Officials with ties to hard-line immigration groups have ascended quickly in the Trump administration, The New York Times reported.
"You would have to go to the 1920s and 1930s to find a comparable period in which you could point to people within the executive agencies and the White House who favored significant restrictions," said Daniel Tichenor, an immigration politics scholar at the University of Oregon.
They include:
- Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies who now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- Julie Kirchner, who retired as executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform in 2015, and is now an adviser to the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.
- Kellyanne Conway, who worked regularly as a pollster for FAIR before she joined Trump's campaign.
- Stephen Miller, who worked to defeat immigration reform under Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was a senator and is now Trump's senior White House adviser.
- Gene P. Hamilton, who used to work on illegal immigration as Sessions' counsel on the Judiciary Committee and is now a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security.
- Julia Hahn, who wrote about immigration for Breitbart when Stephen Bannon was in charge, but is now a deputy policy strategist to the White House.
"We've worked closely with lots of people, who are now very well-placed in his administration, for a long time,” said Dan Stein, president of FAIR.
Under Trump, deportations of criminal illegal immigrants have jumped significantly as the administration continues to look for ways to secure the border.
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