The FRONTLINE Interviews

Michael Shear

Co-Author, Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration

Michael Shear is a White House correspondent for The New York Times and the co-author of Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on July 26, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Rejecting the Republican “Autopsy”

Let’s start with the “Breitbart Embassy” dinner party.… Set up the dinner for me.And what are they doing there?

So it’s early 2013.The 2012 presidential campaign has just ended, from the Republican perspective not well.[Mitt] Romney has lost.[Barack] Obama is about to start his second term.And Steve Bannon invites two folks over to his house for dinner to kind of mull this over and to talk about the future of the Republican Party as he sees it.And it’s Jeff Sessions, senator from Alabama, and—and one of Sessions’ top aides at the time, Stephen Miller, who, you know, we all know later will come on to greater things.

And the three of them are kind of like-minded Republicans.They’re not part of the sort of Main Street Republican establishment.They’re not allies of the business community.These are sort of—at the time, especially—people on the fringe of what you would consider the Republican Party.And they are animated not by some of the traditional Republican issues, but rather they’re really animated by kind of two big, overlapping things: the fate of the blue-collar worker in America and how that’s affected by American trade policies, and kind of in the same way, the fate of that same kind of blue-collar regular American-type person and how that’s affected by what they see as a flood of immigrants coming across the border and taking those people’s jobs.

And those are the two issues that kind of animate all three of them, in slightly different ways.I mean, Bannon is, even then, kind of an almost a political anarchist.You know, Sessions is a kind of straitlaced senator, who sort of, you know, very buttoned-down.And Miller is this kind of over-the-top ideologue who, at that time, is essentially just a congressional aide, but who everybody on Capitol Hill knows, because, you know, you would get emails from him almost daily, long emails or long phone calls, ranting about immigration and the perils of immigration.

And so the three of them come to this dinner to—this wasn’t a specific strategy session to accomplish a certain goal.It was a kind of a bitch session to talk about, like, what was wrong with Republican politics?How did they lose again?And how was it that, you know, all of these issues that they cared so deeply about had been sort of tossed to the side by the traditional Republican Party; that they, you know, that had—had the Republican Party embraced their issues the way they think of them, they were convinced that night that they—you know, the Republican Party could—could do great things.But unfortunately for them, they didn’t have a way to convince the the leaders of the party at the time that that was the way to go.

And at the time, not necessarily at the dinner but certainly in that environment and from these three guys’ perspectives, as we’ve come to think about it, it’s a kind of revolution gets started.… How crazy is the aspiration?

It was crazy.In fact, I mean, if you think about it, the Republican Party had just, under the—under the leadership of Reince Priebus, who was the head of the RNC [Republican National Committee], had just completed an “autopsy” of what had gone wrong with the 2012 campaign, and the main conclusion of that autopsy was entirely the opposite of what these three were talking about.It was that the Republican Party had sort of abandoned or had failed to embrace the growing diversity of the country and had recommended that, if the Republicans wanted to win again, they were going to have to embrace Hispanics, embrace diversity, embrace immigration, the Gang of Eight kind of theory of the case of like, you know, “We can—we can sort of find a way to compromise in the middle with Democrats and kind of do great things for business by embracing immigration.”

And, I mean, these three thought it was disastrous.I mean, stupid, disastrous.This was the wrong way to go.But if you were sitting there that night, the audaciousness of what they were plotting was astonishing.And you wouldn’t have given them much chance of success, right?I mean, you would have thought at the time, they’ll never—you know, they’re going uphill against the vast majority of the leadership in their party, not to mention, obviously, the other side, the Democrats.You wouldn’t have—you certainly wouldn’t have picked [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor as the guy who, you know, could have been picked off on this issue.You wouldn’t have—there wasn’t a candidate out there, a serious candidate for president of the United States who would have embraced this sort of fringey kind of ideology.

In fact, think about that.Even at the time, the people that you would begin to think about who was going to run for president in 2016, you know, you would have maybe picked out [Sen.] Marco Rubio as a name.You maybe would have picked out [Gov.] Jeb Bush as a name.You know, these are people who sort of exactly took the exact opposite viewpoint, who wanted to embrace immigration, who wanted to move in that direction as the autopsy suggested.

It was, at the time, thoroughly crazy.

And now, who knew that you two, Michael and Julie [Hirschfeld Davis], would write a book …that has at its heart immigration as the issue, and a kind of revolution that’s taken over in the Republican Party.

Yeah.I mean, you know, when we started to write this book, and the idea of the book was to sort of catalog, as the subtitle says, his “assault on immigration,” and all the ways in which the Trump administration tried to put into practice all of these ideas. I mean, it wasn’t obvious at the time that this meeting was going to be sort of the beginning of the story.

But the more we traced back the major players, right, so you have Bannon, who obviously becomes Trump’s chief strategist and is in some ways the architect of his campaign, at least at the end; you have Sessions, who’s the attorney general, and who really wanted that job largely to implement kind of the immigration, the restrictionist immigration policies that he’d been advocating for years; and Miller, obviously, who becomes Trump’s sort of alter ego on this issue, and had kind of learned at the feet of Sessions.

And so we started tracing back those characters.And you know, the further back we went, it was—it was sort of obvious that, like, there had been this moment, we say in the book that—that it was only a couple months after that dinner that Bannon ends up seeing Trump give a speech, I think at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], the conservative group that comes to Washington every year.And Bannon, which is like a light bulb, you know, that went off in Bannon’s head, that like: “Wait a minute.This guy is saying everything that we talked about at that dinner.”

And so, you know, all of a sudden, it was clear that the—all of the central—many of the central characters that we were going to be writing about had sat down and had kind of mapped this out.Again, I don’t—I don’t think in 2013 they understood that, you know, two and a half years later, Trump would come down the escalator and—I mean, it wasn’t that orchestrated, right?It was much more haphazard than that.But I—but that was at some level, the birth of all of this.

Reporting on Trump’s Immigration Agenda

So writing the book.… Give me a sort of breakdown of how you each approached it.

How we did it?I mean, so both Julie and I had had a long career in which we had covered immigration as kind of a subspecialty.Both of us had spent years kind of off and on.We’d covered all of the different Obama—the fights over immigration during the Obama years.Julie actually covered one of the big legislative fights during George W. Bush’s year, where they fought about immigration as well.And so by the time Trump became president, we both knew that we were going to probably get the tap on the shoulder.Anytime something immigration-related happened, the two of us would probably be the ones they would come to.And sure enough, that happened.

And I think after the first year, at the end of the first year, she and I wrote a big immigration piece that tried to sum up the first year’s sort of what he had done.The travel ban had happened and all of that mess, and some of the debates over how many refugees to let into the country.And so at the beginning of 2018, we sort of sat down and looked at each other and said: “Is there something more we can do?Is there some way to capture this in a bigger—in a book?”And, you know, there’s a lot of different ways that you could do an immigration book.We have colleagues who spend their careers on the border telling the stories of the kind of—the dramatic stories of—human stories of the people who are coming across.And we touch on that a little bit.There’s some of that in the book.But it’s not the focus of the book.

