray, a little opportunity for them to see that you got together, but the substance of the meeting certainly doesn’t get aired on national TV.

So for me, the lack of discipline of the whole thing was kind of striking, just based on the way that I was raised in playing the roles that the people in that room were playing.

… So the meeting breaks up, and it feels like maybe he’s made an offer to Feinstein, and [Rep.Kevin] McCarthy tries to walk him back.

That’s how I understood it.

That is how you—

Yeah.Well, but I remember, I think, if I recall correctly how that went, McCarthy actually corrected him in the middle of the meeting, which I thought was a remarkable moment, and I kind of expected the—you know, from Austin Powers, where Dr. Evil sort of pulls the chute, I was wondering if his chute was about to get pulled.So that was kind of striking that that happened the way that it did.

But is true that they sort of leave it.It sort of feels like, well, what side is he on?Fox, of course, Ann Coulter, of course, and [Laura] Ingraham and all of them, [Rush] Limbaugh, they hit him pretty hard in the next 48 hours.Meanwhile, [Sen.] Lindsey Graham and [Sen.] Dick Durbin are off in a corner writing something up; maybe they can get the deal; maybe they can get the 213/214 deal.Who knows?

And I will say, by the way, to that point, I’m a history lover.I was a teenager when Nixon went to China; [Menachem] Begin to meet [Anwar] Sadat.I had learned that there was a history that sometimes deals must be made between extremes.And so I was actually a believer of the potential for this president to surprise us all.I don’t believe that anymore, by the way, but I was at the time a believer that somehow this guy, with all his bluster and all his crazy way of presenting himself, that somehow he really could be the one who would make a deal in the end, because he would make everybody realize that this is the deal.“I say this is the deal, this is the deal.”So I thought that maybe was an instance where that maybe could have been the case.

So Durbin and Graham are called or call the president and say, “We’ve got something.”He says, “Come on over here.”Meanwhile, Miller and others have brought very hard-right—whatever they call it—immigration hawks, or whatever they call themselves, into the room.And Durbin and Graham walk into just a hornet’s nest.What does that tell you?

What you’ve characterized I think correctly is the immigration-hawk wing, which by the way has a pretty long menu of points of view.It’s not just about the border, and I think they’ve been pretty direct about that.It’s about the overall immigration system.

You know, they are a critical part of the president’s—they are a critical voice of the president’s political base.They have lots and lots of friends in the administration, most prominently among them Stephen Miller.And they—you know, I think they obviously were in many ways calling the shots, at least at that point in time.

Witness recent events at my old agency that suggest that they no longer have quite the sway that they may have had, or at least for right now don’t have that kind of sway.But at that point, they did have that kind of sway.

And also remember, this is and always has been a very media-conscious president.So for instance, you know, Ann Coulter or whoever else is calling you a sellout, that’s going to have an impact.

Zero Tolerance and Family Separation

…So when “zero tolerance” comes down a few months later, what do you think then?

Wow, it’s hard to separate the beginning of that from the end of that, to be candid.So when the whole sort of child—I mean, the child separation crisis comes very, very quickly.I was horrified, to tell you the truth, by not only the use of criminal prosecution of people whose only crime was their attempt to cross the border, and who were coming from obviously very difficult circumstances; I was horrified not just by the use of that tool, but by then-Attorney General Sessions’ rhetoric behind it and what I saw as just the tremendous callousness with which he presented that rhetoric, you know, which is basically, “Well, if you for some reason that I couldn’t possibly imagine decide to cross our border, well, we’re going to arrest you because that’s a crime, and we’re going to arrest you,” not noting that he has—not only does he have discretion in what he can do, he has other things he can do about people who cross the border illegally that doesn’t amount to putting them in jail and separating them from their families.

