In September 2015, the Remembrance Project organized a meeting between Trump and the families of people who had been killed by undocumented immigrants. Maria Espinoza started speaking at his rallies, and Trump embraced her call for taxing remittances to compensate victims’ families.245 The Center for Immigration Studies published a map of so-called sanctuary cities that “protect criminal aliens from deportation.” Mark Krikorian took to the National Review to declare that “San Francisco’s refusal to turn over illegal aliens for the feds until they’ve been convicted of violent felonies (and the Obama administration’s support for, and even promotion of such policies) is the only reason this poor woman was killed.”246 Breitbart likewise blamed the president, charging that “the only reason sanctuary cities like San Francisco get away with flagrant lawlessness is because the federal government and its degenerate bureaucracy allow them to do so. President Obama could have taken steps to end this ‘sanctuary city’ garbage long ago.”247
The right’s contention that Obama supported sanctuary cities, of course, had everything entirely backward. So-called sanctuary city policies, as I’ve detailed, were in fact the result of rebellions against Obama’s Secure Communities and of federal judges’ rulings suggesting that the program might violate the Constitution. Not only had Obama’s harsh enforcement failed to placate the right, the right now associated Obama with those resisting him on the left. True to form, Hillary Clinton, once again a Democratic candidate for president, indicted San Francisco: “The city made a mistake not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported.”248 Senator Dianne Feinstein, two decades after her anti-migrant rhetoric had smoothed Proposition 187’s passage, declared that San Francisco should have “allowed ICE to remove him from the country.”249
ICE likewise embraced the right-wing narrative, possibly owing to simmering anger at Obama within the agency’s ranks.250 A statement from ICE to the media lamented that “an individual with a lengthy criminal history, who is now the suspect in a tragic murder case, was released onto the street rather than being turned over to ICE for deportation.”251
“Bottom line,” the statement continued, is that “if the local authorities had merely notified ICE that they were about to release this individual into the community, ICE could have taken custody of him and had him removed from the country—thus preventing this terrible tragedy … ICE desperately wants local law enforcement agencies to work with us so we can work to stop needless violence like these [sic] in our communities.”
Trump, the most anti-immigrant major party presidential candidate in modern history, twisted Obama’s draconian policies to appear as though they were policies that coddled criminal aliens. Then, in a bizarre sleight of hand, Trump made the policies that Obama had curtailed under protester duress a centerpiece of his platform.
“We will restore the highly successful Secure Communities program. Good program,” Trump said in August 2016, during a major speech on immigration in Phoenix.252 Arpaio opened for Trump, and Trump ended the rally surrounded by so-called “angel moms,” parents who spoke of losing children to undocumented immigrant crime.253 “We will expand and revitalize the popular 287(g) partnerships, which will help to identify hundreds of thousands of deportable aliens in local jails that we don’t even know about. Both of these programs have been recklessly gutted by this administration. And those were programs that worked.” In September, Trump spoke at a private Remembrance Project luncheon. Espinoza praised him as the sole candidate “who reached out to our families, our stolen-lives families, America’s most forgotten families.” Kris Kobach also spoke, warning that “sanctuary cities” provided a haven for criminals and terrorists.254
Obama had claimed that his deportations targeted criminals rather than hardworking immigrants. When activists and then local officials resisted those deportations, they were, by Obama’s logic, protecting criminals. Trump then contended that Democrats’ policy was to coddle dangerous aliens, and he made Secure Communities and 287(g) his own.
The caravan
“The crime is raging, it’s raging, and it’s violent,” Trump said in July 2015 on Fox & Friends when asked about Steinle’s killing. “And people don’t want to even talk about it. And if you talk about it, you’re a racist. I don’t understand it.” Trump immediately pivoted to trade and then to ISIS. Steinle’s death, he suggested, was just one piece of a multifaceted national humiliation inflicted by bad deals. “Everything we do in this country is just off. Our trade deals are terrible, our border protection is terrible, our security is terr—you look at what ISIS is doing to us, they’re laughing at us. You know, do we have victories any more in our country and the answer is really no.”255
Trump’s articulation of an interlocking threat complex struck a chord. No one could beat the pitchman’s pledge of a “big, beautiful wall.” During the general election, it left Hillary Clinton in a muddle. “I have been for border security for years,” she professed, awkwardly honest. “I voted for border security in the United States Senate. And my comprehensive immigration reform plan of course includes border security.”256
The wall, or at least roughly 650 miles of fencing, had already been built.257 And Trump allies made a point of noting that Clinton had voted for it. They continued to make that point after his election, hypocritically hammering Democrats for hypocritically refusing to fund the very sorts of walls they once embraced.258 At July’s Republican National Convention, Trump slammed Clinton, asserting that “my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was the sanctuary for Kate Steinle? … Where was the sanctuary for all of the Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly? These wounded American families have been alone. But they are not alone any longer.”259 In August 2016, he promised the Phoenix crowd deportations: “Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone.”260
Of course, Trump’s White House has overwhelmingly marched in lockstep with the Republican Party’s traditional powers: slashing taxes for the rich, enfeebling the Environmental Protection Agency, and packing the courts with courtiers of business and Christian conservatism who pledge to read the law through the eyes of eighteenth-century white settler society.