What we thought we could do, and what we set out to do, was to be inside the administration, inside the White House, inside of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and the kind of brain trust around President Trump and try to figure out the motivations for why—you know, for sort of how these decisions came down, when—when the world watched as the separation of families at the border unfolded in the summer of ’18, you know, obviously everybody saw the impact, saw the effect of that.But how did that decision get made?Who were the people behind the scenes who were kind of debating, you know?Did anybody raise objections?As it turned out, there were lots of objections raised in a lot of quarters, largely ignored.Who—you know, who are the driving forces?Obviously, you know, we write a lot about Stephen Miller.But there’s other people, too, Kirstjen Nielsen and lesser-known figures as well.

You know, that was the idea behind the book, was to be able to, at the end of the day, have something that people could pick up and read and say, “Now I understand how all of this happened.”

Defeating Eric Cantor

Great.So let’s walk through the story.… And part of our story, and you can of course correct us, is that probably Bannon’s lead, with Breitbart, on immigration, raising up [David] Brat, getting Laura Ingraham in there, getting Mark Levin in there, pushing, pushing, pushing this utterly unknown professor, sends a message to others that, “Uh-oh, there’s a formidable force out there called Breitbart, which I’ve never heard of,” they say, “and a guy named Bannon.What the hell is he doing?”And the ongoing mendacity of the right-wing radio and the web.

Yeah.I mean, look, when political surprises happen in elections, everybody is looking for an explanation, right, because if you’re another member of Congress, and you’ve been sitting in your district, perfectly comfortable, thinking you are safe, your pollsters are telling you that, you know, you’ve got a comfortable lead over anybody, your district likes you, you’ve got a high approval rating, you’re in leadership maybe or you have a good committee assignment, all the signs point to “You have very little to worry about,” all of which could have been said about Eric Cantor, right, in spades.

I covered Eric Cantor.I used to be a Virginia reporter, so I spent a lot of time in Virginia.I know that district.It would be the kind of district that so many members across the country would have, where, you know, we’re not talking about on the razor’s edge, where it flips back and forth, you know, kind of over and over again.This was a pretty solidly sort of conservative district that you would have thought Eric would have had control over forever.

And so when something like that happens, they look for a reason.And you know, the folks that you talked about, Bannon and the rest of that whole establishment, they—you know, they were both smart and lucky, right?They were smart in that they, you know, grabbed a hold of an issue and pushed it in that district.But then they were also lucky in that when they actually won, which probably, if you’d asked Bannon and given him a truth serum at the time, you probably would have figured, “Oh, odds are low, you know, we’re going to do this,” the—you know, they’re lucky, because then their effort fills the void of what everybody is looking for, which is, how do you explain this?And the big fear then becomes, well, if it can happen to him, it can happen to me.And so across the board, I remember that day so well.And across the board, I think it’s easy to say that like, members, Republican members, who, you know, hours earlier had had no worries, no concerns about their future, no thoughts about being primaried, you know, not concerned about the impact of some of these votes and how it might affect their future, everything flipped.

And so they—you know, suddenly the calculus that you make when you’re thinking about this issue and voting on an immigration bill changes because, in the back of your mind, you look at what happened to Cantor, and the same thing could happen to you.

Finding Candidate Trump

So they’ve got the establishment’s attention.… And they say to themselves, “We need a vessel to carry our aspirations forward.”They go to Lou Dobbs.Well, first he asks Sessions.And that evening, as you say, the booze starts to flow, and it’s nearly midnight.Tell me a little bit about the offer to Sessions in the first place.

Yeah.I mean, so the Sessions offer was, as you say, they were looking for somebody.They were looking for a vessel that could, you know, carry the message.And I think they didn’t—and as they told Sessions that night, “You’re not going to win,” right?I mean they didn’t have any great hope that if Jeff Sessions were put up as president, that he would win.But I think they thought somebody needs to carry this message.Somebody needs to be the person standing on that stage in a presidential contest, not being—Bannon’s favorite word is “squished,” right; not being a squish on all these issues; you know, be standing firm for the American worker, standing firm against immigrants and against this idea that, you know, we have open borders.

… But I think they thought Sessions could be, you know, somebody who they would have confidence in wouldn’t give an inch on any of those issues, and would sort of articulate them in the fierce way that all three of those guys thought.

You know, so Sessions was there.I mean, I think he was smart enough to understand that that wasn’t going to be good for him and that that wasn’t the role that he wanted to play.But they needed to find somebody.

So they go looking around.They stop at Lou Dobbs for a while, and think, well, Dobbs is the guy.But obviously, as much as Dobbs may like Bannon and others, he knows trouble when he sees it.

Right.

…. They land on Trump.Why, do you think?

I think, you know, we talked earlier about the two main overlapping issues of trade and immigration, which really animated these guys.And I think that in Trump, they found somebody who never had a mature political ideology, right?He’s not a fully formed political person who has sort of thought through across the board a set of political and policy ideas that, you know, you could sort of stitch together in a grand notion of how you should govern.

But on two issues, immigration and trade, you know, he instinctively had like almost fully formed ideas, like he felt strongly about both things.He didn’t have, especially on immigration, he didn’t have a lot of the policy stuff that would come later about what to do about it, you know, changing—which laws do you have to change, what policies need to be tossed overboard?You sort of hear him talk a lot now about the visa lottery system, which is—you know, which is, he calls it abhorrent.I mean, he probably didn’t know anything about the visa lottery system back then.So he didn’t—he didn’t have the specifics, but he had really strong views, as we all came to find out, about migrants and not letting immigrants come in, and the dangers, both the physical—you know, the dangers of people being hurt, but then also the economic dangers of immigrants coming in.

And he clearly has long been obsessed with trade, and this idea, you know, that free trade equals sort of a harm to regular working Americans, which is, in some ways, just hysterical, given who he is, right?I mean, he’s the—sort of casts himself as the champion of the working-class American.Of course he’s anything but, you know, standing on top of Trump Tower, peering over, looking down at all the little people.

So, I mean, it was sort of an odd thing for him.But those were the two things that animated him.And so I think from Bannon’s perspective—and since you’ve talked to him, I’m sure he told you this—like they all recognized the downsides of Trump, all of the things that would be potential drawbacks, roadblocks to getting him elected, all the personal stuff, the divorces and the kind of crazy language and the—all the stuff that we’ve now come to see like a million times over.They knew all of that.You know, they were clear-eyed.

But they thought that on these two issues, there wasn’t—there weren’t a lot of other people who could deliver those messages as clearly as Trump could.

The Trump Campaign

And in fact, Bannon tells us, he watched the escalator, the post-escalator ride speech, …and he says, you know: “Hallelujah.This is it.I knew it.We had the guy.”

Right.No, I think he told us for the book something like, you know, “That’s how you—that’s how you break through the—that’s how you disrupt the establishment.”And the people don’t talk that way.“That’s how you—that’s how you break through the vernacular,” right?And he was, at the time, not officially working for Trump.He was, you know, Breitbart.But I think he was there that day and turned to his, you know, his person and said: “That’s the quote.Grab that, the rapist.”I mean, because he understood that like—and Miller understood this, too; he told us later—that, you know, you have to define yourself in a way that is searing, in a way that like, the people will understand.And in a political environment, where everyone is so careful about how they speak, the lack of that carefulness, the willingness to just put it out there, they thought would define him in a way that, you know, obviously others would think is bad, but from their perspective was a good thing.

…. Tell me about Steve Miller’s role as Trump’s warmup act.