The thing that I have never, ever understood is how it happened that children were separated from the adults with whom they arrived, and there wasn’t meticulous association of those children with those adults.That has always mystified me.I came up—I was a state prosecutor in New York City when I started.If you went into any arrest situation, where you arrested an adult, a first-year police officer in New York City understands that part of my responsibility in that situation is to figure out what’s going to happen with these children, including making sure that the parents are connected to the children, so that the idea that the agency didn’t have systems in place to do that, to this day I don’t understand what happened, what went wrong.

What do you think happened?

My guess is, you know, as with a lot of things in this particular field, there wasn’t adequate planning.Different policy decisions were implemented very, very quickly, not with adequate coordination with the career people who would have the responsibility to implement them and to be able to really plan for all the potential collateral consequences of the things they were doing.And so this was a—this coordination, this was just not something they had planned for adequately given the volumes that they were dealing with, given the pressure that was on them to handle this influx of people in the manner that it was being handled, at least at that point.

One of the things they do, one of the things they say, one of the things the president says is: “This is not us; we’re just following the Obama plan.This is what Obama did.Obama started this separation stuff; it wasn’t us.”What’s the truth of that?

That is, for the most part, bull.There were times when, for example, if you had, you know, a family where there was a father, a mother and one or more children, where, for a variety of reasons, the father might be detained or the mother might be detained and the kids stay with the children [sic].On the whole, overwhelmingly kids were left with their parents and were released together with their parents if they came as a family unit.

The other thing that was definitely not the Obama approach was the systematic use of criminal prosecution immediately upon apprehension at the border, again, just for the simple offense of having crossed the border illegally, which is a crime.I mean, to be clear, that is a crime.There is discretion in how you handle these situations.

So why didn’t they play it that way?

Because, you know—it’s very interesting what happened in terms of the overall history of sort of border flows through the course of when we were dealing with those issues and now since this administration’s been dealing with those issues.So the administration comes in; all these executive orders are issued.There’s all this rhetoric on TV.You know, they see a lot of the same stuff we see here.They have TV there, too.They have newspapers there, too.And so they’re seeing it.

And so for a period of time, if you’ll recall, in those very early months, in fact flows drop dramatically.So if you’re looking at February, March, April of 2017, flows have really dropped, and they’re declaring victory: “We’ve scared them off.The flows have really dropped.”The next thing they know, spring comes around, which is, you know, sort of travel season, and the flows start really jumping up again.And suddenly they’re not looking so successful anymore.

And so there is a—you know, and I don’t know whether it’s Sessions or whether it’s Trump or whether it’s Stephen Miller, who it is, they believe they’re going to need to now dial up the pressure in order to contain this new surge of people.And I think that’s how and why that all happened, you know, and again, all through the prism of politics and the promises that had been made to their political base.

So in an interesting way, it’s also to their advantage to create a crisis, because it’s an advertisement for how tough they can be, and please don’t come here anymore.

It is, but, you know, we’re now—now we’re two and a half years in, and all these measures keep seeming to not work.… I mean, I think there’s a lot of factors contributing to this.

But regardless, the enforcement-only approach has seemed to only coincide with the flows to the border actually growing and growing and growing.

… You say you know some people down in that part of the world.Are you keeping track of their changing opinion about the American response?

… Often when I’m going to come have an interview like this, I’ll actually check the media in Central America just to see what they’re saying, and one thing that’s actually really striking, this is not a headline in the Northern Triangle countries [Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador].So it’s huge to us.It gets coverage, but it doesn’t get coverage nearly with the intensity and focus that we cover this issue.

What meaning do you extract from that?

Meaning that they have plenty of other problems, I think is the biggest issue.In fact, a lot of the headlines will often be about criminal justice issues and homicides that occurred, gang violence issues that occurred, and then the mundane stuff that we read in our—the local news here, you know, “The water company just raised the rates,” that kind of stuff as well.

But it’s not the burning issue down there that we imagine it would be.

Certainly not for the public.I imagine for the governments involved—and certainly this was the sense I got in our time.For the governments involved, it’s a pretty significant issue, because it affects their relations with our government.So it is a significant issue for the governments as such.I think for the population, it may not be as big as we perceive it.

