Trump Did Not & Would Not Fix the Border

Donald Trump ran in 2016 on border and immigration control, but he had two years with a Republican Congress and then two years in a divided Washington, and he passed no immigration laws and made these problems worse. He has no new ability or ideas to solve the border now. He presided over the worst year of illegal border crossings up to that point in 2019. Particularly given how divided he left the country on this issue, he would be the worst person to task with solving these problems now.

None of the ten uniting issues that defined the modern Republican Party now hold it together. All that is left for Donald Trump to credibly run on is the reduction of women’s rights and health care, that he says he proved he could accomplish thru appointing judges who ended Roe v. Wade.

In this 4th of a 10-part series, I make the case that Trump does not reflect long-held Republican views on immigration, failed to achieve his stated goals, and now could only undermine, not help the country solve our problem at the southern border.

This used to be the modern Republican platform:

1. Fight the deficit and the national debt
2. Deter Russia
3. Promote free trade and reduce tariffs
4. Honor lawful immigration as a defining American characteristic, in order to pursue merit and reduce labor cost
5. Cherish one’s marital vows, and treat women with respect
6. Serve at the will of the People, and honor democratic values
7. Keep the courts from becoming agents of political activism
8. Control entitlements in order to reduce the size of government
9. Insist on limited government — don’t concentrate power in one individual, but instead guarantee the separation of powers
10. Prevent politicians, their families and cronies from profiteering from holding office

Donald Trump’s southern border and immigration goals were not achieved, and he cleaved core Republican principles in the process.

Donald Trump changed no immigration law. He failed to achieve central objectives of his presidency — to build a wall and get Mexicans to pay for it, and conduct mass deportation of millions of people.

Illegal border crossings under President Trump in 2019, set the record up to that point of such crossings. This is after he had two years to implement his restrictive immigration agenda. He did catch some bad luck — largely through little fault of his own, at that time we experienced a spike at the border of people traveling from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Trump couldn’t control what was happening in these countries, and he could not control what was happening at our southern border as many thousands of fleeing migrants traveled to the US. These outside factors from other countries, at times hamstring US efforts to reduce illegal border crossings no matter who is president.

Trump also wanted to assert a newly harsh level of enforcement of our immigration laws throughout the interior of the country. He said he would deport “millions” of people, but he only averaged about 80,000 per year as president. This was not even an increase on the amounts of deportation during the predecessor Obama presidency. Deportations were not a primary goal of President Obama, but even without focusing on them, his Administration did just as much of it as Trump’s, and Trump spoke as if he were obsessed with it. Tired rhetoric, with no achievement.

There’s no difficult riddle as to why Trump could not achieve these most central goals of his presidency. Trump doesn’t know how to get the government to achieve hard goals, his staff and closest political associates were just as incapable, and he lacks the capacity to learn the job. Because he didn’t know what to do, he made problems at the southern border worse. He dropped a terrible case backlog on his successor, President Biden. And that backlog has continued to get worse ever since.

What Trump did attempt to do on the southern border— temporary Executive Actions and government spending on border security — mostly failed or were reversed in court. There was a small amount of wall reconstruction and construction during the Trump years. Considering that there had been some success at building wall mileage before the Trump presidency, it’s very plausible that more wall would have been reconstructed or built if Trump had never been president.

The twin Trump policies of religious scapegoating and child-mother separation besmirched the reputations of America and the Republican Party, and guaranteed that he could not achieve his underlying immigration goals.

Donald Trump and his hard line immigration inner circle, could not from Washington create the kind of coalition of state and local cooperation, congressional and non-governmental/church partnership, and enforcement coordination necessary to help him achieve his goals.

Their failure started with the 2017 Muslim travel ban. America was founded as a safe haven for religious practice, from countries of oppression and religious persecution. The Muslim ban turned Trump’s Republican Party into purveyors of religious persecution, violating America’s cherished first principle. The Muslim ban destabilized economic activity and travel at our airports, it convinced potential partners at the state and local level that Trump was discriminatory, and gave Trump’s political enemies the capital to undermine his other immigration goals. Whatever one might think of Trump’s Muslim ban, it was established in court to be unlawful. Other presidents with little prior political experience tend to learn from early initiatives that fail badly, and they start to achieve key elements of their platforms as they learn what not to do. Not Trump.

Get Layth Elhassani, GridIron Politics’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

The purposeful Trump policy of child separation in 2018 was a spectacle of cruelty and incompetence that derailed his larger immigration goals and crippled American credibility. Somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,700 children, including babies were deliberately removed from their mothers in our care at our southern border, in a manner that made their reunification difficult or impossible.

This was a conscious policy of President Trump, that he thought might deter other potential immigrants from trying to cross our border. His Administration failed to keep track of children they separated, with poor recordkeeping and general thoughtlessness about these desperate people. Trump eventually by Executive Order ended this practice. These permanently broken families rest near the top of the wrong side of the ledger of our collective conscience.

Trump inherited a Republican Party with the capacity to help solve the southern border and immigration, but now because of him the Party probably couldn’t.

The most important effort to transform the southern border and address many of our immigration problems, occurred in 2013. A closely divided Senate, with the quiet partnership of the Obama Administration, passed on a broad bipartisan basis “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity & Immigration Modernization Act” with 68 senators in support. Remarkably, 84 out of 100 senators voted to begin debate on that bill. This was broad recognition across the ideological spectrum that something in the range of what bipartisan Senate negotiators and the Obama Administration were trying to accomplish, was what the country needed. The bill was a remarkable undertaking of border security and immigration improvement:

1. A giant new investment in border spending on barriers, drones, 40,000 new border agents and surveillance that Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) characterized as “practically militarizing the border”
2. A requirement that the Department of Homeland Security devise a plan to stop 90% of illegal border crossings (imagine how much better off we would be if DHS had been required to do this)
3. A pathway towards citizenship for millions of people already here that included payment of fines, fees and back taxes, and passing a background check, and a pathway for qualifying ‘Dreamers’ who were brought here as children without their consent
4. A new immigration strategy for economic success — agriculture jobs, country-by-country green card reform, worksite enforcement and a focus on emerging industries such as STEM and computer programming.