So he didn’t actually have a long relationship with Trump before the campaign, and didn’t come on right away, though, even while he was still on Capitol Hill working in Sessions’ office.I mean, he was sort of in contact with the campaign throughout that time.But Bannon—Bannon keeps pressuring Sessions when Sessions finally goes over to the campaign and is working with the campaign, and pressures the campaign people to bring Miller on, because he understands, you know, that Miller could play a valuable role.

And I think the bond that Miller and Trump form is really interesting and surprising, in a sense, because it’s—these are really two very different people.But they become, you know—you’re right to sort of put “speechwriter” in air quotes, because Trump doesn’t really read speeches, as we know.I mean, he kind of does when he has to, but that’s not his thing.But I think what Miller does is he helps Trump understand that there are catchphrases; there are ways to talk about immigration, and the sort of gut instinct that Trump had on immigrants that really can push the buttons of the base, right?I mean, Trump’s instincts were everything that we saw, and more.He hadn’t been fighting the trench wars over immigration that Sessions and Miller had, and so he didn’t have the vocabulary that sets off the two sides in—just lights them up, you know, I mean on both sides, right?Like, Miller knew exactly the phrases to put into Trump’s speeches that would light up Mark Levin’s phones on the radio, you know, or light up Rush Limbaugh’s phones.Like, what do you have to say to make those people go crazy, and obviously, on the other side, too, to make the left go crazy?And in some ways, you know, the best thing was when Trump would say something that would make the left go crazy, which then would give Trump and Miller the opportunity to like, highlight the fact that the left is going crazy and say, “See, there you go.”And so it was sort of a cycle that he knew how to help Trump get into.

And so, you know, him as the warmup act I think came sort of, you know—I don’t think that was planned.I think it was one of these things where—like Trump always does.He calls people up: “Oh, look.Come up here, Stephen.”And, you know, once that happened, it was clear that Stephen had a particularly good way of getting people kind of warmed up.But the more important thing for Stephen was how he helped Trump shape his own speeches and figure out how to push everybody’s buttons.

Bannon, Miller, and Sessions in the Trump White House

So by the time they win, these three people find themselves in important positions inside the new Trump administration.How important is it that they landed where they landed in terms of your story, our story and the bigger story of immigration?

If you had had Donald Trump win the presidency but be surrounded by people in the White House who were more traditional Republicans and who sort of thought the way more traditional Republicans, the John McCains of the world, thought, you know, I’m not sure any of this would have happened, or at least I think it would have been a very, very different administration.In order for Trump to have kind of proceeded on the—with the kinds of things that happened over the last two and a half years, three years, you needed—you needed people committed to those issues around the president to implement his agenda, to implement his ideas.

And one of the things that Miller in particular—I mean, all three of them, but Miller in particular—was motivated by this real rage about what he saw as the failure of Republicans to follow through on the immigration issue.He called it the “apology retreat cycle.”And he would describe it as Republican politicians who would use immigration in the sort of waning days of their campaigns as a way of stoking—stoking their—you know, energizing their voters, so they’d have, you know, “Oh, we’re going to get tough on immigration” kind of campaign ads.They’d win, and then the minute they won, they would drop it and say, “Well, that’s the last we’re going to say of that, because, you know, we’re going to come together, and we’re going to sort of govern from the middle.”And he hated that.He hated that.

Trump got into office, and Miller was by his side.What he wanted to do was break that cycle, you know, make sure that all of the rhetoric, all of the promises of building the wall and keeping these immigrants out and—and changing this whole mindset that they saw the country in, of being too permissive with immigrants, he wanted to make sure that it didn’t just stay as rhetoric.You know, he and Bannon in particular, during the transition in the first weeks of the administration, were obsessed by moving quickly, obsessed by moving quickly, because they thought that, you know, the inertia of governing was going to be sort of like a wave against them, that there was going to be, you know, all of this opposition from the traditional Republican Party, from the Democrats, from the activists, from the bureaucracy, all these people that had been sort of working in DHS and the State Department and all of these agencies forever, all of whom—none of whom—none of whom were going to have the same, you know, kind of thoughts about immigration that Miller and Bannon had.

It was, I think, vitally important to Trump’s agenda that they were there and that they had this idea that they had to move quickly.

And how important was it for Sessions to be the attorney general and members of his staff, [Francis] Cissna and [Gene] Hamilton and others, to begin to populate at a high enough level that they didn’t have to be ratified, or whatever that’s called.

Yeah, yeah, confirmed with the Senate, yeah.

But they could get right in there at an important junction, inside DOJ [Department of Justice], inside DHS especially.How important was that as part of the plan?

It was really important.I think Miller grew to learn that it was even more important than he realized.I think, you know, he took the position in the White House of senior adviser.I don’t think he understood quite at the beginning how, in some sense, how he had a lot of power, because he was standing next to the president of the United States, but he didn’t actually control any of the levers, right?In order to make all of this happen, you can issue an executive order, but the president’s executive order still tells agencies to do things, and you still needed people in those agencies to actually execute those directives.

And some of the frustration that made the president so angry and made Miller so angry and some of his other people so frustrated later in the administration was because he grows to find that—he grew to find that they get so much pushback, and so much of the stuff there, the changes in regulation that they think are so vital to reorient the country away from this kind of permissive immigration, they languish.They don’t move forward as quickly as they can.

The exception, I think, is Sessions, who, as attorney general, did have the ability to actually start pushing through some of the changes in places, you know, that related to immigration, prosecution of immigration and immigrants.But, you know, for all sorts of reasons that people know that have nothing to do with immigration, he became somewhat hampered by, you know, because of the Russia investigation and his relationship with the president, which soured very quickly.And so there was some—I think—I think there’s probably some regret, you know, on his part and his allies’ part that he might have even been more effective had he not had that issue.

The Travel Ban

How important was the travel ban or the Muslim ban or whatever you want to call it in the arc of the story?

So it’s important.It’s important on the long term for two reasons, I think, because one is, it becomes an object lesson inside the administration and for Miller for the importance of process.The early days of the administration were marked by just a complete lack of any understanding of how to develop a government policy and effectively implement it.And I think they, you know, they thought—Bannon and Miller thought that that was going to be an advantage, this sort of—they called it the shock-and-awe version of just like throw s--- out there, and it will be—and then you’ll sort of shock the government into action.And I think they grew to understand that that didn’t work and that that backfired.And you know, the travel ban has multiple iterations.It isn’t until the third iteration that it goes into effect, and the Supreme Court OK’s it.And I think they, you know, by that time they’ve recognized that like there is a value to running some sort of process that at least can sort of legitimize what they really want to do, even if what they want to do is already precooked, but at least give it some patina of like, we’ve done this.

The second lesson, I think, or the second way that it really sort of impacted the rest of the administration is that, because of the legal—because the lawsuits continued for so many months and into the next year, the argument they were making, the administration was making about the travel ban, and what they were telling the court about to justify the travel ban, which was that, you know, the people coming into the country posed this threat, even though there was very little evidence, and a lot of the government, you know, the bureaucrats and the holdovers from Obama were saying, “There’s no evidence of what you’re suggesting.”But they were from the very—from that first week, they were arguing.The government’s lawyers were arguing in court, “These people are a danger, and therefore we have to—it justifies the ban.”

What that meant was that, on a whole host of other policies, when they started considering questions, when they—when bureaucrats started to say, “Well, here’s the benefit of a refugee, or here’s the benefits of immigrants,” the lawyers fought back and said, “Well, no, no, you can’t put that—you can’t actually say that in any official document, because it would undermine the case that we’re making on the travel ban.”

