White House staffers and administration officials were tearing their hair out. There was so much misinformation about the family separation crisis at the border, they said, and an unwillingness to grapple with the basic challenge President Trump was facing.
The protocols for housing adults and children separately had not changed. Neither had the circumstances under which children might be separated from the adult they came with: a false claim of parentage, some specific danger to the child, or the adult being criminally prosecuted.
What had changed was a shift in illegal immigration to the U.S. from single males from Mexico to men, women and children — sometimes traveling as intact family units — from Central America, a trend on a collision course with the Trump administration’s desire for greater immigration control.
Previous administrations exercised greater prosecutorial discretion in cases of illegal entry when the adult was with a child. Trump, through Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announced “zero tolerance.”
The Trump administration was also markedly less inclined to release families into the U.S., in many cases never to reappear before authorities, pending the resolution of an asylum claim. But the 1997 Flores consent decree said unaccompanied children could only be detained for 20 days, and then the 9th Circuit Court extended that to children with their families. Asylum cases are seldom resolved in that amount of time, creating another family separation scenario.
Still, it did not take a great deal of imagination to anticipate what could go wrong with more migrant children in federal custody. Conservatives believe in the rule of law. We also believe that parents and families are generally better at caring for children than government.
Nor was there any public relations strategy for explaining the uptick in detained children. If Trump cannot escape scrutiny for how many scoops of ice cream he is served, the media was never going to give him a pass on this, losing a different kind of scoop.
The Trump administration had the correct goal in removing incentives for future illegal immigration and preventing a new generation that would need a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals-style amnesty because they were brought to America through no fault of their own. As the president blinked Wednesday, however, it was clear that he underestimated how difficult politically this would be.
Immigration enforcement is popular in the abstract, but when attempted in a more sustained way than usual there is always a backlash. When the laws are enforced against illegal immigrants, you see raids and detentions involving mostly sympathetic people alongside the president’s bad hombres. When they are enforced against the businesses that employ illegal immigrants, there is an outcry from people who vote and donate campaign cash.
At the micro level, illegal immigrants are as Jeb Bush says mostly trying to provide for their families. At the macro level, having many millions of them creates problems responsible governments would be wise to try to avoid.
Contrary to the impression given by the occasional Trump tweet, no given undocumented immigrant is especially likely to be a member of ISIS or MS-13. Again at the macro level, having many millions of people entering the country undetected or overstaying their visas without consequence is a good way to end up with national security and public safety problems.
Trump has worked to point out that there are costs to unchecked immigration at a time when most of the Washington political class prefers to emphasize only the benefits. He has occasionally done so with appropriate nuance, such as when he highlights people of color among the victims of illegal immigrant crime.
At other times, Trump is so loose and crude in his talk about immigrants that he reinforces his opponents’ arguments. He makes it too easy to suggest that his motives are impure at a time when the old consensus in favor of immigration enforcement is breaking down. Many Democrats are losing interest in enforcing immigration laws rigorously precisely because they fear it is racist to do so.
It may be true that only someone with Trump’s charisma and authenticity could have been elected on his law-and-order immigration platform, as opposed to the restrictionist wonks who have pinned their hopes on his presidency. But to actually implement that platform in the face of a hostile media and pop culture environment, to ensure that America chooses more of its immigrants as opposed to the other way around, requires discipline and seriousness.
That was not evident either with the travel ban or the DACA negotiations. Even though many problems at the border that have come to light in recent days are not entirely of Trump’s making, the third time on immigration wasn’t the charm.
