One of Nielsen’s tactics for when Trump asked her to do something illegal—or something that violated a regulation or a treaty—was to ask him, “Okay, sir, what are you trying to accomplish here?” She would then try to figure out a legally permissible way to achieve the same result and often arranged briefings to try to inform the president what he could and could not do. “Let me bring people in,” Nielsen would tell Trump. “You don’t have to trust me.” But the briefings rarely made an impression on Trump. Just when Nielsen thought an illegal or unfeasible idea had been put to bed, the president would awaken it. Trump did not see the law as an impediment, a mind-set forged as a real estate developer. A developer could always just sue, battle it out in court, and negotiate some middle ground.
“Look, we’ll get sued and then we’ll work it out,” Trump told Nielsen during one such discussion. “Just block people from coming in.” Stopping people from seeking asylum was a favorite solution of the president’s. But he had many ideas, and they would sometimes feel like a sandblast of suggestions, any one of them violating the international conventions on torture, or U.S. rules requiring the study of environmental harm, or regulations governing competitive contracts. Lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security and the White House rarely pointed this out to Trump. Nobody wanted to get him even angrier. Just as he used to recoil from McGahn’s repeatedly telling him he couldn’t do some of the things he wanted to do, Trump got frustrated with Nielsen.
“Federal law enforcement doesn’t work like that,” Nielsen told Trump in one such meeting. “People could get in trouble. These people have taken an oath to uphold the law. Do you really want to tell them to do the opposite?”
“Then we’ll pardon them,” Trump said.
Nielsen knew that every time she asked her agency heads within the Department of Homeland Security to fully secure the porous U.S.-Mexico border, they would complain that the only solution was for Congress to close legal loopholes. A migrant seeking asylum had to meet a fairly low bar to gain entry, stating that he or she had a credible fear of retribution or harm back home. The overwhelming majority would later be denied asylum based on their circumstances, but by the time of their hearing they had often already disappeared into the country.
On immigration policy, there were many critics and no sponsors. Many offices had to review policy and legislative changes: the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council, the White House counsel’s office, the chief of staff’s office, and the policy coordinators, as well as Kushner and Stephen Miller. It was rare for an idea to survive that gauntlet, and a near miracle for anyone to actually champion it and do the work required to implement it. Kelly sometimes tried to protect Nielsen’s turf, once telling Kushner, “You should stay out of it,” because Nielsen was in charge of immigration policy.
“The White House was so broken,” one administration official later remarked, looking back on this tense period on immigration policy. “There was no process. Ideas would come to the president in a no-process method. Half-baked ideas come in to him. God knows how. It was totally disorganized. To this day, no one is in charge at the White House. No one.”
* * *
—
In late October, with the caravan on the move, Trump badgered Nielsen almost endlessly. He suggested lining up border agents and other officers to form a sort of human wall along the portion of the southern border that lacked fencing, roughly 1,200 miles of the 1,933-mile border. A statistician at Homeland Security figured out it would take hundreds of thousands of people standing arm to arm to create a line that long. The number, a conservative estimate, was immediately discarded because it was so staggering. “We were like, this is absurd,” one aide remembered.
Nielsen and her team, including the leaders of Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, met for a brainstorming session in downtown Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building. Sitting around a conference room, they discussed how to satisfy Trump’s increasingly difficult demands to deny entry to illegal immigrants. The officials felt as if they had already scraped the bottom of the barrel for new options. They contemplated a number of ideas, including sending U.S. marshals to the border, borrowing personnel from another department, or creating a volunteer army. They figured they had to throw some bodies at it, if only to sate Trump. National Guard units had deployed twenty-one hundred troops to the border since the spring, and some homeland security officials suggested ramping up the presence dramatically to create, as one aide put it, “a huge show of force.”
At this moment, the border situation was relatively calm. There was no crush of migrants—the caravan was still a few weeks away from reaching the border—and the humanitarian crisis in overcrowded border stations would not unfold until several months later. One senior agency official interjected to point out that additional personnel at the border was not necessary, at least not yet. “This is ridiculous,” the official said.
It was not, however, ridiculous to Trump. He was adamant about sending troops to the border, telling aides that the military had tens of thousands of men and women in uniform and he should be able to use them, as commander in chief, to protect the sovereignty of the United States. Advisers explained to Trump that if he sent troops to the border, they would not be allowed to function as if they were law enforcement officers. They could erect temporary fencing or fix vehicles or conduct surveillance, advisers said, but they could not use deadly force. Firing a single shot into Mexico would be considered an act of war.
In late October, Trump decided to use his authority as commander in chief to deploy military troops to the border to guard against migrants. On October 29, the Pentagon announced that it was sending fifty-two hundred troops, as well as Black Hawk helicopters and giant spools of razor wire. This was the largest mobilization of active-duty troops along the U.S.-Mexico border in decades. The next day, Trump floated the idea of sending fifteen thousand troops to the border, an extraordinarily large number that was roughly the size of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
The move immediately inspired howls that Trump was playing politics, militarizing the border to scare voters and turn out his base in the midterm elections, which were now just a week away. But Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis vouched for the mission and said the military was providing “practical support” to homeland security operations. “We don’t do stunts in this department,” he said.
Nevertheless, Trump made clear that his rush to put troops at the border was about taking strong action to galvanize his supporters to vote Republican in the elections. “If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said on November 1 at a rally in Columbia, Missouri.
For Trump, deploying the troops wasn’t enough. He wanted images—propaganda—distributed through the media showing the military presence. Trump sent word to the Pentagon that he wanted pictures of troops at the border. The presidential demand landed on the desk of Dana White, Mattis’s press secretary. Kevin Sweeney, a retired navy rear admiral who was serving as Mattis’s chief of staff, told White that the White House needed to see pictures of troops—and fast. White tried to explain this would be unrealistic. This was the Department of Defense, not Coca-Cola. Troops would not be moving to the border instantaneously, even after they received orders.