We're through the looking glass now, but in theory the president's job, as head of the Executive Branch, is to execute the laws passed by Congress. Presidents from both sides of the aisle, including Barack Obama, have stretched this interpretation and expanded executive power over the years. But nobody has shown such outright disdain for the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution as Donald Trump, American president. While Obama issued some borderline-constitutional executive orders, Trump has gone at the law head-on.

After Congress refused to exercise its Article II powers to allocate funding for the Big, Beautiful Wall, the president declared a phony national emergency and tried to seize the funds. This was a direct assault on the Constitution, and a nakedly authoritarian power grab. At the press conference announcing the declaration, Trump admitted he did not actually need to declare an emergency, he just wanted to speed things up. This is not how anything works.

But this week brought news that Trump has decided to get more direct still. According to CNN's Jake Tapper, the president moseyed on down to the border on Friday and had an intriguing message for Border Patrol officials there.

Last Friday, the President visited Calexico, California, where he said, "We're full, our system's full, our country's full—can't come in! Our country is full, what can you do? We can't handle any more, our country is full. Can't come in, I'm sorry. It's very simple."

Behind the scenes, two sources told CNN, the President told border agents to not let migrants in. Tell them we don't have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, "Sorry, judge, I can't do it. We don't have the room."

After the President left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the President said they would take on personal liability. You have to follow the law, they were told.

Here is the President of the United States instructing law-enforcement agents to disregard the law and implement his policy by fiat. It should be no surprise, really. The extralegality of the president's agenda goes well beyond the Phony National Emergency. In his first two-plus years in office, federal courts ruled his policy moves were illegal 65 times, according to the Washington Post. That's an astonishing rate for a president to lose in court, and it's unlikely it's due to bad lawyering. The policies are just hard to defend on the basis of the law.

No wonder, then, the president has been talking about "getting rid of judges." Of course, he's talking about immigration judges, but it's the same thought process: remove these obstacles to me getting what I want. The law is not relevant.

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TRUMP threatens to close border with Mexico as soon as this weekend, then rants about immigration during Oval Office meeting with NATO secretary general: "What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly & make a deal... to be honest with you, we have to get rid of judges." pic.twitter.com/DAbeXVXUIK — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 2, 2019

This idea has been dismissed out of hand by a former acting ICE chief under Obama as "the single dumbest idea I've ever heard in terms of dealing with this crisis." Immigration judges preside over the process of determining whether someone who arrives at our border has a legitimate claim to asylum under U.S. and international law. If a migrant can present credible evidence they are fleeing violence or persecution, or that they face a real threat thereof if they return home, they are eligible to be treated as a refugee and resettled in America. You know, that whole Statue of Liberty thing:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.



Of course, the new Immigration Czar is Santa Monica Gargamel Stephen Miller. All that Shining City on a Hill stuff is out the window now. A "senior administration official" who definitely is not Miller told Axios all about the new order of things:



1. Make regulatory changes to make it "more difficult for low-skilled immigrants ... to gain admission" into the United States, "and easier for high-skilled immigrants who are likely to be self-sufficient."

The Trump administration has produced a draft regulation for this, but it hasn't been finalized.

(The best argument for limiting low-skilled immigrants from entering the country is they theoretically drive down wages for native-born workers. This has not been borne out in practice, however. Also, either way, this gets to the whole give me your tired and your poor thing. Also, the idea the United States is "full" has no relationship to reality.)

2. Make it more difficult for people to invoke their fear of returning to their home country in order to seek asylum in the U.S.

The official said the new DHS would "apply greater rigor and scrutiny to these [asylum] claims rather than credulously accepting what's said."

The official said the State Department could "produce an analysis" comparing an asylum-seeker's claims "against the actual conditions in their home country."

Ah, yes. Surely this administration will undertake a rigorous fact-finding project to determine the actual conditions faced on the ground by people who've left the slums of Tegucigalpa. They would never start from a conclusion—like, say, Honduran migrants have no credible asylum claims—and throw some evidence together to pad out the "analysis." That the White House is in the process of "purging" the Department of Homeland Security, presumably to fill it with Brave American Patriots of Conscience, does not feel reassuring in this regard.

Trump shows off drugs and cash seized by Border Patrol—which no one denies does the difficult work of battling cartels at the border—in January. JIM WATSON Getty Images

Oh, and by the way: between 2011 and 2016 (that is, under Obama) almost 90 percent of asylum claims from Mexican migrants were rejected. The numbers for El Salvador (nearly 83 percent), Honduras (80 percent), and Guatemala (77 percent) were similarly restrictive. The idea that the legal asylum process—with judges, and where migrants ideally have legal representation—lacks "rigor and scrutiny" is absurd. In fact, the problems are on the opposite side. Currently, we have toddlers going to immigration court, sometimes without legal representation.

