AST Digital Magazine July 2017 Digital-July | Page 8

Volume 14
After the Beverly Hills meeting, Mr. Shaw re-
ceived a gift basket containing Mr. Trump’s “Art
of the Deal,” chocolates, and Trump-branded ties
and cuff links, according to an account in The
Wall Street Journal.
At one point, Mr. Shaw flew on Mr. Trump’s pri-
vate plane. At another, while staying at the Trump
International Hotel in Las Vegas, he cut a cam-
paign commercial.
July 2017 Edition
ing him he was no longer director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
To find some of the families, Mr. Trump’s team
had help from the Remembrance Project, a non-
profit founded in 2009 to draw attention to the
victims of crimes committed by unauthorized im-
migrants.
It caught the Trump wave early, bringing several
families to the Beverly Hills meeting and other
campaign events and hosting a fund-raiser for
Mr. Trump in Houston last fall.
As the campaign offered a national audience
to more of the parents, however, many of the
Remembrance Project’s members abandoned
the group, chafing at what several said were its
founder’s attempts to dictate what they said and
even what they wore.
Mr. Trump, they said, had allowed them their
own voice.
White House Adviser Stephen Miller
The other families received regular care from the
campaign, too. A Trump adviser, Stephen Miller,
would call or text at least once a month, inviting
them to speak at rallies or just checking in.
Some spoke regularly to Corey Lewandowski,
Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, or to
Hope Hicks, the campaign’s spokeswoman.
Mr. Miller, an advocate of restricting immigration
and now a senior White House adviser, helped
draft Mr. Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order direct-
ing the government to intensify immigration en-
forcement.
A few of the parents also regularly texted with
Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime bodyguard
and current Oval Office aide.
It was Mr. Schiller whom the president sent to
hand-deliver a letter to James B. Comey inform-
Before going onstage at some events, Mr. Trump
would shoo aides away for a private moment
with the families.
“To me, I find it much more personal when the
president comes up to you and says, ‘Steve, how
are you doing?’” Mr. Ronnebeck said.
“He knows my name. He doesn’t just, you know,
speak the whole time. He listens.”
For the Trump campaign, the private cultivation
paid off. In public, the families became some of
the campaign’s most compelling witnesses.
They could be picked out by what they carried,
the talismans of absence: the T-shirts printed
with photographs of the smiling dead. The com-
memorative buttons. The ashes held close in a
locket.
At one rally in Phoenix in August, a hush muted
the crowd when Mr. Ronnebeck and other fam-
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