And so again and again, we found evidence of people who were trying to kind of push the Millers and push the Sessionses back towards, you know, some sort of fact-based kind of approach to some of these issues.And the lawyers kept saying, “No, no, you can’t say that.”So I think—I think that was a hangover for a long time on a lot of issues that was literally started because of the litigation that was surrounding the travel ban that started that first week.

Who is Gene Hamilton?

You’re both in and out of the White House a lot.You covered lots of administrations.How important was it to discover the existence of Gene Hamilton, for example?How did you find him?What is his impact on the process, especially when you talk about Miller has access to the president, but he doesn’t have any—he can’t drive the car?

Yeah.It’s important to find those people.I mean, Hamilton was somebody who we found to be a central character, mainly through mentions by other people.You know, you would be talking to people who were both allies and adversaries of the president on this issue, whether—you know, we talked to a lot of folks inside the government who disagreed with what the administration was doing; we talked to a lot of supporters.But it didn’t matter which side you were on.You’d always hear, “Well, you should—you’ve got to talk to Gene Hamilton,” or, “You’ve got to find out about Gene Hamilton,” And always universally described as a genial, nice, friendly Southern gentleman from Georgia.He has a kind of a mannerism about him, according to people, that’s completely different than Miller’s, not at all intense and overbearing the way Miller can be, but important.

He started—in the administration, he started at DHS.I think they thought initially that the proper place for him would be to be essentially a lawyer, a counselor at the top levels of DHS.And he was there for four or five or six months, but in the end ended up going back over to the Justice Department to be essentially Jeff Sessions’ top person dealing with immigration over there, and I think had more luck—had more success in that role, but in both places completely invisible to the public, not somebody who was ever on television or was ever quoted.But when we would review documents, emails, drafts of proposals—you know, I’m thinking of, for example, when they were debating the family separation at the border, we found documents that have kind of proposals, like a series of proposals of what they could do to try to stop migrants from coming across from Central America.And you know the way that the Microsoft Word track changes program, you have little kind of bubbles on the side and in red type, and all of them were Gene Hamilton’s, you know, kind of—

“HG,” “HG.”

Yeah, exactly—analysis of like, you know, “Well, this is what the impact of…,” “Yes, we should do this”; you know, “I disagree with this”; you know, the opposition to this; “This would be great.”You know, he’s sort of like—and that was him, you know.That was his role, was to be the person that actually pushed the bureaucracy in the direction that Miller wanted.

“Dreamers” is something that’s been on the agenda all the way through the campaign, one of his promises, one of the things on the whiteboard behind Steve Bannon.But Trump himself is a little squishy—

Yeah, he’s conflicted.

There it is: conflicted, OK.So walk me through what do you think happens to get Sessions—that Sessions ends up being the guy making the announcement.And I gather, Miller, Bannon and Sessions, even though Bannon has gone by now, is he?—

Yep, he’s gone at that point.

—they’re still—they want to get this Dreamers thing moving.So just set it up for me, what you found.

Right.So it is true: Trump was always conflicted.Like he has—it’s this weird thing for him, where I think he obviously wants to be seen as tough, but he also doesn’t want to be seen as mean, if that’s—if that’s kind of a difference.And he, in particular, he had met some Dreamers back years earlier, where he actually kind of interacted with them.And so, I mean, it’s kind of well known inside the administration that even as they’re doing all these other sort of tough-on-immigration things on refugees, on asylum seekers, that this one particular group he’s conflicted about.He wants to keep his promise.He did make the promise during the campaign that one of the first things he would do would be to shut down President Obama’s illegal—illegal executive order.

But he doesn’t want to be seen as mean to these very kind of sympathetic young immigrants who, almost without exception, are—I mean, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have a good, compelling story about when they were brought in and how great they’ve done, and they’re mostly Americans in everything but documentation.So Bannon in particular—Bannon, but also Miller—understand this dynamic.Throughout the first year, they’re desperate to find a way to essentially force the president to accept this, to do it, but also to find a way maybe to have it done without the president having to be the guy standing up there doing it.

And a key person in that effort becomes a guy named Kris Kobach, who had been secretary of state in Kansas, and who had been himself a fierce anti-immigrant advocate.He is a lawyer, a super-smart lawyer who had kind of dabbled in various legal challenges to various immigration policies in Arizona and elsewhere.He had been one of the people that had—one of the lawyer attorneys who had sort of helped to kind of initially file lawsuits against DACA back in the day that—when Obama first put it into place.So he had this—he had a connection to the issue.

There were lots of people, including Bannon, who wanted Kobach to be DHS secretary.That didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons.So Kobach was kind of a radioactive character that like, would be hard to get confirmed through the Senate, but he’s still talking to Bannon.And Bannon says to him, “You’ve got to have a way that we can kind of force this issue on DACA.”

And so Kobach is the one that comes up with the idea of, there’s this group of state attorneys general, conservative state attorneys general, who are agitating about the issue anyway.We’ll have them write a letter to Sessions.The letter will say, you know: “We intend to file a lawsuit against DACA.We will win.The courts will force it to end.And so we’re going to—we’re going to give you a deadline.We’re going to file on this date in September unless the president acts to end it first.”

It forces action inside the government.It forces the government, the departments, the bureaucracy to start moving, because up until that point, the president’s ambivalence means that the government just is frozen, right?There’s no—there’s no movement towards ending DACA until you have this legal threat looming out there.

And at that point, Sessions has a tool to keep going to the president and keep going to the people in the Justice Department bureaucracy, saying: “We’re going to have to deal with this.This is looming, and we are going to have to respond to this lawsuit.The government is going to have to say, when the state attorneys general announce that they’re going to sue, the government’s going to have to take a position in court.And at that point, we’re going to have to say, you know, we don’t support the program anymore, and then it—then the courts will be the one to end it.Wouldn’t it be better if we ended it first?”

And so that’s the drive—that becomes the driving force.The person who has to actually write the memo that rescinds DACA is the secretary of homeland security.The way the government works, that’s how the program was put in place, with a memo by the secretary of homeland security, so it has to be kind of unwoven that way.

… There’s a bureaucrat named Elaine Duke who is the acting secretary of homeland security.

So Elaine Duke is not at all a warrior for Miller.She teaches English to migrants in her spare time.And she hates the idea.She absolutely hates the idea of being the person whose name is going to be on this thing ending DACA, and so she fights against it.There’s meetings behind the scenes where Miller and Sessions and Gene Hamilton—Bannon is gone by then I think—but are all pushing her, you know: “You have to do this.This is what, you know—the litigation is coming.”

In the end, she caves.She writes the memo.She does the sort of formal bureaucratic act, but does not—does not want to be the one to announce it.And in the end, Sessions decides—there’s some back-and-forth.The president was going to announce it, …and in the end, they just—you know, they just—he can’t do it.I mean, he can do the policy, but he can’t give the speech, and so Sessions is the one that announces it.

And Sessions no doubt is happy as you can be, right?

