The year in immigration politics began badly and finished up even worse. On a warm Saturday in late January of 2015 (warm for January, anyway), 1,500 of Iowa’s most committed right-wing activists descended on the Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines for the first ever Iowa Freedom Summit. House Representative Steve King, Congress’s most aggressively bigoted anti-immigration crusader, was the host. A few days earlier, King had followed up his notorious “calves the size of cantaloupes” riff about the mythic strength of imaginary 130-pound immigrant drug mules by calling Michelle Obama’s invited guest to the State of the Union address, Ana Zamora, a 21-year-old who was brought to the country as an infant and recently received temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, “a deportable.”



Most of the as-of-yet-unnanounced candidates in the Republican primary field spoke at the nine-hour conference—including Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson—but for presumptive reasons that made sense at the time, Jeb Bush, the party’s anointed favorite, declined the invitation. Bush, with his much-heralded cross-cultural appeal, seemed to have taken the GOP’s stated goal of reaching out to Latinos to heart. Salon’s Simon Maloy was not alone in wondering “why anyone who seriously believes they can be president would want to be caught anywhere near Steve King.”

Few could have predicted just how obscene the national debate over immigration would get in 2015, but the writing was already on the wall that weekend in January: Ted Cruz, who cut his teeth in the Senate defeating comprehensive immigration reform, was the summit’s most energizing speaker; DREAMer activists who tried to interrupt Rick Perry’s speech were drowned out in standing ovation for the Texas governor, who had deployed National Guard troops to the border the previous summer; a reality TV curiosity named Donald Trump made amused headlines by deriding Mitt Romney and dismissing Bush as “soft” on the issue.

In January, few could have predicted just how obscene the national debate over immigration would get in 2015.

About a week before the Freedom Summit, the House of Representatives had passed, at King’s urging, a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that explicitly barred funding for President Obama’s 2014 executive order on immigration which would potentially extend legal status to more than a third of the United States’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. King and other hardliners had wanted to insert the poison pill legislation in the federal budget the previous year, but House Speaker John Boehner, in the interest of avoiding yet another government shutdown, had convinced the insurgents to wait. Boehner knew the bill wouldn’t make it through the Senate, and knew that Obama would veto if it somehow did. But he went along with the uprising anyway, because that is the sort of posturing now required of leaders in the Republican Party.

Sure enough, the bill stalled in the Senate, and after a few weeks of nail-biting political theater, Boehner allowed Democrats to vote on a “clean” version before the department’s funds ran dry. Boehner would end up resigning in the Fall, before members of his own caucus could drag him through the same doomed cycle of blackmail, defeat, and embarrassment. But even in seeming failure, Steve King and company emerged triumphant; they got to go back to their districts and boast of having held fast to their extremist values. Cruz, who chastised the Republican Senate leadership for its weakness during the standoff, would take his “party of amnesty” maverick routine on the road later that month, when he announced his campaign for president. By the time Donald Trump barged onto the scene that summer, the Republican base was primed for a strongman who could cut through the petty checks-and-balances of democracy.