Stephen Miller Puts Boot on Neck of ICE Agents: Deport More Parents, Long-Settled Contributors, and Students – Or Else
The shadow president and mass deportation architect-in-chief reportedly ripped into top ICE officials and ordered agents to inflate their daily arrests to 3,000 people a day – a 450% increase.
Shadow President and mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller reportedly berated immigration officials for not being brutal enough in their mass deportation agenda. Miller demanded they quadruple the number of arrests they’re currently carrying out, Axios reports. Miller’s abrasive tone reportedly left some meeting attendees “feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren't reached, two of the sources said.”
Accompanied by his assistant and public relations mouthpiece Kristi Noem, Axios reports that during the May 21 meeting, Miller ripped into top ICE officials and ordered agents to massively inflate their daily arrests to 3,000 people a day. For some context, ICE has averaged around 665 arrests a day under Trump, meaning Miller is now demanding a 450% increase, American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said.
It’s a staggering demand even when factoring in the many law enforcement resources that the Trump administration has already diverted from combating actual public safety threats, like fentanyl pushers, gun runners, and human traffickers.
“Keep in mind that the 665 arrests a day that ICE averaged in the first 100 days came AFTER they already deputized thousands of other federal LEOs to carry out immigration arrests, including FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, USPIS, and more,” Reichlin-Melnick continued. “There's no possible way this happens. But the chaos will get worse.” The mass deportation agenda from Trump’s first 100 days and counting has already been chaotic, costly, and cruel enough.
‘ONE OF OUR KIDS WAS TAKEN’
Dylan, a 20-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker and Bronx high school student who arrived in the U.S. legally, was continuing to follow the rules by attending his immigration court date but was instead detained by Miller’s agents, Chalkbeat reports. “ELLIS Prep Principal Norma Vega gathered staff members last Friday to tell them about Dylan. ‘One of our kids was taken,’ she said.”
Dylan and his mom, Raiza, “had little hesitation about showing up in person as instructed in lower Manhattan, assuming it would be a routine check-in, according to Raiza, who asked to use only their first names for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities,” the report continued. “Instead, Raiza said, Dylan, who attended the court hearing without a lawyer, unwittingly relinquished his legal protections and was promptly arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents who followed him out of the courtroom and into the courthouse lobby.”
The months since Dylan’s April 2024 arrival in the U.S. under the Biden administration’s now-defunct CBP One app had seen a young man trying to establish a new, hopeful life for himself and his family, including enrolling in a school catering to “older newcomers” and working as a part-time delivery driver to help get his mom and younger siblings into more stable housing, Chalkbeat said. Instead, Dylan was swept up as part of an unprecedented, “nationwide blitz” targeting other immigrants going to their court dates.
“They switched their tactics,” one attorney said about ICE agents stalking the San Francisco immigration court. “This is new. We’ve only seen it when it was for public safety reasons. I’ve never seen this kind of systematic pattern ever, and I’ve done this for 15 years.”
Dylan’s advocates told Chalkbeat that in the five days since his arrest, he’s been shipped to facilities in four different states, making it hard for him to speak with his attorneys and get medical help for chronic stomach issues. His mom worries for him if he’s deported back to Venezuela, where conditions are unsafe and they have no other close family. Above all she can’t believe what ICE is doing to her child. “It seems like a dirty game on their part,” she said. “When someone appears in front of a judge, it’s because they don’t have any criminal record, they want to do the right thing … The only thing he wants is to study.” But for Miller, Dylan is just a number.
‘THE SAME AGENCY THAT’S NOW PERSECUTING AND DEPORTING THIS COMMUNITY … WAS CALLING THEM ESSENTIAL WORKERS’
In what’s become the largest workplace immigration raid targeting Vermont in recent years, the Trump administration last month stormed a dairy farm, detaining eight essential workers who toil daily to sustain our food supply. Local advocacy organization Migrant Justice said that ICE agents trespassed through private property and even chased some of these essential workers through barns.
