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WASHINGTON – In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the President’s top advisers were summoned to the White House situation room where they were invited, by a show of hands, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials present.
Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting and, according to both officials, he was angry at what he saw as a challenge from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
It had been nearly a month since then Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that any immigrant who illegally crossed the U.S. border would be prosecuted, including parents with young children. But until now, U.S. border officials had not started separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious at the delay.
Among the guests were Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.
Nielsen told meeting attendees that there simply weren’t enough resources at DHS, or the other agencies involved, to be able to separate the parents, prosecute them for crossing the border, and return them to their children in timely, according to the two officials present. Without a speedy process, children would be placed in the care of health and social services, which were already operating at near full capacity.
Two officials involved in zero-tolerance planning said the Justice Department has repeatedly acknowledged that U.S. lawyers would not be able to quickly prosecute all parents, so sending children to HHS was the most successful outcome. likely.
As Nielsen had repeatedly told other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get complicated and kids could get lost in an already clogged system.
Miller saw family separation not as an unfortunate byproduct, but as a tool to deter further immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with support from Sessions, has advocated for the separation of all immigrant families, even those facing civil proceedings, former officials said.
While “zero tolerance” ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated an additional 25,000, including those who legally presented themselves at a port of entry to seek asylum. , according to customs and border protection data for May and June 2018..
This plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials argued that it would end the immigration process. But after Sessions announced that all illegally entering families would be prosecuted, it was up to DHS to act.
At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposed to zero tolerance of being a transgressor and anti-American, according to the two officials present.
“If we don’t enforce this, it’s the end of our country as we know it,” Miller said, according to the two officials. It wasn’t unusual for Miller to make statements like this, but this time he was adamant that politics move forward, regardless of arguments over resources and logistics.
No one in the meeting argued that separating families would be inhuman or immoral, officials said. Any moral argument about immigration “has fallen on deaf ears” inside the White House, one of the officials said.
“Miller was tired of hearing about logistics issues,” one of the officials said. “It was just, ‘Let’s go ahead and the staff will understand that.'”
Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and then demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward, he asked?
A sea of hands rose. Nielsen withheld hers. It was clear that she had been outvoted, officials said.
In the days following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with then CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan in his office in the Ronald Reagan building and then signed a note asking DHS staff to prosecute all migrants. illegally crossing the border, including parents arriving with their children.
Nielsen did so despite his reservations expressed in the situation room and being warned in a legal note by DHS General Counsel John Mitnick – which was also sent to his then Chief of Staff Chad. Wolf, who is now the acting secretary of DHS – that the decision would lead to family separation. Of the practice, Mitnick wrote, “a court might find that the separations violate the INA, the Administrative Procedure Act, or the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
Less than two months later, Trump signed an executive order ending family separations and a California federal judge ordered family reunification on the grounds that due process rights of separated families had been violated.
At the time, no plan was in place to track children who had been separated or to create a system to reunite thousands of separated families, according to the two former officials.
According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to attend the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Under Secretary of Defense John Rood, then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell, then White House attorney Don McGahn, and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.
Asked about the show of hands, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said: “This is absolutely not true and it did not happen.”
In response to a request for comment on the meeting and the show of hands, HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said: “It never happened.”
The State Department and DHS referred NBC News to the White House. Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and Bolton did not respond to a request for comment. McGahn and Rood could not be reached for comment.
Before Trump ended “zero tolerance” by executive order on June 20, 2018, more than 2,800 children were separated from their parents. When the Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge to begin reuniting the families it had separated, it became clear that there was no method to track both parent and parent. child as they moved through the system. As a result, some took months to come together, and in hundreds of cases, parents were deported from the United States without their children.
On May 4, Gary Tomasulo, then senior director of border and transport security at the National Security Council, emailed MPs and lower-level staff responsible for implementing the policy of immigration, telling them that their bosses had accepted the new “zero tolerance” pursuit and separation policy and they needed to make plans to support it.
At the time, some of the subordinates of cabinet secretaries charged with “zero tolerance” raised moral objections, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
In the email, obtained by NBC News, Tomasulo told MPs and other subordinates that their bosses “recognize that there are no easy solutions, but remain determined to collectively do everything possible to develop solutions. innovations that harness all the resources, capabilities and authorities of the US government. “
He added: “I ask that if you are unable to attend these meetings, the message of commitment and determination expressed by our directors is communicated and internalized by those who represent your departments and agencies.
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