8 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
world
As Donald J. Trump moved to wrap up
his unlikely Republican nomination for
the presidency, a senior adviser to Sena-
tor Ted Cruz of Texas laced into the
front-runner in March 2016, in a last-
ditch effort to swing the contest to Mr.
Cruz, the more traditionally conserva-
tive candidate.
The target? Mr. Trump’s soft stand on
immigrant workers.
“He uses the immigrants in ways that
advantage him monetarily but disad-
vantage American citizens,” the adviser,
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, said of Mr.
Trump’s hiring of temporary foreign em-
ployees for Trump resorts from Florida
to New Jersey. “He says it’s wrong,” Mr.
Cuccinelli told a radio interviewer, “but
he still does it.”
Three years later, the president and
Mr. Cuccinelli have put aside their dif-
ferences to make common cause in a
pursuit of the fiercest anti-immigration
agenda in generations. As the acting di-
rector of United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services, Mr. Cuccinelli
now oversees legal immigration, includ-
ing the visa program that he once criti-
cized and Mr. Trump made rich use of in
staffing resorts such as Mar-a-Lago in
Florida and the Trump National Golf
Club in Bedminster, N.J.
From that seemingly narrow perch,
he has roiled the Department of Home-
land Security, peppering other senior of-
ficials with emails containing pointed
demands, encroaching on Immigration
and Customs Enforcement operations
and generally appointing himself
spokesman for all things immigration in
the Trump administration.
In Mr. Cuccinelli, Mr. Trump has found
someone to his right on immigration but
perfectly in line with his street-fighting
skills.
“He has many critics,” said L. Preston
Bryant, a Republican who served in the
Virginia House of Delegates when Mr.
Cuccinelli was a state senator, “but they
underestimate Ken Cuccinelli at their
own peril.”
Mr. Cuccinelli, a descendant of Italian
immigrants who sought sanctuary at El-
lis Island, was recruited initially as the
administration’s immigration czar, with
the broadest possible portfolio. Within
days, though, he was redirected to head
Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The more limited job description has not
hindered Mr. Cuccinelli. If the White
House adviser Stephen Miller is the ar-
chitect of Mr. Trump’s effort to restrict
both legal and illegal immigration, Mr.
Cuccinelli has emerged as its public
face.
He has aggressively pushed immigra-
tion policies with little concern for legal
constraints. His tendency to make light
of sensitive policies has incensed senior
homeland security officials, including
the acting secretary, Kevin K.
McAleenan, and the acting director of
Immigration and Customs Enforce-
ment, Matthew T. Albence, according to
administration officials, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to discuss
the rising tension among officials.
Signature Cuccinelli initiatives in-
clude efforts to speed up asylum screen-
ings, to make it harder for children of
some active service members born
abroad to obtain citizenship and to force
immigrants facing life-threatening
health crises to return to their home
countries (the administration recently
announced that it would reconsider the
last decision).
His agency also put in place a rule
that would deny legal status to immi-
grants deemed likely to use government
benefit programs. A day after announc-
ing that “public charge” policy, Mr. Cuc-
cinelli revised the iconic sonnet on the
Statue of Liberty by saying the United
States would welcome those “who can
stand on their own two feet.”
Born in Edison, N.J., Mr. Cuccinelli, 51,
was raised in Virginia, where he as-
sumed the nickname “Cooch.” He gradu-
ated from the University of Virginia with
an engineering degree and from George
Mason with a law degree.
From the start, his political career —
he was a state senator from 2002 to 2010
before becoming Virginia’s attorney
general — was marked by his hard-line
stand on immigration at a time when his
home base, extending to parts of Fairfax
County in the far suburbs of Washing-
ton, was divided by an influx of first-gen-
eration Americans. He proposed legisla-tion that would allow employers to fire
employees who did not speak English,
advocated denying citizenship to the
American-born children of undocu-
mented immigrants and provoked back-
lash as attorney general when he re-
ferred to immigration policy while dis-
cussing killing rats in Washington.