Kirstjen Nielsen at DHS

When [Kirstjen] Nielsen comes in and replaces the general, what were your thoughts about that?What about her?What about the people around her?

She was sort of a, you know, conventional, national security, cybersecurity, again, super well respected throughout that community.I expected her to be a lot like him in, you know, trying on the one hand to be faithful to her boss and what her boss wanted from a policy perspective, but also having, you know, wanting to kind of moderate some of the more difficult, more potentially problematic aspects of what her boss wanted.

We certainly know from the summer of ’18 through the spring of this year that she was in occasional and then fairly regular hot water with her boss.What seemed to be the difference between what she was doing and what they wanted?

You know, I think probably the difference is that she’s seeing what’s going on on the ground.She’s seeing what her officers and her command staff is dealing with on the ground, and you know, I think is worried that if you overplay the hand, that’s going to get worse.That’s my guess as to what was animating her thinking about these things.And also, I think having some awareness that, especially with respect to children, that you could very easily overplay your hand and end up, you know, end up with a situation very similar to what had happened a year earlier in terms of the separation of children.

The 2018 Midterm Elections

By the summer of ’18, leading up to the midterms, you’ve got [murdered student] Mollie Tibbetts.People from the White House and other places are making something feel like a super crisis in order to wake up maybe the base voter.You’ve got the military on the border, all the things that were happening.What did you think of that?

Well, I thought the military on the border was problematic in a few respects.It’s just not what they do.So I didn’t know how—assuming that the needs on the border were for sort of a less porous interdiction net, I didn’t really understand how the military was going to particularly contribute to that.And I think that turned out to be the case, which is why they ultimately weren’t there for very long.

You know, I guess—I always looked at what was going on at the border—to this very day I look at it as there is a crisis; that crisis is located in the Northern Triangle.We are witnessing symptoms of that crisis here.And so, you know, until very recently, I didn’t view the border as such as its own crisis, but rather as a manifestation and symptom of a crisis in Central America.

Now, that said, did that crisis present a huge problem and challenge for the agencies responsible to deal with it?The answer has always been yes.A huge problem and challenge.So I don’t know that you’d have to work very hard to manufacture that into a big deal because, in fact, I think for the officers down there, you know, for the leadership down there who has to deal with it, it actually I think is—and especially given, you know, the sort of zero tolerance approach, they have a pretty big job on their hands to do, realistically.

the 2020 Elections

So when you look at your crystal ball for 2020, you think about the issue that immigration is now and will be presumably then.The president is going to need to use immigration as an issue, and he’s going to need to spin it in some way that says he did what he could, but others have stopped him or whatever it is.And he has obviously, I guess you would agree, a genuine crisis on his hands now at a magnitude that is much larger even than he ever thought it was.What do you see happening there?

He’s good.And so I think your sort of hypothesis of him sort of being able to play the crisis politically I think is—that’s real.I mean, I think that’s something that he has capably done repeatedly.I think where this gets a little bit tricky, though, is it just keeps getting worse.The more they dial up enforcement, the more they start, you know, reinforcing parts of the wall that were there before and sending people down there and threatening Mexico with tariffs, things seem to only get worse.

And so I don’t know.You know, I don’t know if there comes a point where people start saying, “This was your signature issue, and you didn’t get it right.”I still think there’s a die-hard base that won’t be—won’t look at it that way.I think the, you know—I think a lot of us will look at it and say enforcement is a part of the approach, but it’s not the only part of the approach, and until you bring in all these other elements and highlight all these other elements in terms of working with those countries and view this as what it is, which is a long-term problem rooted in the Northern Triangle countries that ultimately needs to be resolved in and by the Northern Triangle countries, that we’re sort of doomed to keep going through this cycle.And I think a lot of people are going to feel that way.And I think that, too, those feelings will also play a significant part politically in the election.

