Miller's Plan For DACA

HOW STEPHEN MILLER MANIPULATES DONALD TRUMP TO FURTHER HIS IMMIGRATION OBSESSION

Donald Trump’s senior adviser has been the true driving force behind this Administration’s racist agenda. How far will he go?

One afternoon in November, a half-dozen government officials sat at a conference table in the White House, waiting for the arrival of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Donald Trump. Miller had summoned officials from the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice to discuss a new Administration policy initiative: a series of agreements with the governments of Central America that would force asylum seekers to apply for protection in that region instead of in the United States. Miller, who had helped make the deals, wanted to know when their provisions could go into effect. Typically, everyone rises when top White House officials enter a room. But when Miller walked in, wearing a dark suit and an expression of wry resolve, everyone remained seated, their eyes cast down. “You go into meetings with Miller and try to get out with as little damage as possible,” a former Administration official told me. Miller has a habit of berating officials, especially lower-ranking ones, for an agency’s perceived failures. Chad Wolf, now the acting head of D.H.S., used to advise colleagues to placate Miller by picking one item from his long list of demands, and vowing to execute it. “It’s a war of attrition,” Wolf told them. “Maybe he forgets the rest for a while, and you buy yourself some time.”

One participant in the November meeting pointed out that El Salvador didn’t have a functioning asylum system. “They don’t need a system,” Miller interrupted. He began speaking over people, asking questions, then cutting off the answers.

As the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”

Miller, who is thirty-four, with thinning hair and a sharp, narrow face, is an anomaly in Washington: an adviser with total authority over a single issue that has come to define an entire Administration. “We have never had a President who ran, and won, on immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “And he’s kept his promise on immigration.” Miller, who was a speechwriter during the campaign, is now Trump’s longest-serving senior aide. He is also an Internet meme, a public scourge, and a catch-all symbol of the racism and malice of the current government. In a cast of exceptionally polarizing officials, he has embraced the role of archvillain. Miller can be found shouting over interviewers on the weekend news shows or berating reporters in the White House briefing room; he has also vowed to quell a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump. When he’s not accusing journalists of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” or denying that the Statue of Liberty symbolizes America’s identity as a nation of immigrants, he is shaping policy and provoking the President’s most combative impulses.

“The massive changes Miller engineered in border and immigration policy required that the policymaking process at D.H.S. be ignored,” Alan Bersin, a former senior department official, told me. “Who do you think has filled the vacuum?” Miller has cultivated lower-level officials in the department who answer directly to him, providing information, policy updates, and data, often behind the backs of their bosses. “At the beginning of 2017, none of us could have foreseen that he would wield this kind of power,” a former Trump Administration official told me. Of thirty current and former officials I interviewed, not one could recall a White House adviser as relentless as Miller, or as successful in imposing his will across agencies. These officials resented him as an upstart and mocked his affectations—his “arrogant monotonal voice” and tin-eared bombast—but few were comfortable going on the record, even after leaving the government. Miller is famously vindictive, and, as Trump runs for a second term, he is sure to grow only more powerful. “Miller doesn’t have to get Trump to believe everything he does,” one of the officials told me. “He just has to get Trump to say it all.”

For the first seven months of his Presidency, Trump vacillated about cancelling Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a highly popular program that Obama had instituted through executive action. daca protected from deportation some seven hundred thousand people who had come to the U.S. as children. Trump had campaigned against it, then reversed himself. Miller was viscerally hostile to daca. In an e-mail to a Breitbart editor, he said that expanding the “foreign-born share” of the U.S. workforce was an instance of “immigration” being used “to replace existing demographics.” In September, 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White House advisers, Trump agreed to cancel daca, setting a six-month deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution. The fight that ensued led to a brief government shutdown. Republicans refused to grant any form of “amnesty” unless they could get something significant in return, but, given Trump’s inconsistency on daca, the Party leadership couldn’t gauge what he wanted from the negotiations.

Mostly, Trump cared about building a wall along the southern border. For Miller, the main goal of negotiations was to reduce the number of legal immigrants, which was not something that Congress had previously been willing to contemplate. But, with daca recipients as a bargaining chip, the circumstances were different. “Miller knew the window was closing, that his only chance to force his agenda was if daca kids were on the line,” a Republican aide who worked closely with Miller told me.