What Stephen Miller wants is for those numbers to be 100 percent. The way you can tell is that the Trump administration has continually tried to short-circuit the asylum process—which, again, is a way to fulfill our legal obligations under domestic and international statutes. They've repeatedly tried to nix "fleeing domestic and gang violence" as criteria for asylum, which would conveniently cut out many of the people coming from Central America. Those measures have in some cases been struck down in federal court.

But then things get really nasty.

3. The official said the White House is frustrated by the granting of work permits to asylum seekers so soon after entering the country, describing the practice as "a major draw."

The official described previous U.S. practice as "charity toward all, malice toward none."

4. The White House also wants to change rules to allow the government to detain migrant children for longer than the 20-day limit allowed under the so-called Flores agreement.

The Trump administration has produced a draft regulation for this, but it hasn’t been finalized.

If you're keeping score at home, that phrase—"charity toward all, malice toward none"—is roughly quoted from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. In this instance, a senior adviser in a Republican White House (again, definitely not the Santa Monica Gargamel) is associating his political opponents with Abraham Lincoln's civic philosophy and treating this as a bad thing.

Stephen Miller is the man behind the curtain on United States immigration policy. Sean Gallup Getty Images

But don't sleep on that bit about keeping kids in cages for longer than the law currently allows. Because the plan is not just to reinstate the Family Separation Policy, which Trump agreed to end only after his administration tried to orphan thousands of kids without any kind of policy framework to reunite them with their parents. Psychologists have suggested even relatively brief separations could cause severe trauma in these kids, but Miller and Co. don't care. They want to go bigger on this national disgrace, as CNN reports:

Senior administration officials also told CNN that in the last four months or so, the President has been pushing Nielsen to enforce a stricter and more widespread "zero tolerance" immigration policy—not just the original policy started by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and undone by the President once it was criticized—that called for the prosecution of individuals crossing the border illegally between ports of entry, resulting in the separation of parents from children.

According to multiple sources, the President wanted families separated even if they came in at a legal port of entry and were legal asylum seekers. The President wanted families separated even if they were apprehended within the US. He thinks the separations work to deter migrants from coming.

Sources told CNN that Nielsen tried to explain they could not bring the policy back because of court challenges, and White House staffers tried to explain it would be an unmitigated PR disaster.

"He just wants to separate families," said a senior administration official.

This is barbaric. The cruelty, after all, is the point, but it won't fix the problem. While there has been a surge in asylum-seekers that is overwhelming the system, getting into a contest of cruelty with Honduran street gangs and cutting aid to the Central American countries where the migrants are coming from is not going to stop them from coming.

But the common thread through all of this is the unrepentant lawlessness. Asylum is a right enshrined in domestic and international law—until Donald Trump and Stephen Miller decide it isn't. Law-enforcement agents must enforce the law—unless it's more convenient to the president for them not to. A legal process for adjudicating whether someone has a legitimate claim to being a refugee requires a judge to oversee it—unless the president just wants to keep everybody out. Congress has the power of the purse—unless Donald Trump wants some money, in which case he'll just take it. It's almost like we elected someone who has demonstrated throughout his career, in every organization he's ever run, that he has no regard for the law. It does not apply to him.

Here's a take from former British Foreign Minister David Miliband, who now leads the International Rescue Committee, in The Guardian:

“The US government is failing in its most basic responsibilities, never mind as a global leader but as a local example of how a civilized country should behave,” he said.

In an interview with the Guardian from IRC’s headquarters in New York, Miliband said that Trump’s approach to immigration amounted to “disorder by design”. “The administration needs to create the evidence to justify its immigration policies – it is using the concept of crisis to create the justification for government by executive fiat.”

There's chatter now that this big hardline immigration push is Trump's effort to divert attention away from the impending release of the actual Mueller Report—not to be confused with The Barr Letter, despite the best efforts of Trump and many in The Mainstream Media—and the Democratic push to have a look at his tax returns. That may well be true, and there could be things in either or both that would end the presidency of any other politician. It likely won't in his case, though, if only because Trump has done more than enough in public to justify his removal from office. If you don't have time for his assaults on the basic structure of our democracy, consider the simpler truth that the President of the United States tells law enforcement to break the law.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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