Trump 1.0: Build That Wall!
- Carrie Stallings
- Oct 29
- 9 min read
Welcome to my six-part series on immigration in the United States! I hope it will be a helpful tool for you as you navigate the confusing and contradictory messages we hear about this topic. I recommend reading the articles in the order listed, but you can do what you want. I'm not the boss of you.
Trump 1.0: Build That Wall! (this article)
Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy from the Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2015. In that speech, immigration was a primary focus:
When do we beat Mexico, at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they're beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me, but they're killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems…
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. [gesturing to audience]...They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us [sic]. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume are good people, but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting…It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably, probably from the Middle East, but we don't know because we have no protection and we have no competence. We don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop, and it's got to stop fast.
Why did Trump lead with this issue if it wasn’t a priority for most Americans at that time?
For decades, Trump had publicly aired his frustrations about being “laughed at” and “ripped off” by other countries. In the late 1980s, he warned that “this country is gonna go bust in another couple years because we can’t afford to keep defending Japan and other countries,” speaking of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
Although the United States did experience a brief economic downturn in 1990 and 1991, it did not go bust (and we continued to honor our treaties). By the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency eight years later, we had a strong GDP, low unemployment, and good-to-excellent consumer confidence.
Nevertheless, Trump’s suspicion that we were being taken advantage of by the rest of the world persisted. In a 1999 interview with Tim Russert of NBC, he said, "Too many people are flowing into the country, and we have to take care of our own first." Indeed, the number of people coming to the U.S. annually peaked that year at around 1.5 million. But this, too, resolved without Donald Trump’s intervention; after 2000, arrivals declined and then held steady, with small fluctuations.
But Trump was frustrated by the way previous presidents had handled not only immigration, but the country in general. By 2015, he had had enough. He wanted to become president so he could do what other presidents didn’t have the will, or ability, to do: stop America from being pushed around. This was the “America first” ethos that informed Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in his initial campaign speech, but he would need help fleshing it out into an actual policy platform.
To do so, he called upon Stephen Miller, a 30-year-old staffer for Senator Jeff Sessions. At that time, Sessions had become well-known for his anti-immigration positions, often citing reports from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and its sister organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
FAIR’s founder, John Tanton had been a passionate environmentalist who eventually also became a eugenicist and white nationalist. He was extremely concerned about the environmental danger of overpopulation and argued that non-white immigrants were one of the greatest threats to America. In a 1993 letter, Tanton wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
Like Tanton, both Sessions and Miller subscribe to “restrictionist” ideology—basically, the fewer people coming from other countries, the better, especially non-white countries. Restrictionists like Sessions, Miller, and Steve Bannon (Trump’s chief strategist in 2017) bemoaned the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act that had eliminated per-country caps on immigration. Sessions had been influential in defeating Obama’s Gang of Eight bill, citing concerns that offering a path to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants would suppress wages for native-born citizens. He also helped defeat Bush’s 2007 Reform Act.
While Miller was advising Trump in 2015 and 2016, he was a frequent correspondent with Breitbart News. He wrote often about his concerns that white people of European descent were being replaced in the United States by criminal immigrants of Arab and Latin American descent, triggering social destruction.
As much as Miller hated the Hart-Cellar Act, he admired Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 Immigration Act that was designed specifically to limit immigration from non-white countries. He encouraged Breitbart to highlight stories linking immigrants and crime. He also referred Breitbart writers to American Renaissance (AmRen), a publication that purports to demonstrate, scientifically, that white people are superior to people of other races–a concept AmRen founder Jared Taylor calls “race realism.”
Trump and Miller were a match made in heaven (or somewhere). While much of America cringed at Trump’s announcement speech, Miller rejoiced, feeling “as though everything that I felt at the deepest levels of my heart were for now being expressed by a candidate for our nation’s highest office before a watching world.”
Trump’s campaign, and later his policies, reflected Miller’s nativist, restrictionist, and white nationalist ideals. Almost immediately upon taking office in 2017, Trump issued three hefty executive orders: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, and Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.
These orders were sweeping in scope. Some components of them were well-publicized, like the “Muslim Ban.” In the first version of the ban, Trump suspended entry to the U.S. for anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days (with a few specific exceptions). The order also disallowed entry by Syrian refugees, reduced the refugee cap to 50,000 (from 85,000 the previous year) and suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days.
