Source: Trump Pushed Migrant Dump Plan; Pelosi Calls Plan Disrespectful to Immigrants
ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: That's a really good question. I think not. I think that in our conversations with them to get their statement, they didn't mention that. They still have to improve the way Alexa works and needs these conversations.</s>KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Geez louise. Great to see you, Alison.</s>KOSIK: You got it.</s>BOLDUAN: Thank you so much.</s>KOSIK: Sure.</s>KIB: And thank you all so much for joining me. Wild day today. "INSIDE POLITICS" with Dana Bash starts right now.</s>DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm Dana Bash. John King is off today. White House officials are downplaying reports that President Trump personally pushed for dumping undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities, specifically in congressional districts of Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats. Plus, presidential candidate and Mayor Pete Buttigieg isn't the only 2020 contender talking about his religious views. Plus, I travel with Vice President Mike Pence to the southern border where he made the administration's case for how to deal with the humanitarian crisis there. I also asked him about the moment the world is waiting for, the Mueller report being released any day now.</s>BASH: How concerned are you that there will be information in this report that will be politically damaging?</s>MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, we're not concerned at all.</s>BASH: Not at all?</s>PENCE: No. Not in the least. I mean, Robert Mueller engaged in a detailed review of all of the facts. He concluded that there was no collusion. And it wasn't his job to exonerate any particular point of view. But reviewing all of the evidence that he assembled, the attorney general and the deputy attorney general determined that there was no obstruction of justice.</s>BASH: If you feel that confident about it, then should the American people see all of the evidence that went along with this report for full transparency to back up what you just said.</s>PENCE: Well, I think the American people are always entitled to have the facts, but in this case it's important that we protect grand jury confidentiality.</s>BASH: We begin this hour with the president, who has long railed against sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to hand over undocumented immigrants into federal custody. Now, new reporting from "The Washington Post," and confirmed by CNN, shows the president considered making examples of those cities. The idea, to dump migrants detained at the southern border into so-called sanctuary cities. A source tells CNN that the White House repeatedly pressured Homeland Security officials to follow through. The department objected loudly, sources say, and produced a legal analysis that killed the idea. Today, the new acting director of ICE says he was never pressured by the West Wing, saying, I was asked my opinion and provided it and my advice was heeded. Now, the White House, in a statement last hour, they are saying the idea was briefly and informally raised and quickly rejected, adding no one at ICE was pressured by anyone at any time. But sources say the plan was personally pushed by the White House and specifically immigration hawk Stephen Miller. And its failure, a source says, could help explain why Miller now wants to purge top officials inside Homeland Security. Now, a Homeland Security source confirmed the policy pursuit and the pressure to implement it was real, describing his bottom line feelings about the proposal, the source put it this way, these are human beings, not game pieces. Now here at the table to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Phil Mattingly, Seung Min Kim with "The Washington Post," Michael Shear with "The New York Times," and CNN's own Evan Perez. Now, Evan, you have been doing reporting on this. I mean it truly is bizarre and almost really hard to fathom that even in the most darkest of political corners that this is something that was really considered.</s>EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: It really is and it shows you what sort of damage, frankly, is being done to the Department of Homeland Security by some of these policies that Stephen Miller is trying to push. This is an agency that you know has struggled ever since it was created after 9/11 to sort of find its footing out of the political sphere and spotlight and try to just be law enforcement on par with FBI and other agencies. And that's one of the worries that people have is that their -- that at the end of the Trump administration, the damage will be so great that it will take years to repair it. And you can see why the lawyers at the Homeland Security Department and all the people who have -- who have law enforcement chops there were so against this because they know that they'll be the ones that will have to clean it up and will have to be hauled before Congress to explain it once something like this is done. And that's why they pushed back so hard against it.</s>BASH: And it is very noteworthy that we are getting this information on the week that we saw the Homeland Security secretary pushed out, that there is -- that there are rumblings about another purge going on. I mean, it's -- it's not an accident that we're seeing this pushback I think it's probably fair to say. A little bit more reporting from your newspaper. I want to read the following. The White House told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the plan was intended to alleviate a shortage of detention space, but also served to send a message to Democrats. The attempt at political retribution raised alarm within ICE with a top official responding that it was rife with budgetary and liability concerns and nothing that there are PR risks as well. Ah, yes. PR. And how about, you know, basic humanitarian negligence.</s>SEUNG MIN KIM, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Exactly.</s>BASH: And worse.</s>KIM: Exactly. And we've seen multiple times how this White House, particularly when it comes under pressure over immigration issues, really does stretch the boundaries, you know, legally, politically, of what -- what an administration should be doing on immigration. I mean it was only a few days ago that we were talking about potentially shutting down the entire U.S.