YUMA,
Ariz. — President Trump, fresh from the racially charged storms of
Charlottesville, Va., thrust himself on Tuesday into another
high-voltage issue, traveling to a sun-scorched border post in southern
Arizona to highlight his determination to crack down on illegal border
crossings from Mexico.
Mr.
Trump’s visit, long scheduled but newly divisive, was also to feature a
campaign-style rally in Phoenix on Tuesday evening that has drawn
scores of protesters and fanned fears that it could arouse more of the
ugly nativist sentiments that exploded more than a week ago in
Charlottesville.
The visit unfolded in the shadow of a rumor — knocked down for now by the White House — that Mr. Trump planned to pardon Joe Arpaio,
the hard-line former sheriff of Maricopa County, who became a national
symbol of the campaign against undocumented immigrants, and whose
round-’em-up raids have landed him in legal trouble.
“There
will be no discussion of that today at any point, and there will be no
action will be taken on that front,” the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, told reporters, referring to a pardon.
The
president’s first stop, in the desert city of Yuma, focused more on
enforcement than rhetoric. Venturing into a giant hangar, Mr. Trump met
with Border Patrol officials, who showed him a Predator drone, a helicopter and a boat that is used to scour the countryside near the border for illegal immigrants.
The
officers also displayed items, including a fire extinguisher with a
hollow canister and a Coca-Cola carton with a false bottom, that they
said drug traffickers use to smuggle narcotics into the United States.
Administration
officials showcased the stretch of border as Exhibit A in the value of a
border wall. There are now more than 60 miles of fencing along the
border near Yuma — the construction of which preceded the Trump
administration — which officials said had helped drive down the number
of arrests for illegal crossings by more than 40 percent.
Mr.
Trump is using these statistics to make the case to Congress for
funding a wall along the entire Mexican border. Some Senate Republicans
are balking, and Mr. Trump’s political advisers worry that failing to
deliver on this signature campaign promise would hurt him with his
political base.
“What
he’s done so far has worked,” Thomas Homan, the acting director of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told reporters. “We need funding to
make it permanent. We need to build a wall.”
Mr.
Homan said the executive orders on immigration signed by the president
had helped further stanch the flow of illegal crossings. But the
measures he and other officials cited — such as electronic sensors along
the border fences — were put in place well before Mr. Trump took
office.
Arizona
was the site of one of Mr. Trump’s most raucous rallies during the
presidential campaign, and if anything, the atmosphere was even more
charged on this visit, his first as president.
The
Democratic mayor of Phoenix, Greg Stanton, pleaded with Mr. Trump to
put off his trip, saying it would only aggravate racial tensions, coming
so soon after clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters
in Virginia.
The
list of people in Arizona on Mr. Trump’s enemies list includes both of
the state’s Republican senators: Jeff Flake, a longtime nemesis whom Mr.
Trump has described as “toxic” and a “flake”; and John McCain, who cast
the decisive Republican vote to dash Mr. Trump’s effort to repeal
former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in the Senate.
For
his part, Mr. Trump has toggled unpredictably between appealing for
unity in the wake of Charlottesville to reaffirming his inflammatory
statements of last Tuesday, when he draw a moral equivalence between the
white supremacists and those who tried to resist them.
On
Monday night, the president prefaced a speech laying out his
Afghanistan policy with a call for conciliation, telling the service
members in his audience that they symbolized the ideals of individual
rights and respect for minorities that are central to the American
experience.
“Loyalty
to our nation demands loyalty to one another,” he said in the most
eloquent part of his 25-minute address. “Love for America requires love
for all of its people. When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is
no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry and no tolerance for hate.”
Ms.
Sanders said she expected the president to start off in a similarly
conciliatory vein, when he takes the stage at the Phoenix Convention
Center around 7 p.m. local time.
The
lack of a pardon for Mr. Arpaio would deprive the rally of a dramatic
moment. But Mr. Trump has said he is seriously considering a pardon for
the former sheriff, suggesting it could happen later. Mr. Arpaio was
found guilty of criminal contempt of court after he flouted an order to
stop detaining people his office suspected of being undocumented
immigrants.
Mr.
Trump was traveling with Stephen Miller, the senior policy adviser who
is a prime advocate for hard-line immigration policy, and John F. Kelly,
his new chief of staff, who came over from the Department of Homeland
Security.
Mr.
Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who ran the military’s Southern
Command, also favors a tough approach on immigration. But he is trying
to moderate Mr. Trump’s public statements and to impose discipline on a
White House that had come to mirror its capricious boss.
The
trip, planned several weeks ago, is viewed by the White House as a
chance for the president to recapture momentum, after a week that was
lost amid the furor over his reaction to Charlottesville.
Mr.
Trump’s political operation put out a radio ad featuring the
president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump urging people to attend the
rally. She is expected to be on hand for the gathering.
Mr.
Trump said nothing to reporters on his visit to the border center. But
he seemed to savor the welcome from military families who stood along a
rope line at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma.
Though
the temperature was 107 degrees, Mr. Trump lingered to take pictures
and scrawl his name on caps, while his staff and reporters huddled under
a wing of Air Force One to escape the blistering heat.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment