Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

The group had been preparing for legal challenges when Miller intervened. To him, strategic due diligence was a concession of weakness. “Miller has two impulses that he’s warring with,” a senior Republican aide said. “One is to be the bomb-thrower he always was. The other is to try to secure victories for the President.” In the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration, Miller and a close associate named Gene Hamilton, a former Sessions staffer in his midthirties, drafted an executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”—the travel ban. When Trump signed the ban soon afterward, none of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security had been notified in advance, even though they were responsible for enforcing it. Travelers with valid visas were suddenly trapped at American airports, unable to enter the country; refugees who, after years of waiting, had been extensively vetted and approved for entry were turned back. Thousands of protesters and civil rights attorneys began congregating at airports across the country, and Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, arguably the party’s most respected voices on immigration, issued a statement saying, “We should not turn our backs on those refugees who…pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors.”