These essential workers were “living and working in Franklin County,” Migrant Justice said immediately following the arrests. “Ranging from 22 to 41 years old, they came to Vermont to work on a dairy farm searching for a better life for themselves and their families. For this, they are now being held behind bars.” While one of the detained essential workers, Diblaim Maximo Sargento-Morales, was freed and returned home to applause and chants, four of the workers detained alongside Sargento-Morales were deported without due process, Migrant Justice said.
“Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, Luis Enrique Gomez-Aguilar, Urillas Sargento, and Dani Alvarez-Perez have all been removed to Mexico without a hearing or the ability to request asylum.”
The raid left Vermont’s “tight-knit” dairy community shell-shocked, Burlington Free Press reported. Dairy farmers know that without the skills and labor of immigrant workers, there is no dairy industry.
"I'm very worried about it," fifth-generation dairy farmer Dustin Machia told Burlington Free Press, noting the blow to the industry and costs to working families. “Farming would be very bleak and the cost would skyrocket in the grocery store, because you can't pay an American to do (this) job any more. Americans just don't want to do this job. Without the foreign labor, it's just not sustainable." As we noted last year, mass deportation is a kitchen table issue affecting working families. “I don’t think there would be milk,” Idaho Dairymen’s Association President Pete Wiersma told The New York Times when asked last year about the mass deportation of essential workers. “I just don’t think we could get it done.”
These essential workers are deserving of full workplace rights and protections, not being hunted down through a barn like wild animals. “Just a few years ago, at the outset of the COVID pandemic, the same agency that’s now persecuting and deporting this community, the Department of Homeland Security, was calling them essential workers,” Migrant Justice member Will Lambek told Prism. But for Miller, they’re just numbers to be erased.
‘WE FINALLY GOT YOU’
When we think of immigrant mothers who work hard to give their children a more hopeful future, we think about Jeanette Vizguerra, who is a mom of three U.S. citizens and a U.S. permanent resident and has spent years on the frontlines advocating for the right of all immigrant moms to be able to raise their families, including by making national headlines after seeking sanctuary in a church during the first Trump administration. In 2017, TIME named Vizguerra to its most influential people list, where actor and activist America Ferrera called her an example of the “American Dream.”
But in March, the Trump administration turned that dream into a nightmare. ICE agents stalked Vizguerra at the Target location where she works as a cashier, and took the mom into custody while she was on a break, American Friends Service Committee’s Jordan Garcia told The New York Times. “Recounting details of the arrest that Ms. Vizguerra had relayed to her family, Mr. Garcia said one of the agents told her, ‘We finally got you,’” the report said. This arrest wasn’t about public safety, it was a vendetta.
Vizguerra remains in detention and separated from her children, in just one example of the mass family separation playing out under Miller’s agenda. As we’ve previously said, mass deportation is mass family separation because millions of immigrants live in mixed-status families. One estimate found that 4.4 million US citizen children could be affected by mass deportation. Devastating numbers – and that’s all these children are to Miller. Numbers.
Speaking from ICE detention to journalist Maria Hinojosa, Vizguerra said she knows that she and others have been targeted by Miller and the administration due to their voices. “And not just me; there are others, too, because of their activism who are imprisoned right now,” she said.
“My message to everyone who might watch this interview is that no leader who is making change will have a life free of suffering,” she continued. “All leaders suffer. All leaders face attempts to be silenced. All leaders face efforts to make us disappear. But thanks to everything we do, we achieve enormous changes out there. And right now the message to the community is: The people save the people. If you remain silent, we will not have change.”
Remember that for Miller, a designated extremist who has been harassing people of color since his youth, it’s all just a numbers game. And because he sees immigrants only as numbers, he wants us to see them only as numbers and not as real people. He wants us to forget that he’s detaining and kicking out long-settled contributors and beloved community members (certainly something he can’t relate to), hardworking moms and dads critical to our economy, Dreamers and college students who are key to our future potential, and even U.S. citizen children.
Because the courts keep ruling against some of the administration’s agenda, Miller’s only going to triple down on picking on immigrants. And when ICE agents help him with that, they won’t be keeping America safe, they’ll just be keeping their own jobs safe.
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Great reporting. Thank you.