The White House has tried since the 2016 campaign to build support for a border crackdown in the black community by arguing undocumented immigration hits black Americans hardest — both in terms of safety and jobs. But as Donald Trump pushes forward with his administration’s harshest immigration crackdown since he’s been in office, no multiracial coalition has materialized to back him up.

As the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents exploded into public view, the practice has received stern condemnations from establishment civil rights groups, Black Lives Matter activists, human rights groups, and everyday black Americans. It’s happening amid some doubt that a reversal by executive order that has only further complicated the question of how authorities will actually reunite families.

Trump has long pined for black allies on immigration by proposing expanded economic opportunity in exchange for votes that would help them enact harsher immigration laws. “No group has been more economically harmed by decades of illegal immigration than low-income African-American workers,” read then-candidate Trump’s “New Deal for Black America.”



Trump kept the offer on the table after he became president. He constantly touts low black unemployment numbers; he talks to people like Kanye West (“Thank you Kanye, very cool!”), and the newly arrived conservative provocateur Candace Owens; and he wants to increase single-digits approval ratings with black voters with 2020 in mind.

And it is true that there is a small group of black conservatives who generally support the president's plans, and agree with him on immigration, especially those on the receiving end of the White House’s efforts to engage black economic leaders on the nationalist economic agenda behind the scenes. One of the people who have been involved in those meetings is John Burnett, a Republican activist and an adviser to the New York Republican Party, who said he discussed with administration officials how to effectively communicate a message to black Americans on the benefits of coming down hard on undocumented immigrants. (They never called back.)

“It’s time for us to be a little selfish because we built America,” Burnett told BuzzFeed News, adding that black people’s blood is “still too damp in the soil” for black Americans to be concerned for undocumented immigrants. (“When has immigration been our friend? Coming off the slave ships? During Jim Crow? Or now?”) Burnett also doesn’t think that any accusation of promoting white nationalism should hinder black folks from coming to the negotiating table. “We can’t wait until we get an invitation to sit down with white supremacy. It’s been 500 years of that and as for right now, we have to try America first.”

Stephen Gilchrist, the president of the South Carolina African-American Chamber of Commerce, another leader who has willingly engaged the administration, said the White House has asked for help “navigating potential barriers” to America-first policies. Gilchrist said he didn’t agree with the separations. (“It was interesting to see the concern and empathy to the immigrants coming into the country because I don’t see the media being overly concerned about the African-American plight.”) But he said the current moment could be educational for black communities. “When you have the public’s attention you can push policies and implement something tangible. That’s when we can help [Trump’s] reelect, and shape how black people are viewed politically going forward.”

Raynard Jackson, a longtime Republican operative and the president and founder of the political action committee Black Americans for a Better Future, said he believes the press ignores data that shows black Americans are mostly opposed to liberal immigration policies. (He cited, for example, a March 2018 Los Angeles Times op-ed that made references to research showing various correlations between black people’s potential for upward mobility and immigration.) He thinks ultimately what is happening at the border is eventually going to be good for black Americans.

“[Liberals] want to give the public the impression that blacks support amnesty [for undocumented immigrants] when in reality we don’t,” Jackson said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “The media appointed leadership — NAACP, [National] Urban League, CBC, etc. — are totally out of step with the rank and file in the black community.”

Candace Owens, the young black woman who is the communications director for the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, said she’d helped organize a recent retreat attended largely by black men, where participants discussed “at length” what “illegal immigration is doing to our country as a whole, and specifically (of course) to urban communities.”

Owens, like others, has waged her war more against black political malaise, blind allegiance to the Democratic Party, with Trump’s off-the-top-rope immigration stance as “a piece of a larger puzzle, in restoring our urban communities.”

“More to the point,” she said, “liberals trying to pull the wool over our eyes in their insistence that illegal immigrants are somehow a part of the American minority community is something that we intend to combat with vigor. Trying to convince black America to support illegal immigration is a bit like trying to trick someone into digging a grave that you intend to bury them in.”

That early White House pitch is still obsessed over by some party activists, and, fascinatingly, a few fringe actors on the dark, pro-black nationalist corners of the internet. The Republicans, like Burnett, Gilchrist, and indeed, Jackson, are still loyal to Steve Bannon’s mission of galvanizing black Americans around the theory of economic nationalism.

It didn’t take the White House long, though, to learn how difficult it would be to get black lawmakers and other political figures and activists to come to the table as a wedge on immigration, three current or former administration officials interviewed for this story said. “You can’t ignore what they want on criminal justice, public housing, knowing you need them to come to the table on immigration,” one of the sources close to the administration said. “Especially when they already think the administration is dismantling civil rights.”

And prominent figures have wanted no part of what’s being offered.