When protests and widespread confusion broke out at airports across the U.S. after President Donald Trump issued his first travel ban executive order last January, White House officials scoffed at the scenes of turmoil and insisted the president’s plan was smoothly moving into place.
“It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level,” a senior administration official told reporters two days after Trump signed the directive. Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller boasted to CBS that the roll-out was “efficient, orderly [and] enormously successful.”
However, Department of Homeland Security records obtained by POLITICO reflect confusion on the front lines about how to implement the order and show that DHS officials deemed the situation a “crisis” requiring a high-level response.