Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration

by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Michael D. Shear

Overview

Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency.

No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news.

As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis.

Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982117412
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	947,209
File size:	32 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Julie Hirschfeld Davis is the congressional editor and deputy Washington editor at The New York Times. She has covered politics from Washington for more than twenty years. She joined the Times in 2014 as a White House correspondent after stints at Bloomberg News, the Associated Press, The Baltimore Sun, and Congressional Quarterly. She won the 2009 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress.

Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent in The New York Times Washington bureau, where he covers President Trump. A veteran political correspondent, before coming to the Times in 2010, he spent eighteen years writing about local, state and national politics at The Washington Post, where he was also part of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The Vessel 11

2 Breaking the Apology-Retreat Cycle 29

3 The Hamilton Group 41

4 Forty-Three Minutes 56

5 "Bring Out the Crazies" 68

6 "A Fucking Watered-Down Version" 81

7 Shackles Off 92

8 Angels and Demons 108

9 No Legal Basis 113

10 The Trump Effect Fades 121

11 The Admiral's Almanac 129

12 Refugees Not Welcome 134

13 A Not-So-Global Compact 150

14 Blind Spot 156

15 No Way Out 170

16 Life in Two-Year Increments 187

17 Forced Removal 191

18 "Just Bite the Bullet" 205

19 "Shithole Countries" 214

20 Ash and Trash 228

21 "No More DACA Deal!" 237

22 Zero Tolerance 252

23 Reverse Boomerang 269

24 Always a Bomb Thrower 280

25 "You've Kidnapped Our Kids" 291

26 Evelyn and Amber 299

27 "Pencils Down" 309

28 Use of Force 329

29 Hijacking the Midterms 338

30 Mexican Standoff 344

31 Shutdown 349

32 "We've Wasted the Last Two Years" 368

33 The Purge 378

Epilogue 389

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 397

Acknowledgments 407

Sources 413

Photo Credits 429

Index 431

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2019

A congressional correspondent for the New York Times and a White House correspondent for the paper, respectively, Davis and Shear use previously unreported stories to present Trump's anti-immigration stance as his core policy. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

10/28/2019

New York Times reporters Davis and Shear debut with a vivid, revelatory account of President Trump’s attempts to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. According to the authors, the centerpiece of that agenda, the border wall, was “conceived of almost by accident” but quickly became an obsession of Trump’s, as well as an “operational, legislative, and legal quagmire.” They see a similar pattern in efforts to ban Muslim travelers, end the DACA program that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, separate migrant children from their parents at the border, and add a citizenship question to the U.S. census. The authors credit former campaign CEO Steve Bannon, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller with creating the framework for Trump’s nativist program, and reveal that Miller convened a secret policy group to “churn out radical new ideas” on immigration policy. Standing in opposition to the hardliners is former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, among others. Davis and Shear’s fast-paced, richly detailed narrative underscores the chaos surrounding the White House without minimizing the fact that it’s now “more dangerous and costly to be undocumented” in America than it has been in decades. The result is an essential inquiry into Trump’s bet that his “take-no-prisoners” approach to immigration will win him the 2020 election. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Essential reading for those searching for the ‘beating heart’ of the Trump administration. . . . Davis and Shear are scrupulously fair reporters. . . . [They] are right: Immigration demagogy is at the ‘heart’ of the Trump show — and the Trump show is at the heart of our tragic decline as a civil and humane society.

The New York Times - Joe Klein

"The book reveals much about how Trump thinks, why he instinctively 'grasped for the solution that looked toughest,' and, in hair-raising insider detail, how he governs from day to day. If journalism is the first draft of history, this volume is a solid second draft."

Foreign Affairs - Jessica T. Mathews

A stark account of the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to disembowel the nation’s immigration policy. . . . Hirschfeld Davis and Shear had only to state the facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Trump had already taken care of impaling himself.

The Washington Post - Oscar Cásares

A stark account of the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to disembowel the nation’s immigration policy. . . . Hirschfeld Davis and Shear had only to state the facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Trump had already taken care of impaling himself.

The Washington Post - Oscar Cásares