Trump, however, never lost sight of the nationalist message that had catapulted him to his primary victory. He launched tariff wars and a renegotiation of NAFTA. But hyperbolic opposition to immigration remained the centerpiece of his politics. Initially, he declared victory. “You know, the border is down 78 percent,” said Trump in July 2017, exaggerating a decline in apprehensions before making an absolutely false statement. “Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down—it went up.”261
Nevertheless, Trump was still no more capable of winning the war on immigration than his predecessors. And besides, “winning” the war wouldn’t be advantageous, because Trump’s appeal required that he be a border-wartime president. As border apprehensions dipped, hard-core nativists like Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller helped craft a cascade of nativist provocations that ensured immigration remained constantly front and center.
In September 2017, Trump moved to end DACA. Holding DACA hostage, he demanded his own brand of “comprehensive immigration reform” that combined billions for his border wall and the sharp restriction in legal immigration that had long been the nativist movement’s most cherished goal.262 He mused that the United States should bring more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from “shithole” (or, according to some present at the Oval Office meeting, “shithouse”) countries. That went nowhere.
Then came an uptick in irregular migration, which initially infuriated Trump, prompting him to lash out at DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.263 But it was a failure that he quickly remade for his own purposes, using legal tools finessed by his predecessors to charge Central American migrants with illegal entry, thus separating them from their children—in some cases perhaps permanently. While the child separations were widely seen as damaging to
Trump, they also helped to consolidate the base that his political survival depends upon. As the 2018 midterms approached, Trump latched on to the steady progress of a thousands-strong caravan of Central Americans traveling together so as to protect themselves from the constant threats of assault, robbery, corruption, kidnapping, and rape—conditions that the US-backed drug and border wars had made a reality in Mexico. For Trump, their solidarity presented an opportunity.
Trump blamed Democrats for creating the policies that facilitated migrants’ entry and even suggested that someone, perhaps liberal Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros, was funding the caravan. “I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes,” Trump said, when asked to confirm the right-wing conspiracy theory.264 “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” Trump warned in a tweet. People supposedly so dangerous that the president deployed the military to confront them. If necessary, he suggested, soldiers might open fire.265
Trump’s “caravan election” merged the MS-13 and ISIS threat into one. It also spectacularly ratified the far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are organizing mass immigration to destroy the white race. With just under two weeks left before election day, a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and massacred eleven Jews. Beforehand, he had posted an explanation on a far-right social media site attacking the country’s leading Jewish refugee resettlement agency. “HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”266
A bipartisan consensus had for decades made undocumented immigrants into a dangerous problem. Trump was elected because he offered the Wall, which had the cruel appeal of a comprehensive solution.
CONCLUSION
We want that stuff too—but we also want a wall … The chant at every campaign rally wasn’t, “Enforce E-Verify!”1
—Ann Coulter
In July 2019, Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen are “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” They are “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.” Trump’s proposed solution was that “they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Back to Puerto Rico, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s family is from, seized at the height of white supremacist imperialism? To Palestine, the birthplace of Rashida Tlaib’s parents, undergoing genocide at the hands of a US-backed occupation? To Africa, whence Ayanna Pressley’s ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved? Or to Somalia, a country that the United States has helped throw into violent chaos and from where Ilhan Omar came as a refugee at age twelve?
That Trump’s immigration crusade is racist population politics had long since been made clear. His threat to eliminate birthright citizenship would require eviscerating the Fourteenth Amendment, the Reconstruction-era victory that for the first time defined the people beyond the bounds of white supremacy.2 He constantly recapitulates a long history of all-American nativism, promising that a country made white “again” will be great. Colonial settlement and westward expansion were explicit projects of ensuring white dominance over indigenous, black, and Mexican subjects, culminating in laws to exclude Asians from a closing frontier. The color line followed imperial expansion overseas and ricocheted back home in the form of massive immigration restriction. After overtly racist immigration laws were repealed in 1965, Cold War liberalism made the color line into a pretextual legal one, criminalizing Mexican labor migration. As Mexicans were rendered “illegal” and into a criminal threat, Muslims were fashioned into a terrorist one as a new war rebounded in the form of an insurgent Islamophobia.