He also displayed the acumen to carry
out wide-reaching, complex policy.A devout Catholic, Mr. Cuccinelli
made his name nationally more as a so-
cial conservative than as an immigra-
tion hard-liner. He defended a Virginia
law that criminalized sodomy, advocat-
ed prohibiting Virginia state universi-
ties from protecting same-sex couples
from discrimination and investigated
the University of Virginia to obtain doc-
uments related to the work of a scientist
who studied climate change, accusing
the professor of fraud. He issued edited
pins of the state seal for his staff to wear
with the exposed breast of a Roman god-
dess covered up.
“He certainly shares Trump’s desire
for cultural conflict and a relishing of
cultural conflict that is very uncommonfor most Virginia Republicans,” said
Brennan Bilberry, a former spokesman
for Terry McAuliffe, who defeated Mr.
Cuccinelli in the 2013 Virginia gover-
nor’s race. But long before Mr. Trump
was galvanizing his political base with
anti-immigrant language, Mr. Cuccinelli
used a similar approach to appeal to
white voters in a rapidly changing
Northern Virginia.
His district was “beginning to see
early in his term a substantial influx
from people outside who looked differ-
ent,” said Mark J. Rozell, the dean of the
Schar School of Policy and Government
at George Mason University in Virginia.
“So there was some populist appeal to
his taking a very hard immigration
stance.
“But,” Mr. Rozell added, “with Cuc-
cinelli, for good or bad, it has always
seemed that his positions came out of a
certain core of his convictions.”
Mr. Cuccinelli’s allies say his positions
are rooted in the belief that a legal immi-
gration system is crucial to maintaining
a functioning society. But Mr. Cuccinelli
tends to tailor his views based on
whether the legal immigrants in ques-
tion are fleeing desperation south of the
border or, like his ancestors, escaping
Europe.
When a photograph of a drowned mi-
grant father and daughter on the banks
of the Rio Grande went viral in June, Mr.
Cuccinelli said the father was to blame.When he was pressed on CNN about his
edit of the Statue of Liberty poem, he
said Emma Lazarus’s famous verses re-
ferred to “people coming from Europe
where they had class-based societies.”
Mr. Cuccinelli did not respond to re-
quests to be interviewed, but a Citizen-
ship and Immigration Services spokes-
woman, Jessica Collins, said Mr. Cuc-
cinelli viewed the United States as a na-
tion of immigrants; maintaining that
tradition “requires immigrants to come
here legally.” Ms. Collins said one of the
first bills Mr. Cuccinelli passed as a state
senator extended legal protections to
immigrants in the country legally and il-
legally who had their personal docu-
ments withheld from them by the au-
thorities.
But current and former Virginia law-
makers pointed to actions of a different
type taken by Mr. Cuccinelli, such as a
2010 legal opinion that allowed Virginia
law enforcement officials to check the
immigration status of anyone they
stopped. When Mr. Cuccinelli called into
a radio station in 2012 to criticize a local
ordinance that he said protected rats
from being killed in Washington, he
segued into immigration enforcement.
The law “is worse than our immigra-
tion policy — you can’t break up rat fam-
ilies,” he pivoted, apparently advocating
such separations. “Or raccoons or all the
rest, and you can’t even kill them. It’s un-
believable.”Claire G. Gastañaga, the executive di-
rector of the American Civil Liberties
Union of Virginia, sued Mr. Cuccinelli re-
peatedly when he was the state’s attor-
ney general, but she also wrote columns
with him and praised his willingness to
protect privacy rights, one of a handful
of issues in which Mr. Cuccinelli’s popu-
lism can cross party lines.
“There are areas where his conserva-
tive approach to government is protec-
tive to individual rights,” Ms. Gastañaga
said, “but not if you’re an immigrant.”
Since joining Citizenship and Immi-
gration Services, Mr. Cuccinelli has
brandished the sharp elbows he honed
in Richmond. Senior officials in the De-
partment of Homeland Security have
watched angrily as Mr. Cuccinelli spoke
about ICE raids on television and
tweeted a photograph of an active crime
scene at an ICE office in San Antonio
without consulting top officials at the
enforcement agency, administration of-
ficials said.
Mr. Cuccinelli has emailed Mr. Al-
bence, the acting director of ICE, and
other officials at the agency to demand
that it turn over authority over a student
visa program, which Mr. Cuccinelli
wants to limit in scope, according to ad-
ministration officials. Mr. Albence
pushed back against the combative
emails, the officials said, and Mr.
