President-elect Trump talks about a wall on the southern border as an image for communicating his intention of controlling illegal immigration, according to secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, who told senators Wednesday that Trump’s detailed policies for the border are yet to be determined.
“We’re going to have to deal with the situation that we have today, the reality of it,” Tillerson told Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2016, during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing.
“I think this is where the intent of the president-elect, — and while he does express it in the view of the wall, but what he’s really expressing is we’ve got to get control of this border, we’ve got to prevent and stop the flow of people coming across,” he continued. “And how we do that, what policies [we formulate to] execute those are yet to be developed.”
Tillerson made that comment while discussing the influx of Central American children arriving on the border in recent years. He offered an even-handed diagnosis of the factors motivating those people to travel north. He said they were driven by violence and drug cartels in their home countries as well as the perception that if they made it to the United States, the Obama administration would allow them to stay.
“There’s been some well-intended action taken — programs like DACA, the deferred treatment [or] adjudication of these cases —all well-intended, but when those got translated back to the host country, the places these people are leaving from, we know that it got misinterpreted,” Tillerson told Kaine. “It’s incentivizing some, because it’s misunderstood, to take even greater risk to themselves, to their children, to try to make this journey across Mexico, largely using illegal smugglers to get them to this country.”
That’s somewhat consistent with the position adopted by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other immigration hawks during the border crisis of 2014. “Amnesty is not compassionate, it is not humane, it is exacerbating a crisis at the border, it is lawless, and it is wrong,” Cruz said at the time. “We cannot solve the crisis at the border until we end President Obama’s amnesty.”
But Tillerson said the State Department could mitigate the border crisis by providing foreign aid to the embattled Central American countries, “some of which is as simple as infrastructure projects” in order to mitigate the need to flee north.
“The State Department’s role will be, what actions can we take to prevent the movement of people in an illegal fashion?” Tillerson said. “We want people to come legally. The history of the country is that people came legally.”
