Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration

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Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide an inside account with never-before-told stories of the defining issue of Donald Trumps presidency: his steadfast opposition to immigration to the US.

As his campaign rhetoric in the 2018 midterms demonstrated, no issue matters more to Donald Trump than immigration. And no issuewith the possible exception of his opposition to Robert Muellers investigation of his 2016 campaignbetter defines his administration.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take readers inside the White House to document how Trump and his allies 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.

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. Even as illegal immigration has fallen in recent years, Trump has elevated it in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Moreover, his comments about legal immigrantsNigerians in their huts, Haitians infected with AIDS, and people from @#$%hole countrieshave been incendiary.

Border Wars identifies the players behind Trumps anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled, and fought their way toward major immigration changes that have further polarized the nation. This definitive, behind-the-scenes account is filled with previously unreported stories that reveal how Trumps decision-making is driven by gut instinct and marked by disorganization, paranoia, and a constantly feuding staff.

Reviews

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. -- Joe Klein * The New York Times *
A stark account of the Trump administrations ongoing attempts to disembowel the nations 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. -- Oscar Csares * The Washington Post *
"A vivid, revelatory account of President Trumps attempts to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. . . .Davis and Shears fast-paced, richly detailed narrative underscores the chaos surrounding the White House without minimizing the fact that its now 'more dangerous and costly to be undocumented'in America than it has been in decades." * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

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 Prizewinning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.