-Mexico border to deal with the migration issue on the southern bothered. Obviously the president's declared a national emergency, which is in litigation right now. But I thought the fact that this was brought up, according to our reporting, twice really remarkable. The fact that first it was surfaced back in November, when the president, as we know, was furious about the caravans that were moving up north towards the border -- or towards the U.S.-Mexico border and then again in February when we saw that Democrats -- first of all, we were in a shutdown and Democrats and Republicans were really clashing over exactly the number of migrants to detain in U.S. custody, the number of detention beds that had become such a contentious issue. So, obviously, a jaw-dropping reporting that we've seen. But, again, a parent of behavior from this administration that has really, again, pushed the boundaries of what they can do.</s>MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Yes. I mean, look, the -- there is no more central promise that Donald Trump made to the American people than the one surrounding his wall and the border and his sort of anti-immigrant zeal. And, you know, I think what you've seen is over the last two and a half years, as that promise has not been met, the wall isn't built, Congress has stopped him, courts have blocked a lot of his initiatives that have been aimed at stopping the flow of migrants, and then what you've seen in the last few months with this real surge, which is real by the way.</s>BASH: It is real.</s>SHEAR: I was just down at the border in Calexico and in San Diego at the -- and in Mexico. There are thousands of migrant families coming up, more than we've seen in many, many years, and that is putting a strain on the border. And so -- but it's also putting a strain on his political promise and proving in numbers and images that people can see that he hasn't stopped, you know -- he hasn't stopped this immigration, and that's really frustrating him hand frustrating the White House and they're -- they're sort of turning to every which way that they can think and, you know, some of the ideas are kind of bonkers.</s>BASH: Yes. And it is real. And we're going to talk in the next segment about my trip to the border with the vice president to talk about that very issue. You had a great piece on that this week in "The Times" as well. But -- so what we are seeing here is very political, very ugly, but it also is borne out of frustration by this administration to find a way to deal with the reality. Sometimes there's a crisis. Sometimes, depending on where you are in the past two and a half years, it is manufactured. Right now we're at a crisis point. But they're trying to deal with it with the existing laws that they have, and it is very hard to do. If you -- and what you're seeing is the combination of that and the raw politics and the ridiculous notion of mixing that with political retribution.</s>PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I actually think this is a great window into kind of the heart of the frustration inside the White House and the heart of the frustration inside some of kind of the more hawkish advisers in the White House about how restricted they are by current administration -- or by the current laws that kind of dictate the immigration system. I know we'll talk about it in the next block in terms of why it has become a crisis, why the flows have been surging to the degree they have because of the laws that are currently in place. Now this, again, it's kind of an absurd outlier idea, but it also -- it not only underscores the window into why they're frustrated, but it kind of underscores the reality that there's only so much these agencies can do.</s>BASH: Exactly.</s>MATTINGLY: There are lawyers at these agencies. There are career lawyers. There are also politicals who, to Evan's very good point, understand that we're going to be here probably longer than this administration.</s>BASH: Exactly.</s>MATTINGLY: Whether it's four or eight years --</s>PEREZ: That's why the president --</s>BASH: And you probably hear this all the time from</s>MATTINGLY: Yes.</s>PEREZ: Right. Right. And that's why the president himself raised it with Kirstjen Nielsen, you know, for an idea that they claimed was briefly brought up and disregarded. This thing, as you said, was brought up in November and then in February. The president himself pressured Nielsen to do this. Now, DHS is telling us that it never really got to her for a final decision, but it is clear that there was -- there were these conversations.</s>BASH: Yes. And you saw that this is a window also into the pressure that Kirstjen Nielsen herself was feeling.</s>PEREZ: Yes.</s>BASH: I mean you could kind of see throughout her tenure she was trying to explain this zero tolerance policy. Then she sort of stopped doing that and her rhetoric had got really strong. You could see that she was trying to make way with the president and get in good graces --</s>SHEAR: Save her job.</s>BASH: And save her job, and then she just gave up and now we're seeing these stories.</s>SHEAR: Well, and, look, you know, there was a senior administration official who -- who briefed a bunch of reporters a couple of days ago about the frustration inside the White House that the bureaucracies -- the immigration bureaucracies in the country weren't moving fast enough to implement the hardline agenda, which --</s>MATTINGLY: Or were moving in the wrong direction.</s>SHEAR: Or were moving in the wrong direction.</s>MATTINGLY: Yes.</s>SHEAR: And -- and -- which is remarkable when you think of what has happened in the last couple of years that has already pushed, as Seung Min said, the boundaries of what sort of -- kind of establishment Washington thinks is the right approach. And so the fact that it's not going fast enough for them is really striking.</s>BASH: Before we go to break, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, just reacted to this story. Let listen.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): Just another notion that is unworthy of the presidency of the United States and disrespectful of the challenges that we face as a country, as a people to address who we are, a nation of immigrants.</s>BASH: And up next, my exclusive interview on the southern border with Vice President Mike Pence. Stay with us.