Jeff Sessions’ Impact on Immigration Policy

…You know enough about the regulations; you knew enough about what a powerful bureaucracy or presidency can do.When Jeff Sessions is attorney general, even if he is in eclipse vis-à-vis the president, we’ve already talked about DACA and zero tolerance, are there lots of other little things, quiet things that an attorney general who sits in an office with lots of U.S. attorneys and resources can do, did do, probably, that aren’t headlines but are changing the very nature of the way immigration is handled?

Yeah.I mean, there’s one thing in—you know, I’m so in this that I don’t know how the outside world is viewing this, but the immigration court decision that he took into his own hands and then he authored an opinion which severely narrowed the ability of people to claim either gang violence or domestic violence as a basis of asylum, that was very impactful.In fact, that view of asylum was implemented by USCIS.That has substantially affected the grant rates of asylum claims that actually make it to adjudication from those countries.That’s the kind of, you know, essentially bureaucratic—it’s kind of bland but super impactful along the lines of what you’re describing.

So that’s an example of a kind of thing.You know, remember, there’s all kinds of memos and policies and stuff that the public would never really focus on that, yeah, is a big part of how policy is implemented.

So even if he’s on the outs with the president, and even if it’s not a case of him going before the cameras at the Justice Department and saying, “We’re going to do this; we’re going to do that, and I’m announcing,” he is probably, for a guy who’s spent his life learning about all this and saying yes or no in the Senate to it and on committees to it, he’s implementing the Jeff Sessions immigration policy maybe independent of Donald Trump.

That’s exactly right.And remember, it’s not just him.There’s enough people in different parts of the administration—at Homeland Security headquarters, in senior positions at the Department of Justice, in the White House—who understand the system well enough to know where its quiet levers are located.And they were—those levers were applied.You know, and again, what I just shared is one very, very definitive example of how that happened.

And to what effect?

To the effect that it certainly made it more difficult for people ultimately to sustain asylum claims in the United States.You know, interestingly, I don’t know that they figured out a way to play that for sort of political effect particularly.I think it may have kept some of the pundits at bay for a little while.But in terms of their base overall, I’m not sure they necessarily would have focused on that particular.

But I’m not positive that Jeff Sessions, especially now, gives a damn about the base.I have a feeling that if this is your life’s work and your life’s legacy, even if it’s a silent legacy, and you want for a generation or certainly for a president or two who comes in to be unable to do anything about it, he was in a position to do that.

Yeah.Look, there’s one thing that you learn in government, which is, government—I’m not just talking about the federal; I’m talking about any government—is huge.And so there is a lot that happens and gets done in and by government that don’t necessarily come from the very top.I mean, you know, Jeff Sessions is a Senate-confirmed political appointee on his own, and he can make decisions until his boss tells him to stop.He is empowered to make decisions like the ones he made.

But of course, he’s got a boss that doesn’t even know he’s making those decisions, and Steve Miller, who’s cheering him on when he makes those.

Oh, yeah, no, I’m sure.And I imagine there was coordination with Steve Miller and that element of the White House when those decisions were made.

Why?

Because the one thing you rarely want to do is do something where you don’t give your principals heads-up that you did it, because God forbid, that step you took goes south and your boss gets tarred in the media, which, you know, happens pretty much daily, that falls on your head.And so, to your point about being on the outs, he would have even been deeper into the outs had he not coordinated, which is, I do believe that the things he did were coordinated with at least with Miller and others at an advisory level in the White House.

The Lasting Effects of Trump’s Immigration Policy

So two and a half years into this administration, what’s your overview of how much has changed that will have lasting effect through the DOJ actions and DHS actions?Just sum it up.Is it surprising what has changed and sort of what that means for United States immigration in the future?

I think a lot that story for me is still being written.A lot of things that we’ve talked about are things that can be reversed in a day.So, you know, a lot of policy decisions that were made can be reversed at the stroke of a pen if you have the political conditions that support your doing that.