Yeah.Totally.I mean, because for Sessions, it actually—the elimination of DACA ticks off both boxes for him, because Sessions is not only—not only does it do all of the kind of anti-immigrant thing; it’s like, you know, it’s the end of an amnesty.He views DACA as an illegal amnesty.But it also is, for a lot of Republicans, including Sessions, kind of an abomination the way it was done; that it was an executive order rather than something that was done through legislation; that the idea that, you know, Barack Obama could just sign a little piece of paper essentially and, like, you know, here are 800,000 or 1.6 million, depending on how you counted, young people are going to just—their crimes, in Sessions’ views, are going to be wiped away.So for Sessions, who’s a very kind of law-and-order, constitutional-government kind of guy, even aside from the immigration subject, he just, I think, thought that it was the wrong way to have gone about it.So to be able to like say, “Hey, we’re getting rid of this thing,” kind of is 100 percent great for Sessions.

Trump Wavers on DACA

The issue—so it happens.The issue languishes.We find ourselves in January.Trump still—what side is he on?… And Trump has a meeting with “Nancy and Chuck” and sends a tweet out afterwards and sort of says, “DACA, DACA people, don’t worry, you Dreamers; you’re good.”The very next day on television, he invites the TV cameras in and has this strange meeting, reality TV-show kind of meeting where he’s offering [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein the barn and the house and the pool and everything.

The Republicans are going crazy.

And [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy is stepping in going: “What?What are you doing?”So into that whole world, which we’ve covered pretty well, it’s the aftermath of that when [Ann] Coulter goes berserk in the two days before the “s—hole” meeting; Miller’s gathering support everywhere.So let’s just—let’s look at it from Miller’s perspective.What happened in that first meeting, the Nancy and Chuck tweet?What does he think is happening to his guy?

So I think—I think Miller viewed the DACA issue as both one of the biggest dangers, but also a potential lever to use, right?So on the one hand, Miller and Bannon both, I think, and the sort of likeminded folks thought that it would be—it could be a disaster if Trump just folded on DACA and granted amnesty, from their perspective, to all of these kids, all of these immigrants, in exchange for nothing; that it would be a disaster with the base—a la Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter and Lou Dobbs would go crazy—and would essentially be a betrayal of the kind of promises that he made and would call into question for, you know, the blue-class, regular working-class people whether or not Trump is committed to the cause.

And so I think when, you know, every time [Sen.] Lindsey Graham would whisper in Donald Trump’s ears, you know, when he’s playing golf with him, about, “Hey, let’s do this DACA thing,” I mean, Miller would go nuts.And so this whole time period that you’re talking about, the Chuck and Nancy thing, the crazy televised meeting, it’s all driving Miller nuts.But I think Miller was also smart enough to understand that DACA was probably going to happen somewhere now that they were going to have to fix it, because these were the most sympathetic people in Washington, and there was enough of a consensus on the—among Democrats and a lot of Republicans that this had to be fixed.

And so, from Miller’s perspective, the question was not, “Are we going to do it in the end?Like are we going to find—now that we’ve sort of made good on our promise to end it, is there going to be a way to fix the situation for these kids?” but "What are we going to get for it?”And the—this is simplifying it, but I think the thing that ultimately dooms the effort to, like, actually find a legislative fix that can—that Washington can agree on is Miller’s insistence on, you know, larding it up with all of these other things that he wants to get, right, and not just for him personally, but, you know, that he thinks that the only way this is going to work is if, you know, in exchange for DACA, we get the wall money, the changes to what—what Trump always calls “catch and release,” so that you can essentially detain people and families and kids indefinitely.You know, changes to asylum laws, changes to refugee policy, so that you don’t have to let so many refugees in.All of these other things that Stephen wants.

And so what ends up playing out over the course of the next year is just this back-and-forth where, you know, you see Trump leaning in towards wanting to make some kind of deal for the DACA kids and then being pulled back by his—by the hard-liners that are around him who, you know, insist on there being—on getting something for it.And—and the calculation I think that Miller makes is if we can—if we could sell—I think his calculation is, we could sell to Ann Coulter, you know, some kind of a deal in which the DACA kids sort of are protected either permanently or even maybe—maybe even get a sort of long path to citizenship, but only if we could crow about the fact that we got $25 billion for the wall, and we’ve got all these, you know, changes that sort of, over the long run, are going to be really restrictive about immigration.And that dooms the effort.

So why do [Sen. David] Perdue, [Sen. Tom] Cotton, all the others show up in that meeting, when [Sen. Dick] Durbin and Sen. Graham arrive, sitting in the waiting room, holding their freshly baked—

So, you know, it’s just classic Washington, right?Like Lindsey Graham and Durbin, Republican, Democrat.They’ve known each other for years and years.They’ve worked on this issue, on immigration broadly, for a long time.And I think Graham in particular thought that he had kind of baked a proposal together that would have enough of the bells and whistles of Miller’s, some of Miller’s proposals, that it could kind of slip by, right?You protected the DACA kids, the Dreamers, but then you also, you know, did some of these things.

From Miller’s perspective and from the perspective of Cotton and some of these other hard-liners, the specifics of Graham’s proposals were incredibly weak.They did some of the things that Miller wanted, but in name only.The sort of details of them would have meant that they really wouldn’t have done a lot, at least from the perspective of Miller and that gang.

And so I think that the huge worry that day, on the part of Miller and [John] Kelly and the hard-liners around Trump, was that if Graham pulled the wool over the president’s eyes and said, “See, Mr. President, this does it all.This—this takes care of your whole problem, because it gives you what—it gives you what you want, and it gets you out of the Dreamer mess, and it satisfies you.You can go out to Ann Coulter and say you’ve done all these things,” I think Miller thought, “Oh, my God.If—if the president comes to believe that, we’re doomed,” because what will happen is that will gain momentum, that will pass, and everybody—everybody on the right will see it as the sort of sham that Miller thought that it was.And—and we’re screwed.

And so not 100 percent clear that Miller actually picked up the phone and made the phone calls.The calls to the White—to the members of Congress go out generally through, you know, through administrative people, so it’s—you know, we couldn’t find anybody that said that Miller actually was the one on the other end of the line, but it was clear that that was who was, you know, panicking.I think Kelly was also panicking, largely because this isn’t the way it’s done, right?Like, you’re not supposed to have a couple of senators whispering in the president’s ear.I mean, you want to sort of think about this.

So I think they were all sort of panicked around the president and understood, as we’ve all come to understand about this president, that it’s—you know, that he will sort of blow in the wind with whoever was the last person who whispered in his ear, and so they knew that they needed to make sure that that didn’t happen this time.

So when the Trump whisperers Graham and Durbin walk in, they’re surprised—“shocked” is probably not a strong enough word—to find the president pretty spun up and not exactly receptive to an idea that they talked about.There was an 11:00 Trump and a 12:00 Trump.

Yeah, no.And look, this is—this was classic Miller, too.We found many examples of this, where one of Miller’s talents was spinning the president up.And, you know, being the person to whisper, to hand him, you know—He was constantly handing him, you know, statistics and numbers and papers and, you know, things that would, or, you know, links to Breitbart, links to Fox News clips, links to, you know what I mean?… He would do it before.He wouldn't—A lot of—a lot of people would do these kinds of things during the meeting.He wouldn't do it as much during the meeting.He would mostly do it before, to get the president already spun up.And then once he spun the president up, it was fine.He was in, you know, in the mood that Miller wanted him to be in.

