“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to officials present at a White House meeting.
WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.
President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay. Continue reading.