Isaac Chotiner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, interviewed Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, about President Trump’s impact on American immigration policy, from travel bans to changing how asylum claims are made at the US-Mexico border. Reichlin-Melnick says that the Trump administration has had success in finding “the hidden weapons in existing immigration law” and using “them to the full extent, which no one had ever imagined would ever be done.”

In the interview, Reichlin-Melnick covers a variety of topics, including the international agreements that the Trump administration has made with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which have re-shaped who is arriving at the US-Mexico border; the travel bans, which are essentially nationality-based immigration restrictions; the child separations that are still ongoing; and, in particular, the “humanitarian catastrophe” happening at the U.S.-Mexico border because of the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP).

As Reichlin-Melnick explains, the MPP program is supposedly to increase access to court hearings but “what it is doing is forcing sixty-two thousand-plus asylum seekers to wait in appallingly dangerous conditions with no hope that they’ll ever have the opportunity to get a lawyer and virtually impossible chances of ever winning asylum, regardless of the strength of their claims.” Because of MPP, migrants have been subject to kidnapping and serious crimes like rape and torture. Reichlin-Melnick notes: “I often like to say the Trump Administration realized that Americans would rise up in anger when it saw our own government officials doing horrific things to people at the border, so what they did is they exported that—they outsourced the violence, and the crime, and the danger to the cartels in Mexico and let the cartels do the deterrence work that our agents were no longer able to do.”