It’s a great analytical challenge, then, to describe what’s old and new about Trump. Trump’s policies have persecuted countless people by increasing deportations, attempting to end DACA protections for undocumented youth, separating families at the border, turning US Citizenship and Immigration Services into an enforcement agency, pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio for his crimes, easing the summary denial of asylum requests, slowing the naturalization process, attempting to terminate Temporary Protected Status for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, forcing Central American asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico and then requiring that they apply for asylum in the first country they enter on their journey, coercing Mexico and Guatemala into acting as proxy US border enforcers, sharply curtailing refugee admissions, and barring people from entry because their home nations are predominantly Muslim. Yet by his second year in office he had so far failed to match (not even close) the number of interior deportations overseen by Obama during his first term, or the border deportations undertaken during his second.*
Obama’s methodical merger of immigration and criminal law enforcement was terrifyingly efficient until a Latinx-youth led movement forced him to retreat. But in the difficult circumstances that have defined his presidency, Trump always returns to the symbolic power of the Wall. The Wall, then, is a novel form of nativist politics. But given that 654 miles of “fencing” was in place when Trump took office, what’s new about it is not what many think.3
Since the 1990s, the establishment attempted to use its wall to deter migration, forcing migrants into the desert, where thousands died. Their wall, however, more than anything was intended to convince Americans that government was solving the immigration problem. What it did instead was to help make immigration a problem and lay the political, institutional and physical foundations for Trump. Rather than slaking nativist demands, escalating enforcement measures only highlighted their own futility. They indicted government for inaction rather than convincing the public of its sovereign capacity to deliver security. Instead of placating xenophobes, it stoked them to the point where the ante could only be upped to a utopian vision of a hermetically sealed nation, at once autarchic and supreme.
Initially, Trump tried to make the Wall bigger than a racist metaphor or a mere physical extension of his predecessors’ fencing. He proposed doing something truly revolutionary, using an escalation in the long-running war on “illegal immigrants” to support a full nativist agenda that sought to end all immigration as we have known it since 1965.
The Wall
In a campaign that included many startling pronouncements, Trump’s pledge to build the wall in June 2015 became the iconic phrase that stitched together a right-wing nationalist tapestry of resentment, nihilism, and violent nostalgia.4 Mexico would pay for it. A form of imperial tribute recast as reparations to a wronged and aggrieved America, whose sovereignty had been violated by unchecked “illegal immigration,” unfair trade deals, and unfavorable inter-state alliances. Justice would finally be secured by a president with the boldness to reassert the rightful order among nations. The American people would remain composed of the white citizenry the founders envisioned.
Trump’s embrace of the Wall as a big concept was new. On a policy level, however, Trump’s wall as a physical barrier looked a lot like what the Republican and Democratic establishment had been building for years, though they had called it “fencing.” But in August 2016, Trump, in his campaign’s landmark immigration speech in Phoenix, promised that the Wall would go beyond the standard fare. Instead, it would be a metaphor for a comprehensive nativist agenda to not only crack down on “illegal immigrants” but also “control future immigration” so as “to keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms.” He even referenced the year 1965, when President Johnson ended the racist national origins quota system.5 It was a clear signal to the hard-core nativists in the powerful network founded by John Tanton in 1979. And they loved it.
“This kind of emphasis on dealing with legal immigration in this way is not something a major nominee has done in the last 60 years,” said NumbersUSA head Roy Beck. “It was probably the best immigration speech any major party’s political candidate has delive
red,” said Center for Immigration Studies executive director Mark Krikorian. White power activist Richard Spencer was thrilled too, reading the clear racial subtext of Trump’s paean to national origins quotas and call to limit immigration to those who could achieve “success in U.S. society.”6 “Trump is returning to the ideas of the 1924 Immigration Act,” he tweeted. “Immigrants will reflect the racial makeup of the country.”7
After Trump won, Tanton-network nativists and their allies entered the administration. Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump’s primary bid, became his attorney general. Sessions, among Congress’s most hard-line nativists, also provided Trump with his leading immigration strategist, former Senate aide and zealous xenophobe Stephen Miller. Many who had worked with FAIR joined too. One was Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, its longtime pollster.8 Another was Kansas secretary of state and Immigration Reform Law Institute attorney Kris Kobach, who led Trump’s conspiratorial hunt for “voter fraud,” continuing the long white supremacist tradition of doing everything possible to ensure the electorate’s maximal whiteness.9
The war on “illegal immigrants” had thrived within rather than outside the reigning post-1965 liberal ideology that celebrated America as fundamentally a “nation of immigrants.” This worldview took root amid the elimination of the racist national origins quotas and the mass criminalization of Mexican migration. The mainstream demonization of undocumented immigrants had been vicious but was waged in the name of defending the good legal immigrants who came the right way. For organized nativists, however, the goal was to smash that model and sharply curtail all immigration—to reverse the 1965 reform that today threatens the “white” majority. In 2017, Trump again lifted their hopes, announcing his support for legislation that would ultimately slash authorized immigration by an estimated 50 percent through cuts to family-based visas (stigmatized as “chain migration”) and an end to diversity visas.10
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