Border officials weighed deploying migrant ‘heat ray’ ahead of midterms

click to enlarge Border officials weighed deploying migrant ‘heat ray’ ahead of midterms
Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times
A group of of newly arrived returnees at the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico, July 31, 2020. Even as the Republican convention tries to soften President Donald Trump’s image, he has made it clear that the extreme immigration policies of his first four years will be central to his re-election pitch.
By Michael D. Shear
The New York Times Company


WASHINGTON — Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Donald Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his Homeland Security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants.

That afternoon, at a meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat-ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.

Developed by the military as a crowd dispersal tool two decades ago, the Active Denial System had been largely abandoned amid doubts over its effectiveness and morality. Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president. Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security told an aide after the meeting that she would not authorize the use of such a device, and it should never be brought up again in her presence, the officials said.

Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said Wednesday that “it was never considered.”

But the discussion in the fall of 2018 underscored how Trump’s obsession with shutting down immigration has driven policy considerations, including his suggestions of installing flesh-piercing spikes on the border wall, building a moat filled with snakes and alligators and shooting migrants in the legs.

The Republican convention on Tuesday night featured a small citizenship naturalization ceremony at the White House clearly designed to try to soften the president’s image as a heartless foe of immigrants.

But for his core supporters, Trump’s immigration agenda is again at the heart of his campaign, and the unrest roiling cities from Portland, Oregon, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, could give it more punch. The pitch: He has delivered on perhaps the central promise of his 2016 run, to effectively cut off America from foreigners who he said pose security and economic threats. Through hundreds of regulations, policy directives and structural changes, the president has profoundly reshaped the government’s vast immigration bureaucracy.
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