Don’t Be Fooled: Miller Is Still In Charge And The Mass Deportation Agenda Hasn’t Changed
Congressional Hispanic Caucus leaders: “As long as Stephen Miller is in control, there is no ‘kinder, gentler’ DHS.”
When it comes to government dysfunction and flushing taxpayer dollars down the toilet, no one does it better (or worse?) than the Trump administration. Case in point: rather than just paying the airport TSA workers who help ensure that we can fly safely, the president killed a deal to get money into their pockets. Instead, he deployed ICE into airports to supposedly help with the entirely-preventable long lines that have stretched out for as long as five hours at some airports.
IT’S NOT WORKING
Unsurprisingly, the federal government’s stunt – which some have speculated could have been inspired by someone who called into C-SPAN – has been about as successful as Trump Steaks (Remember that flop? If you don’t – good on you).
“It appears that Trump’s master plan is having little positive effect,” The Daily Beast reported. “At Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on Tuesday morning, a four-hour wait debilitated travelers, with lines stretching from the security checkpoint all the way back to the airport subway, according to ABC News.” The Washington Post noted that as one security line at Bush airport snaked through several levels, “Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’—one of Trump’s campaign rally songs—played over the public address system.”
While travelers have continued to endure these grueling waits and missed flights, ICE agents were spotted “chit-chatting in groups, sitting at cafes with coffee in hand, and drifting through terminals with lunch bags,” The Daily Beast noted. Of course, all while getting paid. Must be nice.
ICE OUT: TSA AGENTS SAY ‘WE DON’T NEED THEM’
Meanwhile, it was the same unpaid TSA agents who’ve had to visit food banks to put food on the table and borrow money in order to keep up with their bills that continued to do the actual work of trying to get travelers to their destinations. “I don’t think we need them here,” said one frustrated TSA worker in Arizona. “We need to be paid, why would you bring another agency to be TSA when you already have TSA?” The worker “added that he and his colleagues are specifically trained, whereas the ICE agents are not,” The Daily Beast noted.
The administration and its Congressional allies have been desperate to convince Americans outraged over family separation, due process violations, and state violence in our streets that they’ve turned the page on this cruelty and bloodshed, but the reason why TSA workers remain without paychecks and ICE agents are enjoying Double Chocolaty Chip Crème Frappuccinos on our dime is precisely because the administration is refusing to back off its mass deportation agenda and agree to any common-sense oversight.
A NEW YES MAN, SAME OLD BOSS – STEPHEN MILLER
Just look at the messaging campaign around the recent installation of Markwayne Mullin as DHS Secretary, which was accompanied by coordinated insistence that his nomination signaled “a course-correction” after experiencing – now get this – “a little hiccup” among Latinos who saw the administration’s shenanigans as a bit “over-zealous,” as Speaker Mike Johnson claimed.
A little hiccup. You gotta wonder what Arnoldo Bazan, an American citizen teen who was physically assaulted and insulted with racist slurs by federal agents last October, thinks of that:
Sorry to have to break the news to Speaker Johnson, but with the actual mass deportation architect still at the helm – that is, Stephen Miller – we’re in a no better place now than when disgraced former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was jetting around in a sky mansion and sending dads and make-up artists off to foreign gulags to be physically and emotionally abused.
Can you imagine a sitting U.S. senator like Mullin vacating his seat, expecting to report to Trump – only to find he reports to Miller? Miller was in charge then, and he’s still in charge now. Congressional Hispanic Caucus leaders put it best: “As long as Stephen Miller is in control, there is no ‘kinder, gentler’ DHS.”
“We know President Trump fired Secretary Noem not because of her corruption, incompetence or open disdain for civil liberties, but because she was dragging down his poll numbers. We have no reason to think Markwayne Mullin will be any different,” they said. “He has shown no signs of pushing back on Stephen Miller, has not called out the blatant corruption in the Trump administration, could not correctly identify a core component of ICE, and time and time again has reiterated his belief in violence as a means to resolve civil disagreements.”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ), who last year voted for Noem, was a “nay” for Mullin for similar reasons. “It’s really Stephen Miller that’s calling the shots there,” he said. “I don’t trust anybody that’s in that role if Stephen Miller’s just going to continue to dictate what happens.” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said “nothing appears to have changed at the department. And I have no confidence that Senator Mullin will demonstrate the independence necessary from Trump and Stephen Miller to lead the department in a necessary, different direction.”
ITS NOT ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY, ITS ABOUT POLITICS
Nor has a recent offer from the administration proven that it’s serious about a “course-correction.” A recent DHS funding proposal from the White House included no requirement for judicial warrants before ICE agents enter homes or make arrests. Meanwhile, Trump killed a bipartisan deal that would have funded TSA workers and begun to end the chaos raging in America’s airports.
Instead, he tied DHS funding to the so-called “SAVE America Act,” an anti-voter bill that pretends to tackle the non-existent issue of widespread voter fraud and instead seeks to save Trump’s bacon in the upcoming midterm elections. Miller’s agenda is dooming his party’s chances in November, and Trump knows it. It’s one reason why Steve Bannon, a former top Trump advisor, is urging him to deploy ICE to polling stations as well. It’s not about voter integrity, it’s about intimidation and voter suppression.
Trump doesn’t want accountability for ICE, and he’s said that himself: “Any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it,” he proclaimed Tuesday. Which means continued abuses against immigrant neighbors and American citizens – including kids. ProPublica revealed in a shocking report that ICE has detained the parents of thousands of citizen children, forcing many to scramble to find guardians or have to watch their kids be needlessly thrown into the foster care system:
ICE REMAINS OUT OF CONTROL, TERRORIZING AMERICA
“In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention,” the report said. “Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all. Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses.”
In one instance, a mother in Lakeland, Florida, was forced to leave her four-month-old baby girl and eight-year-old daughter with her pastor, who agreed to care for the children rather than see them turned over to strangers.
“So in the frantic hours before officers took her parents away to immigration detention, her mom turned to their pastor and his wife,” ProPublica reported. “As squad cars waited outside the family’s Lakeland, Florida, trailer home, she gave them a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old.” When the baby would not nurse, her mom, Doris Flores, tried to instruct the couple on how to bottle feed the baby. “The baby’s half-sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of,” the report continued. “Eight-year-old Briana was quiet and humble. She preferred speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color was blue.”
The report notes that the pastor, the Rev. Israel Vázquez, had met the baby before during a ceremony at his church. Little did he know then that he would soon be guardian to this child and her sister due to senseless mass deportation policies. “If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn’t take the girls in, they would have to go into foster care. ‘What else could we do?’ he said.”