5/20/2019

CABINET/IMMIGRATION/TRUMP PEOPLE: “Access to a government jet 24 hours a day. An office in the West Wing, plus guaranteed weekends off for family time. And an assurance of being made secretary of homeland security by November. Those were among a list of 10 conditions that Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, has given to the White House if he is to become the administration’s ‘immigration czar,’ a job President Trump has been looking to create to coordinate immigration policy across government agencies. The list was described by three people familiar with it. Mr. Kobach, who once served as an adviser to the hard-line immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio and helped write an Arizona law requiring local officials to verify the citizenship of anyone they had ‘reasonable suspicion’ to believe was an unauthorized immigrant, said he would need to be the main television spokesman for the Trump administration on immigration policy. And he said he wanted a guarantee that cabinet secretaries whose portfolios relate to immigration would defer to him, with the president mediating disputes if need be.”

Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, “A Would-Be Trump Aide’s Demands: A Jet on Call, a Future Cabinet Post and More,” The New York Times online, May 20, 2019