On January 11, 2018, Trump summoned Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina, to the White House so that they could explain the terms of a bipartisan deal they’d reached. It would offer a path to citizenship for daca recipients in exchange for increased border security and enforcement measures. The President told the senators that he was ready to back their plan. But, two hours later, when they entered the Oval Office, they found that they were not alone. Miller had invited a group of far-right Republicans—including Tom Cotton and David Perdue, the sponsors of a bill to cut legal immigration in half—to join them. The “fix is in,” Durbin told an aide. When Graham brought up Haitian immigrants, while explaining an aspect of the agreement, Trump asked, “Why would we want all these people from shithole countries?” He now refused to endorse the deal he had supported that morning.

In the weeks that followed, whenever Trump responded positively to an overture by Democrats, Miller interceded. “Whoever has access to the President last—that’s what sticks,” a White House official told me. “Miller always made sure he was that person.” Graham said, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere.”


In late fall, as Trump’s impeachment hearings began, Miller tried to limit his own public exposure. “He was getting a little too much steady attention, so he knew he had to hang back,” a top Administration official told me. Miller has survived the upheavals in Trump’s inner circle by representing himself as a member of the supporting cast. This strategy was reinforced by the demise of Steve Bannon, who, a few months before being fired, in August, 2017, appeared on the cover of Time, next to the headline “The Great Manipulator.” Sessions was forced out in November, 2018, after having recused himself from the Russia probe. Trump continued to mock him, often in front of Miller. According to someone who witnessed the exchanges, Miller never spoke up to defend his mentor. He was “part of the family now,” a White House official told me.

By the end of November, Miller was back in the news, though not by choice. The Southern Poverty Law Center acquired and published hundreds of e-mails that Miller had exchanged, between 2015 and 2016, with editors at Breitbart. They included links to articles on the white-supremacist Web site vdare, as well as an enthusiastic reference to “The Camp of Saints,” a racist French novel about the ravages of immigration. In one e-mail, Miller approvingly forwarded an article arguing that the U.S. should deport immigrants on trains “to scare out the people who want to undo our country.” In Congress, there were calls for his resignation, but only from Democrats.

The e-mail scandal barely registered at the White House, where Miller faced a greater challenge. At Trump’s behest, Jared Kushner—who was already responsible for negotiating peace in the Middle East, overhauling international trade agreements, and leading the President’s reëlection campaign—has added immigration to his portfolio. “Stephen understands that Kushner is the real power,” a former White House official said. “He would never cross Kushner.”

“When Kushner came in to work on this, he told people that they were too close to the issue, that he had the distance from it that was needed,” a senior Republican aide told me. A number of people Kushner consulted on the Hill recommended that he start by trying smaller deals, such as one on daca. “I’m doing this big or I’m not doing it at all,” he responded. In May, from a dais in the White House Rose Garden, Trump announced the broad contours of Kushner’s “merit-based” immigration plan, in which applicants would be evaluated based not on family ties, as in the current system, but on a combination of factors, including language skills, education, and employment prospects. (Sitting in the front row was Lindsey Graham, who was now one of Trump’s strongest allies.) In 2013, when Miller was first engaged in immigration policy, he and Sessions talked about moving to a merit-based system, and “it was laughed about,” one of the former Republican aides told me. “It wasn’t just a fringe position. It was a politically impossible position.” Now the proposal represents the White House’s “moderate” pitch, though it is still unlikely to get through Congress.

A six-hundred-page bill that details Kushner’s plan has been circulating in Washington. It would not directly lower the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country each year, but, so far, Miller has coöperated with Kushner, writing the parts of it that address asylum and family detention. “Jared is the most powerful White House adviser, but he’s very busy,” a person who has worked closely with both Miller and Kushner told me. “Miller is focussed on one thing. He and Kushner make situational alliances. They both think the President needs the other, and they each believe in the other’s absolute loyalty to Trump. In all my time around them, I have never heard either one of them say a negative word about the other, and that’s not true of anyone else.”

Recently, the number of migrants intercepted at the border has dropped significantly—from a hundred and forty-four thousand, in May, 2019, to thirty-six thousand, last month. Asylum seekers stuck in Mexico have given up on reaching the U.S. America’s legal and moral standing may not survive the Administration’s immigration policies, but Trump has succeeded in realizing one of his most infamous tweets: “Our country is full.”

