Any given week, in the Trump era, can stretch to contain a year’s worth of shock and distress, but it was only two weeks ago, according to the calendar, in a brief and humid interim between summer storms, that Beto and Amy O’Rourke arrived at Battery Park with a small retinue to meet the ferry for a morning trip to Ellis Island. Beto, who on the debate stage often looks constrained by his necktie, was in a blue oxford shirt, open at the neck, and Amy was wearing a sleeveless blouse and fluted black skirt. Though everyone around them was sweating horribly, the O’Rourkes looked dry and cool—thanks to a lifetime of practice in the El Paso, Texas, heat, maybe.

The news surrounding the O’Rourke campaign was not good (having begun the campaign as the Party’s freshest and perhaps most promising prospect, O’Rourke had dropped rapidly in the polls, to sixth place), and so it seemed a little idle and indulgent to be spending a whole morning examining the history of Ellis Island. But part of the reason that O’Rourke had become such a phenomenon last year, when he ran against Ted Cruz for the Senate, was the open, rambling way that he narrated his campaign on social media. The theory of O’Rourke as a Presidential candidate has always been that, in a late-night minivan careen across America, encounters with Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas, and a dental appointment in El Paso, he could find the raw material to create a Kerouacian account of the American experience.

On the ferry over, there had been some talk about a tour guide, but none materialized, and so we entered the museum and started wandering around. In the retinue was Frank Sharry, who runs a progressive immigration-policy group called America’s Voice. Sharry was wearing a blazer and jeans and handling the heat somewhat less well than O’Rourke was, but he brought some helpful order to things. When O’Rourke stopped to read a placard, Sharry stepped forward and thrust his thumb at a statistic: “All these people, and we let ninety-eight per cent in,” he said, with some wonder. O’Rourke seemed especially interested in the politics that had allowed ninety-eight per cent of immigrants into the country, but Sharry said that anti-immigrant sentiment had been intense all throughout the Ellis Island period. “The difference was a combination of generosity and regulation,” he said.

The group kept circling a theme, that the American people had long-held conflictual attitudes toward newcomers, and that political leadership could tip the balance. At a twentieth-century photograph of immigrants in a penned waiting area, O’Rourke pointed out how similar it looked to images from the detention centers at the border now. He stopped at a placard describing the Chinese Exclusion Act, of 1882—which remained in place until the Second World War—and asked Sharry whether that anti-immigrant spasm had been motivated by a fear that Chinese migrants were competing for scarce resources. Not really, Sharry said—it was a time of economic expansion, especially in California, where most Chinese immigrants arrived. “So it was a fear of racial difference,” O’Rourke said.

The conversation lagged, and I drifted away from the group, taking photographs of displayed birth certificates, identity cards, and mental tests, until I noticed O’Rourke a few feet away from me, doing the exact same thing. It made sense: we were both committing details to memory, preparing to write a story. Eventually, we reached the vast central hall of the exhibit, walls of pristine subway tile and huge windows soaring up to an arched ceiling; O’Rourke stepped away from the group with a videographer, ran a finger subconsciously across his forehead to smooth his hairline, and began to recount his experience, for his campaign’s social-media accounts and for posterity.

We sat down at some outdoor tables by the ferry dock, backgrounded by New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. Inside, O’Rourke and Sharry had been talking about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision, on the eve of the Second World War, to turn back the Jewish refugee ship the St. Louis. To O’Rourke, this seemed to set a template for nearly a century’s worth of Democratic posturing on immigration: “President Clinton ordering troops to the border, one of whom shot an eighteen-year-old U.S. citizen who was herding goats; or Democratic senators voting for a wall; or, under one year of the Obama Administration, four hundred thousand-plus ICE deportations; or this need to demonstrate toughness—again, going back to F.D.R., to purchase some political capital to then do other things.”

O’Rourke wanted to expand legal immigration and to stop the prosecution of people who cross the border, but also to continue the deportation of those who “defraud our government,” in part to demonstrate that there was an orderly system. It sounded like he was after the same balance that Clinton and Obama had maintained but that, in his political reading, it was no longer necessary to demonstrate nearly as much strength. “You don’t need to do the walls. You don’t need to do the internal enforcement against people who pose no threat, aren’t violent, aren’t a danger and risk to our communities,” O’Rourke told me. “But that’s not—we haven’t seen that from the Democrats in forever.”

Maybe the more difficult question has to do with the matter of why not—whether American sentiments about immigration really are changing. At Ellis Island, O’Rourke recalled that, shortly after the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy had been announced, and the “industrial-scale separation” of families had begun, he visited a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, where mothers and children were being held, unaware “that within hours they were going to be separated, by force, if necessary.” A Border Patrol agent, who mentioned that she is a mother of young children, toured the facility with him. “I said, ‘Man, this is absolutely killing me. This has got to be so tough for you to do this day in and day out, and have to separate these families—you’re the mother of young kids.’ And she said, ‘You know, I think we’re doing them a favor. Because anyone who would subject their child to this is not a good parent.’ ”

O’Rourke seemed to be groping for a way to reconcile the cruelties at the border with the decent American people he wanted to see. “And so I think the President has given people permission. When you dehumanize people, or when you say that they’re motivated by a desire to come here and get us, or take our stuff, you have to internalize that, in order to be able to take that kid from that mother or to put that child in the cage or to deport her back. I don’t think you’re evil for doing that—I think you have made some kind of peace by rationalizing something you should not be able to.” A little grimly, he went on, “This is a real test for us at this moment. But I think when people know what’s happening, know a choice that we have to do this the right way, they’re going to make that choice. That’s what I’m betting on.”