His argument was that these majority-Muslim countries fostered anti-American ideals and we didn’t have the capacity to thoroughly vet every individual. One section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) seems to grant him this authority. It says, “…the President…may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants.”
This order was blocked nationwide by a federal judge, citing religious discrimination. A second iteration of it was also challenged in courts, with the plaintiffs arguing that the order violated a section of the INA that prohibits “discrimination on the basis of nationality ‘in the issuance of immigrant visas.’”
After continued challenges in court, the final version removed Iraq from the list and added North Korea, Venezuela, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Tanzania. It also allowed non-immigrant (temporary) entry for some people from those countries.
Throughout the rest of his first administration, Trump issued five more far-reaching executive orders or presidential proclamations regarding immigration, plus thirteen others that were smaller in scope. Some elements of these were widely publicized, like the “zero-tolerance” policy that resulted in children being separated from their families at the border.
Under previous administrations, adults who violated immigration laws but had not committed any crimes were frequently released on parole and able to stay with their children. Since the Trump administration was detaining more adults, and children are not allowed to be kept in adult jails, they began keeping children in HHS facilities away from their parents. Some of these facilities were hastily constructed and poorly run, and the quarters for the children were little more than metal bars on concrete floors.
The administration is also remembered for its Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico” policy. Under this program, people from third countries (not Mexico) who arrived at the border requesting asylum were sent to Mexico to wait there while their case was processed. Although this policy created problems for some immigrants, others appreciated its clarity. They were given a specific date and time to appear in court and could plan where and how they would live in the meantime, rather than everything being up in the air.
Other executive actions were changes in enforcement practice that were difficult for the public to see but had an outsized effect, like raising the threshold for establishing a credible fear of torture or persecution and mandating that asylum seekers arrive only through ports of entry. Both of these policies made it much more difficult to request and obtain asylum, without technically changing asylum laws. They were levers Trump pulled.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it gave the administration an opportunity Stephen Miller had been looking for since 2018: replace Title 8 (the standard protocol for processing immigrants) with Title 42. Title 42 is a provision in the U.S. Code from 1944 that gives the surgeon general and the president the authority to bar people from entering the country in order to prevent the spread of contagious diseases.
This made sense in the spring of 2020. While their cases were processed, asylum seekers and other migrants were usually held in crowded facilities where the spread of disease was almost inevitable. Title 42 allowed CBP and BP agents to immediately expel anyone trying to enter the country (whether legally through ports of entry or illegally between ports), without processing their cases.
At first, this practice dramatically reduced the number of people entering the U.S. through the southern border. From April 2020 through December 2020, at least 80 percent of monthly migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border resulted in expulsion.
An unintended effect of Title 42, though, was that the number of repeat encounters (the same person trying to enter over and over again), more than tripled. Because Title 42 simply expels people rather than apprehending them and opening a case, the administration was not keeping tabs on who was trying to come in when. This practice may have incentivized more people to attempt to cross the border, because there were not the usual legal consequences for attempting to enter illegally.
It’s impossible to know how Trump’s first term would have ended if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened. But events being what they were, the net effect of the first Trump administration was a dramatic decrease (63 percent) in legal immigration. By the end of 2020, issuance of new Permanent Resident Cards, non-immigrant visas (people coming temporarily for work or school), and protected refugee statuses had decreased significantly.
At the same time, removals of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States reached an all-time low under Trump. This was largely because local officials were less willing to cooperate with ICE under the Trump administration than they had been under the Obama administration, when interior removals reached an all-time high. Still, the overall illegal immigrant population did decline by 270,000 people, or about two percent, between 2017 and 2020.
While public conversation regards the first Trump administration as tough on illegal immigration, the data shows that it reduced border crossings and legal immigration, but had little effect on illegal immigrant numbers in the interior. In the process, the administration’s policies created disorder in case administration and potentially violated many existing laws and constitutional provisions.
Nearly every single one of the Trump administration’s executive orders was challenged in court by plaintiffs arguing that it violated an existing law or their constitutional rights. This was a relatively new phenomenon. Although some past presidents had certainly wielded executive power broadly, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were not in the habit of issuing executive orders that appeared to violate existing laws and thus got bogged down in court cases.
Behind closed doors, it was a high-level game of, “Let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” In the public eye, it was Trump repeating his message over and over again: “The bad guys are out there and I’m going to protect you from them.”
Many voters (slightly more than half, as it turned out) felt that Trump’s policies were illegal, immoral, and un-American.
Biden: Snip Snap (next article)
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