McAleenan and some White House offi-
cials have told Mr. Cuccinelli to tone it
down.
“That’s not how it’s going to work, my
friend,” Mr. Cuccinelli said in a reply to
the pushback from ICE officials, accord-
ing to an administration official.
His performance has pleased immi-
gration restrictionists outside the ad-
ministration, a key constituency of Mr.
Trump’s.
But Mr. Cuccinelli is unlikely to be
confirmed as the permanent director
because of his tumultuous relationship
with the Senate majority leader, Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky.
Two years ago Mr. Cuccinelli signed a
letter drafted by conservative activists
calling for Mr. McConnell to step down.
As president of the Senate Conserva-
tives Fund, he backed hard-line conser-
vatives against more mainstream Re-
publicans, even siding with Matt Bevin,
Kentucky’s current governor, in his
failed 2014 primary campaign against
Mr. McConnell. And Mr. McConnell has
let the White House know of his dis-
pleasure with Mr. Cuccinelli’s appoint-
ment.
Mr. Cuccinelli’s emergence as the un-
official homeland security spokesman,
when each agency overseeing immigra-
tion policy is led by an acting chief, has
left the rank and file wondering who is in
charge, administration officials said.
“Is Kevin McAleenan in charge of
homeland security; is he acting secre-
tary?” asked David Lapan, a former
press secretary for the cabinet depart-
ment.
“Why is Cuccinelli out there talking
about all these topics? I’m sure people
would say that’s because that’s what the
president wants, but that’s not neces-
sarily the best thing for the Department
of Homeland Security.”
A senior White House official re-
sponded to such questions unbidden,
emphasizing that those closest to Mr.
Trump believe Mr. Cuccinelli is more
aligned with the president on immigra-
tion than his peers in the sprawling de-
partment, including Mr. McAleenan.Hard-liner on relentless anti-immigration drive
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, center, who oversees legal immigration, has extended his reach and incensed some senior homeland security officials, according to sources.T.J. KIRKPATRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESWASHINGTON
In taking charge of agenda,
Cuccinelli ruffles feathers
at Homeland Security
BY ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS
AND MAGGIE HABERMAN
“He has many critics, but
they underestimate Ken
Cuccinelli at their
own peril.”For almost two decades, families at Fort
Campbell, a sprawling Army base on the
Kentucky-Tennessee border, have borne
the brunt of the country’s war efforts as
troops from the 101st Airborne Division
and Special Operations units have de-
ployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Last week, the families discovered
that they would not get the new middle
school they were expecting so that Pres-
ident Trump could build his border wall.
The school is on the list of 127 projects,
touching nearly every facet of American
military life, that will be suspended to
shift $3.6 billion to the wall.
The Pentagon’s decision to divert
$62.6 million from the construction of
Fort Campbell’s middle school means
that 552 students in sixth, seventh and
eighth grades will continue to cram
themselves in, 30 to a classroom in some
cases, at the base’s aging Mahaffey Mid-
dle School. Teachers at Mahaffey will
continue to use mobile carts to store
their books, lesson plans and homework
assignments because there is not
enough classroom space. Students
stuffed into makeshift classrooms-
within-classrooms will continue to
strain to figure out which lesson to listen
to and which one to filter out.
And since the cafeteria at Mahaffey is
not big enough to seat everyone at
lunchtime, some students will continue
to eat in the school library.
“Most of our students don’t know
what it’s like to live in a world without
war, where you don’t have to worry
about Mom or Pop being killed,” said
Jane Loggins, a Fort Campbell teacher
who is the director of the Federal Educa-
tion Association’s Stateside Region, the
teachers’ union for the Defense Depart-
ment’s education system in the United
States and Guam. “The one big benefit
of this school is that we try to support all
those emotional needs.”
In normal times, the Fort Campbell
middle school project would have a pow-
erful political ally in Senator Mitch Mc-
Connell, Republican of Kentucky and
the majority leader.
In a January op-ed in The Louisville
Courier-Journal headlined “Here’s How
Kentucky Families Benefit From Mc-
Connell’s Clout in D.C.,” Mr. McConnell
boasted that he had “secured much-
needed assistance for Fort Campbell,Fort Knox and the Blue Grass Army De-
pot, helping the men and women serv-
ing there keep America safe.”
