The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 by Sid Holt

Author:Sid Holt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Through the early spring of 2018, border crossings continued to rise. Fox News commentators took note of the trend and blamed Kirstjen Nielsen. Stephen Miller prompted the president to chastise her. Knowing that Trump did not like to read official reports, Miller would instead print out articles by a few choice immigration reporters at right-wing outlets and leave them on the president’s desk, saying they were evidence that Nielsen was a bad leader. Soon, Nielsen was being summoned to the West Wing for even more frequent—sometimes daily—meetings about what to do. The discussions consisted mostly of Miller ranting about how the ideas he’d been pitching for months had needlessly stalled. Jeff Sessions would sometimes pile on, telling the president that Nielsen was being gutless, allowing him—if only temporarily—to escape Trump’s ire himself. Once, Sessions told Trump that Nielsen could simply choose not to let people cross the border, but was refusing to do so. Trump screamed at Nielsen, making her cabinet colleagues deeply uncomfortable. Kelly stepped in and tried to adjourn the meeting, but he stayed quiet about the specific policies.

Indeed, the limitation of Kelly’s approach to opposing Zero Tolerance may have been that, in front of the Hawks, he focused on his logistical concerns. Kelly felt that approach was the most likely to stop the policy from being implemented, but the Hawks now say they didn’t register Kelly’s general opposition to it, only that he thought it would require additional resources. (Kelly says his opposition to separating families was plainly clear throughout his tenure in the administration.)

According to colleagues, Tom Homan and Kevin McAleenan continued to minimize the significance of Zero Tolerance, saying that they merely wanted to increase enforcement of laws already on the books. “Under what authority do you tell the police ‘Don’t enforce law’?” Nielsen told me McAleenan said to her. “He was basically like, ‘Look, you’re not allowing me to do my job. We need to stop having the conversation and just move forward and do this.’ ” (McAleenan says he never suggested that the policy was uncontroversial and that he raised logistical concerns with Nielsen repeatedly. Homan says he never pressured Nielsen.)

Nielsen still didn’t feel she had enough information to make a decision: Did Border Patrol stations have the capacity to house additional migrants waiting to be sent to court? Did the Justice Department have enough lawyers to take on extra cases? Did the U.S. Marshals have enough vehicles to transport separated parents? What would happen to the children while the prosecutions were carried out? Nielsen and her colleagues say that McAleenan and Homan were dismissive, the implication being that it was not her job as secretary to get mired in enforcement details; she was micromanaging.

Every key member of the Trump administration’s DHS leadership team whom I interviewed told me that separations were never meant to play out as they did. But when I asked them to explain how separations, prosecutions, and reunifications were supposed to have worked, every one of them gave me a different version of the plan.

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