In a few months, if it hasn’t already, President Trump’s legacy at the border is going to look much better even to skeptical observers. As the Biden administration unwinds Trump policies, and a new migrant crisis builds, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump team arrived at an approach that, after fits and starts, worked. Counter to the image of the administration taking a blunderbuss approach to everything related to immigration, the push at the border was a thoughtful, creative, and well-coordinated effort across government agencies and between sovereign countries. It is worth revisiting because understanding how it came about and the reasons that it made such a difference underlines the mistakes that Biden is making now, no matter how much his officials and allies want to deny it and shift blame.
Many of Trump’s policy successes — tax cuts, deregulation, judges — came from adopting standard, off-the-shelf GOP policy. There is another category, though, of intractable issues or unexpected crises that were addressed by innovative problem-solving by officials unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom about what was possible. The Abraham Accords and Operation Warp Speed, as well as other aspects of the pandemic response, fall into this category. So does the border, even if has been largely unappreciated. Commentators who were willing to welcome Middle East peace and the rapid development of COVID vaccines, even if it meant giving credit to people they despised, were never going to find anything good to say about the Trump administration’s immigration hawks.
Obviously, department and agency heads such as Kevin McAleenan and Chad Wolf at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Mark Morgan at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Ken Cuccinelli at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and Mike Pompeo at State played a major part in the effort. At the staff level, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who cut his teeth working for Senator Jeff Sessions, took a lead role. He mastered the intricacies of the law and the system and pushed relentlessly against bureaucratic and policy inertia. Even though much of the bureaucracy was hostile, especially at HHS and the State Department, there were career officials at immigration agencies who welcomed, finally, a serious attempt to control the border and were constantly consulted, including at regular White House meetings. There was also a cadre of career officials at State who worked tirelessly to secure complicated agreements with Mexico (the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP) and Northern Triangle countries
How Trump Got Control of the Border. And how Biden created a crisis by throwing it all away
