A pair of White House “principals”—a term that here clearly means Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—have what they think is an ultra-clever solution to the immigration crisis. Rather than hold asylum-seekers at the border, they want to load them on trucks, bring them to sanctuary cities, and dump them onto the streets. Not because that would be a good solution to the immigration crisis, but because it would “retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries.” Trump was apparently particularly keen on the idea of taking busloads of immigrants and dropping them onto the streets of Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco.
According to the Washington Post, those “officials” have brought this plan to the Department of Homeland Security not once, but twice—including once during the government shutdown Trump engineered before he signed on to the funding agreement and promptly wrecked it with his declaration of a national emergency at the border. Even among the Trump-appointed leaders of DHS and ICE, the plan to use thousands of human beings as a political attack letter sounded alarms. When the White House pressed the plan, the legal team at ICE pushed back.
It’s not clear if the refusal to follow through on leaving cities to deal with the issue that DHS is given a $74 billion budget to cover was the issue that drove a wedge between Donald Trump and former stalwart defender of child separation Kristjen Nielsen, but it was definitely a point of friction between Miller and immigration officials.
Miller personally brought the proposal to the deputy director of ICE, Matthew Albence, according to two DHS officials who spoke with the Post. Albence has acknowledged that the conversation took place. Again, this is a senior White House adviser pressing the deputy director of ICE to take human beings applying for asylum and drop them onto the streets of American cities as a means of punishing political opponents.
And now Stephen Miller is heading up a purge and restructuring of the department that turned down his proposal to weaponize immigrants.
This scheme was formal enough to circulate around DHS and ICE under the subject line “Sanctuary City Proposal.” In addition to targeting San Francisco, the idea was to bus would-be applicants not to larger communities, but to “small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities” where they would be a greater burden. The effort was to intentionally overwhelm communities in the hopes that they would cry out for help and admit that Trump was justified in his actions. This plan actually circulated around ICE for legal opinions and operational approaches.
Officials responded by expressing concerns over every aspect of the plan, from liability to cost. If DHS was going to allow those seeking asylum to register, then transport them hundreds or thousands of miles, that would be a huge additional expense compared to just registering and letting them go—the system that worked well before, but which Trump derided as “catch and release.” If DHS wasn’t going to bother to register the immigrants for hearings, but only take them in and dump them, wasn’t that a hundred times worse than the system Trump had complained about?
Neither of those answers thrilled Miller. Now that Nielsen is gone at DHS, and Trump has withdrawn the nomination of acting director Ronald Vitiello at ICE for “someone tougher,” it seems that Miller may get a third swing at his plan to dump people where he thinks it will hurt the most.
And in response, Democrats should be clear: Yes. Let’s do this. Because bringing people into American cities where they can wait out the time to their asylum hearings with dignity and while planning for their future is infinitely better than destroying families and holding them apart in dusty, ill-suited locations on the border. Or warehousing their children in abandoned Walmarts in the care of the lowest bidders.
A little of the funding that DHS is supposed to get for handling this issue would be nice, but even if it’s not there … sure, bring them on.