Interviewing Stephen Miller

You guys interview Miller.This is between DACA and “zero tolerance.”You sit with him.Take me there. …

So we interviewed him two or three times.… And those were sessions designed largely to be—to talk broadly about immigration and the president’s agenda, immigration agenda, and what they were trying to accomplish.And you know, Miller is in private very much the way he is publicly.He’s incredibly intense.He speaks really quickly.He is relentless in his beliefs.He doesn’t give an inch.You know, as reporters, you’re often trying to sort of poke holes to you know, sort of get a person to respond to, you know—kind of to challenge something so that you hear what their response to that is.And he’s—he gives no quarter.I mean, I can’t remember a time when he would say, “Well, yeah, that’s right.Actually, I think that’s right.”Yeah.No, he doesn’t do that.

Zero Tolerance and Family Separation

You used the word “defiant” in the book.

Yeah.Yeah.I mean, he is.Now, the most—the most interesting interview I think we had with him, though, was at the height of the family separation.So, you know, that interview was maybe a week or two before the president finally pulls the plug on family separation.It’s in June, I think June 7, maybe.He—and that was in his office, on the second floor of the West Wing.

…And we were doing, Julie and I were doing a big story on family separation, which at that point was blowing up.And we, you know—and Stephen agreed to talk to us about it.And as we said in the book, he was incredibly defiant.I mean, this is the—the controversy is global at this point.I mean, I can’t remember if by then the pope had condemned the policy, but like essentially, you know, it was clear that this was becoming the sort of controversy that it ultimately became.And our question to Stephen, our repeated question to Stephen during that day is, you know, “Can this—are you really telling us, first of all, are you really telling us this is a good thing?And second, are you really telling us that the president is going to, you know—is not going to back down?Are you really telling us that in the face of these images and the sobbing children and the, you know—and the”—I can’t remember if Time magazine had put that little girl on the cover yet, but you know—

And the ProPublica audio.

I think that was a little—

—later?

A little bit later.… And we, I think, were somewhat incredulous, like, “Do you really think that this—that he’s going to be able to sustain this?”

And on both counts, on whether it was a good idea and on whether he could sustain it, Miller was absolutely not willing to give any ground.He just kept, you know, making the argument from his perspective, that the only way to—that you have to enforce the law.The only way to send the message to Central America that it isn’t open borders is to enforce the law 100 percent, regardless of the consequences.He talked about, you know, in political terms, the Democrats being the party of open borders, and that if the president wanted to differentiate himself from that, if the president wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t the president of open borders, that he was committed to this, and that he was not going to give in; he was not going to relent.

And there was one—there was one moment where, you know, to make his case, he sort of turned to an aide who was sitting there and said, “Where’s that paper that I wanted?”And he grabs this paper, and it’s a printout of a—of a raid that had happened in Philadelphia, an ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raid, and a list of the people that had been apprehended in that raid, of immigrants that had been apprehended in that raid.And he starts reading down the list—murder, rape, rape, assault, assault, rape, murder, you know—and to make the point that, you know, here, this is the invasion we’re preventing, right?Like, I mean, which of course isn’t factual, right, especially given what we were talking about.We were there to talk about what are essentially families and coming over.And you—you can have your view about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.But what the statistics show is that they are not all murderers and rapists and criminals.

But to us it was revelatory about him, the way he thinks about it, right?And I think that mirrors the way the president thinks about it, which is that that’s—that is who he envisions the big great wall stopping, is that, you know, immigrant equals murderer, rapist, assault—and that that’s, you know, that’s the frame, you know, into which all of these other things, all of these other policies are seen.

Kirstjen Nielsen and Family Separation

… So let’s tell the Kirstjen Nielsen story in as full a form as you want, so that we really understand where the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is in the midst of this process.

So she is vital to the ultimate separation of these families, because the way the government works, Sessions had the power as attorney general to tell the prosecutors that work for him, the immigration judges and the prosecutors essentially, “We want you to prosecute 100 percent of the cases that come to you,” right?And he did that.That’s the announcement that he made in April, and that was within his power to do.

The problem is that they can only prosecute the cases that are referred to them, and they—in order to get a case, they rely on DHS to refer people to the Justice Department for prosecution.So when somebody comes across the border, it is, you know, it’s initially Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol agents who capture the person usually.And then it’s immigration, ICE, that detains them.

… The policy, the sort of general policy, had been that when DHS took custody of a family—Mom, Dad, kid; Mom, kid; some, you know, family unit—the law said that you could not detain children in jail.You couldn’t detain children in an adult prison.And so if you wanted to take the family and prosecute them and hold them in jail cells, the only choice you had would have been to separate them, because you could—you could detain the adult, but you couldn’t detain the child for longer than a few days.

And so the general policy at DHS had been, we will refer to Justice people who come over who are just single adults, but we’re not going to refer families.When we find a family, we’re going to, you know, detain them for a brief period of time; we’re going to issue them a summons that they have to appear in court, and then we’re going to let them go because of this issue of separation.

And even the Obama people had, in previous years, had sort of considered the idea of, should we—should we separate, you know, these families so that we can prosecute the adults?And they largely had decided, no, that’s—that’s—we’re not—not a line that we’re willing to cross.So then—so after Sessions announces this idea that we’re going to prosecute 100 percent of the people that are referred to us, it is Nielsen who has to ultimately make the decision.And she gets presented with a memo that basically says, OK, zero tolerance has started.The prosecutions are going to be 100 percent as soon as—as soon as you decide who you’re going to refer, and we recommend that you refer 100 percent of adults, even if those adults came over with a family, with children.

And she agonizes.She agonizes over it, not so much, I think it’s fair to say, because of the moral implications of it, but rather because of the practical implications.She worries that, wait a minute.Like, what are we going to do with the kids?And is there—do we have facilities for holding all of these people if, you know—and obviously, if we’re—if we’re not letting them go, then both the adults and the kids have to be put somewhere.And do we have a process in place for doing that?

And she has discussions with Justice and with HHS [Health and Human Services] and with other sort of—and with the CPB and ICE, you know, kind of agencies within her own department.Like, are we able to handle all of this?And she worries.She frets about that not being the case.Sessions, Hamilton—Gene Hamilton, who is by now at Justice, says, you know: “Don’t worry about it.We can handle this.This won’t—you know, we’re going to prosecute these people really quickly.They won’t be separated for long.As soon as we’re finished prosecuting them, they’ll be, you know, brought back together and deported, and—and—which is exactly what we want, is these quick deportations.And that will send a message.”

And the idea, I think for all of them was, you know, that will send a message to Central America: “Don’t even bother coming.”And then the numbers will drop, and everything will be—will be good.And she resists for a couple of months, and—but ultimately she gets phone calls from the White House, from Miller, from, you know, Kelly, and she relents, and she signs the memo.

A lot of pressure?

Incredible amount of pressure.I think she—it’s interesting.I think she—she wavers.She doesn’t want to be the face of this—this policy that she understands will be very controversial.But she also doesn’t want Sessions to get all the credit with the president, right, because she knows she’s already in a position where the president doesn’t think that she’s tough enough on immigrants, right?He’s sort of made that clear to her already.And so, you know, she tells her staff at one point, “But, you know, if I don’t sign this, then I’m the one standing in the way of, you know, of what the president wants, which is getting tough on immigration.And if I do sign it, and Sessions gets all the credit, then, you know, I’m still—I don’t get any.”

And so she—you know, there is this—the back-and-forth.And in the middle of that, I mean, people are telling her, you know: “Your ass is on the line.You’ve got to sign this.You’ve got to do this, because the president wants this to happen.”And she does.She signs it.

Do you have any sense of what Miller or Sessions thought of her personally as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?