With the border virtually sealed, Miller is turning his attention inward. D.H.S. has begun sending armed agents from Border Patrol swat teams to New York, Chicago, and other so-called sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement has limited its coöperation with ice. “There’s no one left at D.H.S. to say ‘No’ to Miller anymore,” a senior department official told me. Another official was present at a meeting in which Miller advocated allowing ice officers to pull children out of school.

This summer, months before the election, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Administration can cancel daca. “Everything—everything!—hinges on that decision,” a former senior D.H.S. official told me. If the Supreme Court ends daca, then “Miller will be in ecstasy. He’ll finally have the leverage over the Democratic Congress that he’s been dying to have this entire time. He’ll say, ‘Well, you’re all worried we’re going to deport them. What will you agree to?’ ” The official continued, “It’ll be the summer of a huge campaign, and Miller will be in his glory.”


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...tion-obsession

Not worried bout Miller at all, its the fkin democrats and United We Dream that wont fkin do sht with the legalization for all bullsht.

Nah bro. It’s miller, Bret Kavanaugh, Mitch, and the GOP who you have to worry about. Lord Trump owns the Supreme Court, the senate and Mitch has been filling the lower courts with conservative judges. I get where you are coming from but how can the Dems do anything? They just Control the house, look where impeachment got them.

Lol it’s UWD...? That is actually scary to know we have Republicans / president whose opinion about a group of people who have DACA is immediately affected by a non political group than the very man who is miller who main job is to advise the president on policies. Yikes!!!

You can't be serious. Are you blinded by your own self importance that you can't see that Miller has been undermining us at every turn since the beginning of the Trump administration? It is because of Miller that Trump has renegaded on a few DACA/Wall compromises, it's because of Miller the congressional debate stalled, and it's because of Miller we can't expect anything good after the Supreme Court.

I hope you enjoy your promotion.

This is miller's sole purpose in life.

We all know how the DACA senate case will turn out, we arent dumb. Our future rests with the nov 2020 election.

Both Miller and UWD are equally rooted in making sure no sort of solution happens and for different reasons. Miller because he is genuinely anti-immigrant and UWD because they are afraid of donations slowing down if there is any sort of solution. The fear that the likes of Miller create and promote is vital for the strategy of far left orgs like UWD in order to continue their business. Miller is a money maker for UWD. I have seen UWD promoted ads on Facebook asking for donations to help with “DACA renewals” during the time when USCIS was NOT accepting renewals! (Before the courts had stepped in).

But the difference is that Miller has actual power and clout and we've seen time and time again that Trump listens to Miller.

UWD is all bark and no bite, putting aside their fundraising for a second, how much influence do you really think that they have with the Democratic Party? I would say little, if any at all. The Democratic party understands that protecting Dreamers is popular with their base, if UWD wants to profit from that, then so be it, but let's not pretend that the tail is wagging the dog on this one. Any influence from UWD is further diluted by the fact that there are 250+ members in the US Congress in the Democratic party. Again, UWD is nothing compared to some of the special interest groups in DC, they probably don't have enough money to TALK to 1/10th of the Democratic caucus.

One man is easier to influence than one party, especially if that man is already willing to listen to anti-immigration ideas.

Equating Miller and UWD is absurd. That's like me fearing the monster on my TV more than an actual intruder inside my home.

I certainly hope you’re right on that. I’ve always perceived UWD as being a powerhouse. And that has always been the tragedy of Trump, fact that he has still not gotten rid of Miller. He already took out Bannon and biggest immigration enemy Sessions. I bet you after the election is won he might get rid of Miller too. Let’s hope Kushner can gain ground because he has some good ideas on Dreamers.

We already had quite a few good deals on the table and the demorats backed off since they were influenced by United We Dream since they wanted legalization for all EVEN for criminals among other absolutely ridiculous demands that must be dealt with SEPARATELY. UWD unfortunately is the organization that represents us the most and has sabotaged the deals we could of got to get this fixed once and for all, but no, they wont let us get fixed to keep getting donations.

Is it necessary to make remarks about something so irrelevant like my career? Jealous? Kinda low to be doing that.