But that was before Mr. Trump de-
clared in February that there was a na-
tional emergency at the border with
Mexico, allowing him to divert money
from military projects without first get-
ting approval from Congress.
The next month, Mr. McConnell
backed the president in a Senate vote on
the national emergency declaration.
(Kentucky’s other senator, the Republi-
can Rand Paul, voted against Mr.
Trump.)
Mr. McConnell’s office said that the
senator recently spoke with Defense
Secretary Mark T. Esper about the issue
and is “committed to protecting funding
for the Fort Campbell middle school
project.” David Popp, a spokesman for
Mr. McConnell, said that “we would not
be in this situation if Democrats were se-
rious about protecting our homeland
and worked with us to provide the fund-
ing needed to secure our borders during
our appropriations process.”
Asked on the CBS program “Face the
Nation” in February about the prospect
that the Fort Campbell middle school
could be sacrificed for the border wall,Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of
South Carolina, said the border came be-
fore education. “It’s better for the mid-
dle school kids in Kentucky to have a se-
cure border,” Mr. Graham said. “We’ll
get them the school they need, but right
now we’ve got a national emergency on
our hands.”
Two active-duty military service
members in Fort Campbell said on
Thursday that they believed Mr. McCon-
nell would step in to save the middle
school.
One of the service members, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity be-
cause she did not want to be identified
discussing the issue, said that familieshad been waiting for the new school for
three years.
Across the globe, projects like the
Fort Campbell middle school have been
shelved, including an elementary school
in Wiesbaden, Germany, and a cyberop-
erations center in Virginia.
Defense Department officials insist
that military construction projects are
not being canceled and said that their
hope was to get Congress to replace the
funding for the middle school and the
other projects.
But, privately, several department of-
ficials acknowledged that their position
was tenuous. After circumventing the
will of a Congress that refused to fundthe wall, the department faces an uphill
task trying to convince lawmakers that
they should put money back into
projects whose money has been di-
verted by the Pentagon to the wall.
“President Trump has stooped to new
lows in trying to illegally fund more bor-
der wall,” Representative Jim Cooper,
Democrat of Tennessee, said in a state-
ment. “Our troops and their families de-
serve better.”
Mr. Trump has defended the diversion
of funds. Mr. Esper “feels it’s a national
security problem,” the president said on
Wednesday. “I do, too.”
The Defense Department education
system was born as a response to segre-gated schools in the South. After the mil-
itary integrated in 1948, officials devel-
oped a school system so that the chil-
dren of service members in the South
could go to integrated schools. Teachers
are usually civilians or retired veterans.
All together, the department runs 163
schools in seven states and 11 countries,
educating more than 70,000 students.
At Fort Campbell, Mahaffey Middle
School, around 40 years old, has for
more than a decade been in want of deep
renovations. As far back as 2007, the
Senate Armed Services Committee was
hearing testimony from local teachers
that the school needed help. “Garbage
cans catch water from a leaking room
while a broken heating and air-condi-
tioning system produces sauna-like con-
ditions in some classrooms, while other
classes have no heat,” Misti K. Stevens,
then a member of the Military Child Ed-
ucation Coalition, said in written testi-
mony.
The problems persist today, Fort
Campbell service members said. The
air-conditioning system at the school is
pieced together, they said, and class-
rooms often run too hot or too cold.
Two years ago the base’s other middle
school, Wassom Middle School, shut
down, and those students were all sent
to Mahaffey, nearly doubling the size of
the student body. Teachers and parents
were told that this would be a stopgap
measure while a new, unified Fort
Campbell Middle School would be
housed in the old Fort Campbell High
School, which would be renovated. The
base’s high school students moved to
the new Fort Campbell High School last
year.
Now, the stay at Mahaffey is extended
indefinitely.
“This is like a gut punch to this fac-
ulty,” said Venita Garnett, the president
of the Fort Campbell Education Associa-
tion, the local teachers’ union. “And who
is carrying the burden of so many years
of war? It’s these schoolchildren.”School on military base is among sacrifices to Trump’s wall
WASHINGTON
BY HELENE COOPER
Families at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, where $62.6 million earmarked for a new school was shifted to President Trump’s border wall.LUKE SHARRETT/GETTY IMAGES“Our troops and their families
deserve better.”