I don’t know what they thought of her personally, like as a person.I know there was suspicion by the president, and I’m—and I’m sure there was by Miller and Sessions and Hamilton and the others, that she didn’t share this kind of, you know, ideological restrictionist view of immigration; that she was, you know, she was a Bush person.She had been, you know, sort of brought into government under—under George W. Bush, which, you know, to Trump was like, you know, that was—that was the kiss of death, I mean practically.

And you know, she wasn’t an immigration person by training.She was more of a cybersecurity expert.So I think—I think they just didn’t trust her.They didn’t think that she was committed to the cause.I think, you know, she tried throughout her whole tenure, which we can talk about, to convince them that she was a sort of—she believed in the rule of law and believed that like, if there’s rules against immigration, we should enforce the rules against immigration.But she was also clear-eyed about the fact that like, the laws are the laws, and if—you know, and we can only do what the laws say we can do; we can’t go beyond that.And I think that frustrated the administration.

How did she find herself accepting Sarah Sanders’ invitation to stand before the jackals of the press…on that particular day?

Yeah.She—so the controversy gets worse and worse.She is defending it.The way she would think about it and would talk about it to members of Congress, and get into such trouble, is that this wasn’t a policy to separate.In her mind, it never said we will now—we choose to separate.The separation was a consequence of a different policy.The consequence was, we’re going to refer for prosecution all adults, and that meant that separation was going to happen.

Now, we found documents that actually sort of acknowledged in print the word “separation.”And so the memo that she signed, that ultimate memo that she signed referring them all actually said, “We do understand that doing this will mean that families will be separated.”So, you know, it’s disingenuous for sure to suggest—for her to suggest that she didn’t maybe understand that this was going to happen.It’s possible to understand that or to accept that she didn’t understand the chaos with which it would happen, that, you know, that came because they were so—they handled it so poorly.

But—so she—so it’s getting worse and worse.She’s beaten up, but she’s still defensive.The ProPublica audio comes out, the kid wailing, the little girl wailing, you know, which captivates everybody and is really, really hard to listen to.You know, Melania [Trump] comes out and makes statements.Everybody’s, you know, piling on.And it’s clear that this thing—something has to give.But the White House is still, you know, defiant.The president makes—the day that ultimately Nielsen appears at that—in the briefing room, the president has made some comments, you know, saying: “I’m sticking by this.This is necessary.”

Nielsen has gone to give a speech in New Orleans, to I think a sheriff’s group, in which she’s also very defiant, and she repeats again that there is no policy that specifically separates children, and this is important, and there are some people in the country who, you know, who want to be open border.I mean, she repeats the open borders and a lot of the same rhetoric that—that Trump and Miller had been putting out there.And she’s on the way back, her way back to Washington, when she gets the call from Sarah Sanders that they think they need to do some—you know, they need to put somebody out in front of the press, in the White House, to kind of make the administration’s case.I mean, they know they’re dying.You know, they’re—you know, it’s just a monster controversy at that point, and they—and they need to, you know, it’s not going to work to just have Sarah out there, you know.They need somebody with more gravitas, and she’s the secretary of homeland security.

And her aides and her allies desperately don’t want her to do this.They desperately don’t want her to, at the height of all of this, to be the person defending it.Kelly tells her—Kelly, John Kelly, who is—who had brought her to the—to the Department of Homeland Security when he was there and is sort of her mentor and her protector and, you know, says he doesn’t think that she should do it.And initially I think she says, “No, I’m not going to do it,” but then relents and sort of feels like it’s her duty.

This is, you know, one of her press aides tells her that he thinks she shouldn’t do it.… And then there’s a back-and-forth, and she ultimately agrees to do it.She’s never been before the White House press corps.She doesn’t get any real guidance.You know, I covered eight years of Obama.The people who came before—people who came before the White House press corps usually get hours of briefing, and they maybe even do a mock, you know, kind of like practice inside this–the press secretary’s office.I mean, it’s a—you know, the klieg lights are on.The White House press corps is pretty aggressive.It’s different than facing—facing a bunch of Homeland Security reporters who, you know—I mean, if you’re a Homeland Security person who covers DHS full-time, you’re, you know, you sort of are in the weeds of immigration policy or of Homeland Security policy.

That’s not what White House reporters do.You know, White House reporters are focused first and foremost on the president and politics and, you know, for good or ill.And so she—she goes out there, and it’s a disaster.I mean, it just—you know, I think the first five questions are all about like: “Have you listened to the audio?Isn’t this—isn’t this inhumane?" …And she again denies the separation.And I think in the end she regrets it.

She gets a little snarky, too, a couple of times.

She gets snarky.She—there’s an exchange at the end with Steven Portnoy, who is a young CBS News Radio reporter who, you know, who says to her: “Let me just understand.Is the reason that you’re doing this because you want to separate families as a deterrent?”And she gets really—she gets—she gets sort of offended and says: “Absolutely not.You know, I would never do that!”And I think he said something like, you know, “Well, Sessions says that it’s a deterrent.”And she, you know, says: “Why?That’s not why.That’s not—we’re doing this because this is the law.”

And I remember thinking, when I went back and watched that exchange again, much later, when we were writing the book, that, you know, that it was so duplicitous, because all of the conversations, all of the memos that, you know, that we reviewed in the discussions with people, the interviews that we had with people, everything was built around the idea of deterrence.That was the whole idea.I mean, the only way in which even Miller and company thought that this was a workable policy—put aside the moral quandary of whether you should do it—the reason to do it, in their minds, was deterrence, was that you needed to—it was that the lack of a policy like this invited immigrant families to come up, because they thought they could sort of sneak into the United States this way, they could apply for asylum and then just be let go and then never show up again, and that what you needed was a deterrent message, was a—was a horrific thing to happen so that, you know, migrants would get the message that, “Oh, my God, I don’t want to come to the United States because my kid will be taken away from me.”I mean, that was the message!That was the point!They had done a trial, a trial along one sector of the border the previous year for a few months, and gleefully announced that migrant families had, in that little section, had dropped off by 60-something percent because they got the deterrent message.I mean, it was the whole idea.

So the idea—so the notion that the secretary of homeland security was standing up in that briefing and just—and reacting that way, and denying first that it was a policy of separation at all, and then denying that it was intended to be a deterrent, I think struck a lot of people in the room, a lot of the reporters in the room, as just stunning that she would say that.And then I think, in retrospect, when we looked at it, that was—that was a moment that, you know, didn’t match up with the record.

Trump’s Frustration with Nielsen

… What happens?Fire her.

She has problems from the—from family separation through the rest of her tenure, she has problems with Trump.She is constantly fighting with Trump.He is constantly telling—he is getting more and more frustrated.The family—the numbers of families are shooting through the roof.It is a—he’s getting if not daily then certainly weekly reports about how like, all of these people are coming to the border, the caravans, all of that stuff that happens through the fall of ’18.He’s getting angrier and angrier, and he takes it out on her, because he keeps telling her: “Just keep them out.Just—just do any—you know, don’t let them in.”And she keeps saying: “I can’t do that, Mr. President.Like, that’s not legal.I can’t—you know, we have laws that say that if this person comes and claims asylum, there’s a process that we—a legal process that we have to abide by.You may not like the process, but—and we can try to, like, you know, make changes to the process, but ultimately Congress is the one that’s going to have to.If they don’t want to give asylum to people anymore, they’ve got to say that.”