So I actually—there are some things that are more far-reaching and that, you know, a presumable subsequent non-Trump administration might not be able to get to and change and reach.But you know, some of these sort of broader-stroke things actually can be changed pretty quickly.You know, again, assuming the right political conditions, they can be changed pretty quickly.

Just to stay on this, because I think it might help us to understand what happens when the Trump administration comes in, can you just give us a bullet-point list as you’re watching as somebody who knows what all those levers are?What are the changes that they’re making at DHS and DOJ to change the way of immigration?

So the USCIS workforce are civil servants in the best sense of the word, in the sense that they have a strong loyalty to the integrity of what they’re doing, and also a real fidelity to sort of the direction that they’re given by leadership, so long as they think it’s legal and lawful.And so, you know, there are directives being given not visible to any of us, either orally or in the form of trainings or in the form of field memoranda that in fact can have really—in fact, can and have had really profound effects on the way decisions are made, in the way that adjudications are conducted.

That’s an example of a very quiet, very bland lever, but that can actually have really far-reaching change. We talked about it a bit already: The attorney general controls the immigration courts.He controls the criminal prosecution apparatus.The immigration—there is a huge Office of Immigration Litigation that basically defends the administration’s immigration decisions.That, too, is in the, under the control of the attorney general.

There is a tremendous amount of pretty quiet direction that can be given to all of those agencies without making any particular political splash, that can have pretty profound effects on the ground in what happens to people, what decisions are made.

And those are two agencies.Department of State, they gave—and it seemed like a really big deal for about the two or three days that it was announced—they gave consular officers these pretty onerous instructions as to what information needed to be gathered in certain countries from certain travelers to the United States.Was a big deal for about two weeks—addresses for the last 15 years; I think your social media handles, this and that.Seemed like a big deal for a couple weeks, then it was gone.But those are still in place.

Travelers are being put into something called administrative processing.So it used to be fairly easy.You’d go to a consulate.If you look OK, we give you a visa.

More and more people are being put into the sort of back-office review before they’re given a visa to travel to the United States, most of them people who are entirely harmless to the United States and some of whom are people we really, really would like to have here for a variety reasons, still finding real trouble in coming to the U.S. And so those are—you know, those are just examples among multitudes of examples.Remember, there’s a lot of agencies involved in this.So we talked about Justice; we talked about a part of Homeland Security; talked about State; we haven’t even gotten to the Department of Labor, all of whom play, you know, all kinds of very micro-bureaucratic roles, but roles that can be really impactful in this area.

Jeff Sessions Senate Years

… You said you crossed swords with Jeff Sessions when he was a senator.What was that like?Was that at hearings?How would he exert his influence, or try to?

Well, this was in the course of hearings, or, at one point, I remember we had a consultation on our annual—the announcement of our annual refugee ceiling.And he would ask me questions.I would answer them.So the beginnings would be fairly polite.He wouldn’t like my answer, and then it would escalate from there.

What was it like to go up against him?

It was—it’s an interesting question, because I’m actually one of the few people in Washington who really likes testifying on Capitol Hill.I’m trained as a trial lawyer.I really enjoy the process.So it was actually kind of professionally fulfilling to kind of do battle with Sen. Sessions.

On a substantive level, I was always very troubled by what I saw as just profound callousness to the circumstances of the people who he was upset we were helping.Whether it was DACA recipients or refugees, it was always just stunning to me whenever I stepped back from it, like, how can he be so oblivious to the sufferings of these people and not have a sense of the grandeur and power of our country as actually having the ability to help them rather than to kind of give them the back of the hand?

How do you answer that?How could he be that way?

I mean, his view, which he announced to me more than once, is that our responsibility as a government was to the taxpayers who are here now, and they needed to come first and 100 percent first, and that those—anything that we did for those people came at the expense of that, of our sort of protection and championing of the people who are here already.

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