Editorial of The Times

How the GOP Built Donald Trump’s Cages

President Donald Trump may have caved on his child-separation policy, after a public outcry that included significant members of his own coalition. But rather than waste time on self-congratulation, Republicans who spoke up this time should be asking themselves why a president of their party felt he was enforcing its principles by breaking apart families and caging children.

For a number of reasons — economic, cultural and demographic — immigration has been a growing concern among Republican base voters for decades. From the early 1990s to 2000, the conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan kept the Republican Party on its toes, running for president three times with an explicitly isolationist message. But it was during the George W. Bush years that anti-immigrant sentiment started to become more central to the party’s identity.

Bush made comprehensive immigration reform a priority of his second term. Multiple Senate bills emerged, built on the pillars of border security, a guest-worker program and a path to legalization for unauthorized immigrants. But conservatives in the House rejected the idea of legalization and instead focused on border security. Conservative talk radio took up the cause, smacking Bush as squishy on immigration. The very concept of comprehensive reform became anathema to many on the right.

President Barack Obama also took a run at reform. And as with Bush 43, his efforts shattered when they collided with the Republican hard-liners in the House. The Great Recession that Obama inherited did nothing to quell nativist resentment among working-class whites, and the rise of the Tea Party pulled the Republican Party further to the right, with zealots on immigration setting the tone. Politicians who did not follow risked banishment.

Just ask Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who saw his fledgling political career almost snuffed out by his flirtation with comprehensive reform. In early 2013, Rubio joined a bipartisan group of colleagues, nicknamed the Gang of Eight, to hammer out a grand compromise. This was in the wake of Mitt Romney’s presidential loss in 2012, after which the Republican Party briefly decided that one of its principal goals was to improve its image with Hispanic voters. The resulting plan would have done everything from beefing up border security to overhauling visa categories to promoting a merit-based immigration system. It also provided for the legalization of unauthorized immigrants, which meant conservatives hated it. That June, the bill cleared the Senate by an impressive 68-32 vote. But John Boehner, then the House speaker, refused to bring it up for a vote in the Republican-controlled lower chamber.

For his efforts, Rubio became a pariah to the Tea Party voters who had propelled him to office three years earlier. Soon, he was denying that he had ever really supported the bill.

The immigration moves Obama made on his own — such as instituting protections for “Dreamers” and expanding deportation deferments — further enraged conservatives. Party leaders fanned those flames, accusing Obama of being imperious and “lawless." In one bit of twisted logic, Boehner argued that the House couldn’t possibly take up reform legislation because it couldn’t trust Obama to carry out said legislation. Thus, the battle lines continued to harden.

Along the way, Republican candidates continued to play to their base’s darker impulses. On the whole, the rhetoric was subtler than that of the current president, but now and again it turned Trumpian. Recall the remarks in 2013 of Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, painting Dreamers as drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Or the boast in 2011 of Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.: “I’ll do anything short of shooting them” — “them,” of course, being unauthorized immigrants.

Nor was Trump the first Republican to promote the idea that within every immigrant lurks a murderer or terrorist. In 2010, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, ran around warning of what came to be mocked as the great “terror baby” plot. As Gohmert told it, radical Islamics were plotting to impregnate droves of young women, who would infiltrate the United States to give birth here. The babies would be shipped back home for terrorist training, then return as adults to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting America.

Time and again, given the choice between soothing and stoking nativist animus, Republican lawmakers chose the low road. By the late Obama years, a skeptical-verging-on-hostile view of immigration had become a core tenet of party orthodoxy — like opposing gun control or denouncing Obamacare.

There is no question that Trump inherited a broken immigration system. There is also no question that he prefers ranting about its brokenness to making even a token effort at fixing it.

And he has even less interest in addressing the root causes of migrant families flocking to the border. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security reported, “More individuals sought affirmative asylum from the Northern Triangle Countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) in the last three years than in the prior 15 years combined.” Between February and March of this year, border arrests and denials of entry took their biggest jump in five years, largely because of migrants from those same nations.

None of this is surprising considering the rampant violence in the region — in 2016, Honduras and El Salvador ranked among the five nations with the highest rates of violent death. People are desperate to escape, no matter what they may face at the U.S. border.

Helping these nations stabilize themselves is key to reducing the flow of asylum-seekers. But Trump does not like complexity or long-term strategizing. He prefers casting blame and making threats. He has repeatedly vowed to cut off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras unless they stem the flow of drugs and people into the United States.

In the administration’s budget proposals, it has sought deep cuts in aid to these countries — something Congress has wisely ignored. Removing a financial lifeline from nations already in chaos is hardly a recipe for progress.

At the same time, Trump’s move to kick out as many people who are from these countries as possible threatens to overwhelm nations ill equipped for such an influx. And without the money that many of the immigrants living here regularly send back to their families, the economies of these countries would further crumble. (In 2016, 17 percent of El Salvador’s gross domestic product came from remittances from abroad.)

America’s immigration mess is not going to be cleaned up anytime soon. The House’s efforts last week to pass legislation dissolved into squabbling. Maybe leadership can salvage the situation and squeak through some uneasy compromise between Republican moderates and conservatives. But conservatives are terrified that the base will punish them if they concede even an inch. Speaker Paul Ryan, with one foot out the door, has no juice. And pretty much everyone assumes that nothing will move through the Senate anyway.

For his part, Trump is planning fresh crackdowns in the run-up to the midterms, to reassure his base that he has not lost his resolve. If anything, given the fragility of his ego, last week’s flip-flop will make him all the more desperate to prove his strength.

More immediately, there is the matter of the 2,300-plus migrant children who need to be reunified with their parents as soon as possible. It remains unclear how the White House plans to handle that logistical challenge. Trump is more a breaker than a fixer.

Whether out of moral queasiness or political fear, a smattering of Republican lawmakers chose to say, “Enough is enough” to this particular Trump atrocity. The question now is whether the conference will learn anything useful from this episode. Dehumanizing unauthorized immigrants may be one of Trump’s signature outrages, but it is hardly his only one. There is also his politicization of law enforcement, his attempts to undermine public faith in the democratic process, his attacks on the press, his family’s suspect business dealings and his habitual lying — so this is unlikely to be the last time the president puts members of his party in an uncomfortable, and perhaps untenable, position.

The weight of this moment should be recognized. Trump’s capitulation was not a given. With a little less media scrutiny, fewer heartbreaking photos and fewer calls from angry voters, tent cities could have kept on filling with traumatized children. Congressional Republicans, even last week’s conscientious objectors, would have borne a significant share of responsibility for that disgrace as they bear significant responsibility for the Trumpism undergirding it.

It takes work for America to hold on to its values. Individuals must push back when those values are threatened — especially when that threat comes from the commander in chief. Republican lawmakers should feel this burden more than most. Having done so much to pave the way for Trump and his immigration policies, they now owe it to the American people to help keep him in check.