Importantly for many Republicans, this bill was brought up through regular order, with hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee that has primary jurisdiction over immigration laws, in April 2013, and hearings in the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs and Senate Small Business Committees in May of 2013.

Had the Republican-controlled House ever taken up this bipartisan Senate-passed bill, they likely could’ve shifted the bill further to the right and passed it, and a divided Senate and President Obama may have mustered enough support to pass a more conservative version. That would have been a rocky process, but there was significant good will and momentum behind this process at that time. But the Republican House never took up that bill. America has never been close to solving our southern border and immigration issues since then.

Trump’s initial rise was a reflection of this disappointment of immigration reform, and now he is an impediment.

Little did we know at the time, that Trump’s 2015 New York City descension down the escalator represented the last gasp of bipartisan hopes for a border/immigration solution. Recently, this year’s bipartisan Senate effort that would have authorized the complete shutdown of the southern border during times of surging illegal border crossings, was torpedoed by candidate Trump. It’s clear to all sides that the hope for a border/immigration agreement is dead until after the election. If some other candidate than Trump had been running this year for president on the Republican side, this bill might have passed the Senate. Trump is impeding border and immigration reform.

But what if America could try to allow only Republicans to solve the southern border and illegal immigration problems? What would a Republican-only border/immigration bill with a President Trump at this point even look like?

1. Reduce illegal border crossings drastically. But Trump failed to reduce illegal border crossings, even below Obama-era levels. This year he killed off a bipartisan Senate proposal that would have allowed the entire southern border to be closed when border crossings reached high levels. House Republicans in 2013 refused to take up an effort that would have “militarized” the southern border according to one Republican supporter of the bill.
2. For prospective immigrants, If you get in line, and do things the right way, and the legal way, there is a place for you here in America. But Trump reduced legal immigration, even as he had no impact on illegal immigration. He passed zero laws that reworked our legal immigration system. Pro-business Republicans for decades have tried to focus our legal approach on what would work best for our economy; what individual industries need; where talented immigrant workers might come from and how we can make sure they help US companies profit from immigration. Senate Republicans in 2013 divided down the middle on the bipartisan bill that would have reworked our legal immigration system. Where would the Party even start now? And what wouldn’t Trump reject?
3. We should work on deporting illegal immigrants and becoming more effective at interior enforcement of our immigration laws. But Trump said he would deport “millions” of people and failed spectacularly at this. Initial headway he had made in some jurisdictions as president capsized late in his presidency. States and localities decided he couldn’t be trusted, after child-mother separation and other fiascos. Mayors, governors, non-profits and churches didn’t want to risk turning people over to federal authorities who had proved capable of this. What would Republicans as long as Trump is on the scene be able to do, to repair this severe problem of lack of cooperation?
4. At least build the wall. But Trump and a united Republican Washington could not build more than a nominal amount of border wall. And some conservative immigration think tanks and members of Congress think the wall is not a sound way to go about securing the border — it’s expensive, and doesn’t fit all topography. They conclude that technology and manpower may be more effective than a wall at preventing border crossings. How many terms would Trump have to serve before we see meaningful progress on the wall? It should not have been that difficult — it was his big priority and his Party was in charge. He should have traded concessions in other areas with Republican appropriators and built miles of wall. He proved he can’t handle this task.
5. Maybe just focus immigration reform on discrete industries and sectors where there are worker shortages such as agriculture, nursing, tech/STEM. But Republicans now want to focus only on one issue at a time, or otherwise reject immigration solutions until the border is secure. Our industries, no matter their immigration challenges, languish in frustration as Republicans say no to every immigration solution year after year.
6. Reform immigration legal/court system at the very least. We need to process the cases of undocumented people in our system more quickly. Let’s increase the size and capacity of immigration courts so we can return people who shouldn’t be here to their countries of origin. But this will mean government funding of counsel for indigents, special considerations for unaccompanied minors and other children, increasing the public-private partnership with non-profits that are perceived as liberal which are on the ground providing services for families awaiting their immigrant proceedings. Trump does not appear to support these policies. Other Republicans are divided on them. No wonder the Trump years produced such an enormous case backlog.

A Republican-only southern border and immigration solution if Trump were again president looks like just as heavy a lift as a bipartisan one has proved to be. No wonder he and a Republican Congress didn’t get one done when they had the chance.

Donald Trump has proven that he lacks the skills, ideas or credibility to fix the border in another presidential term.

Working on a border/immigration solution requires deftness. You need a team full of smart, hardworking, experienced advisors. You have to spend a lot of time and effort on immigration stakeholders ranging from border agents, to highly educated potential workers in specific industries from individual countries, to Hispanic advocacy organizations to the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups concerned about labor access to hard liner conservative think tanks. People need to be heard, feel heard, and see their views reflected in the policy decisions of political leaders. That’s how you begin to achieve hard things.

Trump is running on immigration again. He has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”. But he already failed to reduce illegal border crossings when he was president. With Trump at the helm of the Party, Republicans appear lost on what to do about the border and immigration, even though there is such Party unity in believing it is such a serious challenge.

“Si me enganas una vez, la culpa es tuya, si me enganas dos, la culpa es mia.” As a non-Spanish speaker, I hope this means something to the effect of, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”