A senior staffer on the House Republican team that prosecuted Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was a valued member of Stephen Miller’s immigration team in the Trump White House, internal emails show.
Trevor Whetstone is the deputy general counsel for the House Homeland Security Committee that impeached Mayorkas. He is also a veteran of the team that Miller assembled to pursue some of the most Draconian and radical immigration policies of then-Pres. Donald Trump.
The House’s impeachment of Mayorkas is going to the Senate, but it’s not clear whether Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will permit a trial.
Mayorkas was impeached on two counts. He’s accused of violating immigration law by not detaining enough undocumented migrants and of lying to Congress by touting the border as secure.
Ironically, Trump did both of those things, as Whetstone is in an almost unique position to know.
“Our Southern Border is now Secure and will remain that way,” Trump claimed in a Tweet on Dec. 11, 2018. (Shortly afterward, Trump argued that more money was needed to secure the border.)
Whetstone and the House committee he works for didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Whetstone is likely aware that other Homeland Security secretaries, like Mayorkas, also didn’t detain every single undocumented migrant.
According to a Cato Institute analysis, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security released 52% of the undocumented immigrants encountered in 2019 and 2020. But it was the punitive, inhumane policies that drew scrutiny at the time.
While Whetstone’s specific role isn’t known publicly, emails show he was a part of the Trump White House team. And apparently of value to Miller, who gained infamy for his animus toward refugees, asylum-seekers, and any undocumented immigrants.
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After Trump’s 2016 campaign falsely depicted an America beset criminally and economically by undocumented immigrants, his administration began separating families about a year before the policy became known in 2018. Trump killed it, officially, at least, with an executive order in June 2018.
But separations and mistreatment continued throughout the Trump presidency and hundreds of children had yet to be reunited with their families when Trump left the White House. (Pres. Joe Biden’s record on the issue is mixed, at best.)
It was Miller, a senior advisor to Trump, who pushed that administration’s cruelest measures and policies, which separated even some families who had applied for asylum in full compliance with the law. In April 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration’s “zero tolerance” approach, prosecuting every undocumented immigrant, even if it meant splitting up families with small children.
When Trump came into office, Whetstone had been at the Department of Justice for ten years. Then, in August 2017, he was detailed to the White House, as a DOJ advisor to Trump’s Domestic Policy Council.
When Whetstone’s assignment came to an end, Miller got involved, even as his policies were becoming national news. Emails obtained by American Oversight show that on March 29, 2018, Miller emailed DOJ Counselor to the Attorney General Gene Hamilton about Whetstone.
“Trevor Whetstone is our DOJ detailee,” Miller wrote. “Can you find a good place for him when his detail ends at White House?”
John Zadrozny, who was on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, had been cc’ed on Miller’s email. Zadrozny explained that, “Trevor hails from OJP [Office of Justice Programs]. He has been a huge help. Give me a call later. I’m happy to discuss Trevor’s situation offline.”
The email chain doesn’t address why Whetstone’s situation merited a call.
When Miller asks for an update the next day, Hamilton assures him, “We will find a place that suits his strengths.”
Miller says, “It should be something that touches on border security law enforcement narcotics so he can stay part of the team.”
(Hamilton is now general counsel of the America First Legal Foundation, which Miller runs and which is part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.)
There’s no public record of Whetstone’s work with the Trump immigration team. And Miller never said in the publicly released emails why he wanted to keep Whetstone on the team. But Miller was known to bounce staffers who advocated for refugees, and he kept Whetstone.
According to Whetstone’s LinkedIn profile, by July 2018 he was senior policy/attorney advisor at DOJ. Apparently, that post kept Whetstone on Miller’s team.
Four months later, in November 2018, Miller wrote in an email that Whetstone was part of the “full immigration team.”
In last month’s impeachment report from the House Homeland Security Committee, there’s no general counsel listed, but Whetstone is named as deputy general counsel, above the committee’s other attorneys. There’s no public record of his actions in that capacity, other than the impeachment report itself.
But his value to Miller and Zadrozny isn’t the only indication of a hard-right approach, with a theocratic bent to it.
Whetstone studied law at Ave Maria School of Law, founded in 1999 with the proceeds from the sale of the Domino’s Pizza company. As the school itself notes, the National Catholic Reporter called it “militantly religious,” with “a more conservative religious orientation than any existing Catholic law school in the nation.”
The school’s backers included a number of conservatives with theocratic leanings. Its founder opposed reproductive rights. Ave Maria’s website cites early interest from former Attorney General Edwin Meese, who has been affiliated with the Heritage Foundation since 1988 and an insider at the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive Christian group behind the National Prayer Breakfast.
As a lawyer, Whetstone might also be familiar with a legal precedent that’s been cited by legal scholar Jonathan Turley, a regular Republican witness. In a Daily Beast opinion piece, Turley pointed out that Mayorkas’s enforcement failures are not, in fact, illegal, because the courts and even the Federal Tort Claims Act have long established that cabinet secretaries have broad discretion about which laws and regulations to enforce.
If the Senate votes to dismiss the trial, however, it may never be known whether Whetstone as lead counsel came up with an effective rebuttal.
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