And so—and the two of them fight constantly, constantly on the phone.He calls her up at all hours of the day and night, frequently calls her up at 5:30, 6:00 in the morning to yell at her about why she isn’t doing more.Sometimes she’s awake; sometimes she’s not.He gets angry because she doesn’t, you know, always pick up the phone.Cabinet meetings, you know, in the Oval Office, in front of people, not in front of people—he just is constantly yelling at her.

And she, you know, she’s pushing back.She’s—she’s, you know, essentially saying like, “I’ll do everything I can do, but I can’t—you know, I’m not going to—there’s limits.”And he doesn’t like the fact that there are limits.So if you fast-forward to March, the end of March of 2019, she—you know, the president is angrier than he’s ever been about the fact that migrants keep flowing across the border.He sees it as a direct affront to his—to his promises that he made during the campaign and throughout his presidency.

Miller, who has always been good about—good—has been skilled at not only tweaking the president in person but also feeding the conservative press, fueling the kind of outrage in the Ann Coulter world or in the Rush Limbaugh world or in the Sean Hannity world, and in this case, in the Lou Dobbs—for Lou Dobbs, that’s what he does.He seeds that outrage, or helps to seed that outrage—I think the outrage is already there in some cases, but—and then knowing full well that the president is going to see it.

So that that end of March, the president is angry.He—he watches Lou Dobbs.Lou Dobbs goes on a 90-minute rant about—a long rant about how terrible the Department of Homeland Security is.You know, the president is trying to do everything he can.Kirstjen Nielsen is standing in his way.She’s weak; she’s a Bush—I mean, all that—raising all of the things, all of the doubts that Trump has had about Nielsen.So Lou Dobbs interviews Kobach, who, you know, is sort of always kind of in the mix, and Kobach dumps all over Kirstjen Nielsen and all over the Department of Homeland Security.There’s been, I think, a report that day, or earlier that week, from the border about the border numbers, and they’re higher than they’ve ever been.It’s record numbers.And Dobbs just kind of just—it’s just, you know, over the top, even for Dobbs.

And so the next morning, there’s a meeting in the Oval Office with Kirstjen Nielsen and a bunch of other folks, scheduled to be—to talk about immigration, but scheduled to be about 20 minutes.It goes on for two hours….You know, Nielsen tries to, you know—and most of the ire is focused on her.“You need to just shut it down.”

And you know, they’ve talked about this before."You can’t just shut down the border with Mexico," she says.And he says: “I don’t care.Do it.”And so the meeting ends, and he looks at everybody in a way that he had never done before, and he says: “I want you to shut the border tomorrow at noon, the entire border with Mexico”—2,000 miles.“Just shut everything, commerce, you know, everything.Just shut the whole thing down at noon tomorrow.”And he gives a deadline.

And that, you know, that precipitates a panic.I mean, he storms out.That precipitates a complete panic for like six hours, where, you know, Nielsen, the rest of the administration, the sort of—even Miller, even Miller at that point understands that, like, what that could mean economically to both countries and the sort of the out-of-control nature of that.And yet they also understand that he has ordered—it’s the president of the United States, and he has looked the people who are responsible in the eye and said, “I order you to shut the border down tomorrow at noon.”

Trump travels to a rally in Michigan that night.Nielsen and the CBP people and the rest of the sort of—and Kushner, everybody tries, basically says: “We’ve got to stop that.We cannot do this.This can’t happen.”So he’s flying to Michigan for a rally that night.They enlist Miller and the others that are on the plane with him, they say, “You have to talk him out of this.”And by the time that he flies back from Michigan that night, they’ve convinced him to wait a week.They’ve—he won’t back down; he still wants the border shut, but he gives them a week, because they basically say, “Well, you know, it’s just impossible practically to do this in a day, like in less than a day, in a matter of hours.So we can’t do it.”But he says: “Fine.Do it in one week,” which they take as a reprieve, but only a temporary one.

And then they spend the next week desperately trying to convince the Mexican government to do something to demonstrate that they’re going to stop this, so they convince the Mexicans—they basically tell the Mexicans: “The president is out of control.He’s crazy.He’s going to shut down the border.I know we’ve like, you know, said that he might do this before, but you’ve got to believe us this time.”They convince the Mexicans to do a bunch of high-profile raids in which they try to stop immigrants and then issue press releases that they have faxed back up to the White House and have people hand the president, you know, sort of details of the raid.They, you know, they have businesspeople call Trump to tell him that this would devastate business.They have Chamber of Commerce people calling him.They have members of Congress calling him, you know, all of them with the same message: “This is terrible politically.This would be devastating economically.You don’t want to be the president—you don’t want to see the stock market crash.You don’t want to see…”—you know, all of this stuff that is—that is told, you know, to try to convince him to walk off of this ledge.

And they try to talk to him about, “Well, we can slow down—you know, we can do things to slow down entry, which will have the similar effect that you want.We can do it at one port instead of all of the ports.”They were—they were going to take people away from the processing of the ports and move them over to like, basically be line people to try to stop the immigrants and that that would have the effect of slowing everything down, and that that would be a similar result.

That Friday, the end of that week, he has scheduled to go to Calexico, which is a little town in California on the border with Mexico.That was—had been a preplanned thing.So he flies to Calexico, and—and, you know, he sort of—he backs down on the threat to close the border.He says, “OK, I won’t close—we don’t have to close the whole border.”And so they breathe a sigh of relief.Nielsen and company breathe a sigh of relief.

But when he gets to Calexico, and he’s meeting with the Border Patrol agents—they have a sort of a little, you know, event set up for him—behind closed doors, he’s shaking hands with the Border [Patrol] agents, and he says: “Let me just say, when people come in, just don’t let them in.Just don’t let them in.Don’t let them come over.”

And Nielsen and her people are standing there.And as soon as the president leaves the room, Nielsen and the border protection people all go up to the Border Patrol agents: “Yeah, don’t—don’t do that.Like, you can’t do that.Like, you’d—that’s not legal.You can’t just tell people they can’t come across”—which is, you know, pretty amazing when you think about it.And—and so it’s clear, even as he sort of backs down on the immediate threat to shut the border down, it’s clear that she is still, you know, standing in the way of what he really wants.

And as she flies home to—as he goes back to Washington, and as she flies back to Washington separately, she calls him and says: “Mr. President, I think we should—you know, I think we should talk.I think—you know, let me—let me describe for you.I know you’re frustrated.I know you don’t think I’m doing—but I believe that we can do things that will do what you want, that are legal.”She says, “I just don’t want to come and make the case that I can—that we can still do this.”And she’s—she’s sort of sketched out—she and her aides sketch out a kind of a six-point plan that, you know, in sort of diplomacy and various different steps that she thinks, you know, are within the law but can achieve this.And he says: “Yes, that’s great.That’s great.Come—come see me in the Oval on Sunday, in the Yellow Oval on Sunday.”

And she thinks she’s meeting just with him.And she comes on Sunday, and Mick Mulvaney is there, the chief of staff at that point.She didn’t expect that.And he basically said, “Look, this isn’t working.”She tried to make her case for, you know, for the sort of six-point plan that she said could work.And—but it was, yeah, I think it became pretty clear that Trump and Mulvaney and maybe others, maybe Miller, probably had already been talking.… And then she said, “Well, then I’ll resign, Mr. President.”And before she left, before she got out of the White House complex, the news was already out.They had leaked it already.

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