Trump Demoted; Stephen Miller In Charge
While Donald Trump may be the one sitting behind the Resolute Desk, Stephen Miller is the one running the show.
No surprise here: Stephen Miller is clearly running the White House. While obvious for a while now, in just the past few days, Miller outdid himself when he completely pulled the rug out from under his boss, Donald Trump.
Last week’s short-lived claim from Trump himself that his administration was pausing raids that have been aggressively targeting restaurants, hotels, and farms (“Homeland Security agents chase worker through crop field in Oxnard,” read one shocking headline) was an open confession that its ugly arrests targeting essential workers are hurting these businesses – and that it has overreached in its brutal obsession to purge the nation of Dreamers, loving parents, and long-settled contributors.
“The decision suggested that the scale of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose,” The New York Times reported June 13. “Mr. Trump posted after Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, informed him of farmers who were concerned about the ICE enforcement affecting their businesses, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump has for decades owned luxury hotels, an industry with a strong immigrant labor force.”
First, the obvious: Trump has already backtracked on the backtrack – and we’re pretty sure it’s because Miller, the mass deportation architect-in-chief, got his way yet again (more on this later).
Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of why Trump initially backed down: farmers got majorly pissed at Miller rounding up their workforce and called the Agriculture Secretary to vent. Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, commented that the administration’s shifting stance was a “slap back to Stephen Miller’s ‘arrest everyone’ madness” and “an admission that Trump is under pressure from multiple industries that rely on migrant workers.”
“This is huge and important,” she continued. “Keep amplifying the harm done by the Trump/Miller zealous, cruel overreach. Don’t bury this.”
Facts. However, others also justifiably had their doubts. “We have heard reports of guidance directing DHS to ‘pause’ raids on agricultural worksites and we are skeptical,” United Farm Workers (UFW) responded, quite literally calling “bullshit” on the policy. “As long as Border Patrol and ICE are allowed to sweep through farm worker communities making chaotic arrests the way they did TODAY, they are still hunting down farm workers.”
“We experienced such a sweep in Moorpark, CA today — after this ‘guidance’ reportedly went out,” UFW noted. And, during an interview with SiriusXM’s Joe Sudbay on Monday, UFW President Teresa Romero expressed her doubts, saying that farmworkers are still vulnerable when going to the store or taking their kids to school.
“And if they’re detained, they are detaining farmworkers,” she said. “Not at work, but they're still farmworkers who are being detained and deported.”
We also knew the future of such “pause” was in question because Miller runs the immigration show. And, sure enough, he won again, after the walkback walkback Monday night. “Trump officials reverse guidance exempting farms, hotels from immigration raids,” The Washington Post reported, saying that ICE agents were instructed to “continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants, according to two people familiar with the call.”
It’s been increasingly obvious that Miller is running the show – and not just on mass detention and abductions. While Trump has been out at UFC games or golfing on the taxpayer dime or in a confused state of mind, it’s Miller who appears to be calling the shots, berating top agency officials for not separating enough families, speaking over Cabinet heads, even going in front of cameras to dictate on other issues beyond his anti-immigrant obsessions, like healthcare.
Miller has his extremist thumb in all of the pies and truly believes that he knows better than everyone else and should be challenged by no one – which is why, judging by reported press accounts, Miller didn’t take the initial scuttling of his ”detain and deport Dreamers” agenda very well.
“Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. Many of Mr. Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history. But the decision had been made,” The Times previously reported. “Some conservative influencers scrambled to respond, at times pleading with the president to walk back his plans,” reported The Washington Post on June 13. “Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and an architect of his immigration policy, likewise voiced concerns Thursday about Trump’s comments …”
The outlets very likely underplayed Miller’s reaction, who by admission from folks on his own side, will stomp his little designer shoes and screech like a white nationalist banshee until he gets his way.
“As a staffer on the Hill, he threatened to turn activists on fellow Republican aides when their bosses did not line up behind his positions, one senior GOP aide on Capitol Hill recalled,” NBC News reported last month. Now White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Miller has made Senate-confirmed officials like Marco Rubio his lap dogs and put his loafers on the necks of ICE leaders and agents, with one report stating that his “abrasive” tone at a recent meeting left some attendees “feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren't reached, two of the sources said.”
During the May 21 meeting, Miller – and not DHS’ actual confirmed secretary, Kristi Noem – ripped into ICE officials and ordered agents to massively inflate their daily arrests by a massive 450%. Miller wanted “everybody arrested,” one official said. “‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?'’” Miller reportedly stated.
There is a direct thread from that now-infamous demand to the public’s fury over mass abductions, after communities took to the streets in L.A to protest the senseless and militarized arrests of day laborers outside of a Home Depot. Of course, it’s not just the Home Depot arrests that are repelling everyday Americans. Miller has been vastly overplaying his hand, observers say.
“Many of the specific Stephen Miller driven actions are WILDLY unpopular. Abducting US citizens to foreign prisons, revoking green cards, family separation, and immigration raids at schools were detested with particular intensity,” Way To Win said. Similarly, polling guru G. Elliot Morris asserts that, “Politically, the increasing focus on deportations may be a warning sign for Trump, whose approval ratings on the issue are low and have recently fallen in ours and other surveys.”
Yet just hours after announcing the supposed pause – and perhaps massively peeved over the historic “No King” protests that overshadowed his taxpayer-funded birthday party – Trump posted a demand to expand detentions and deportations in Democratic-run cities. News flash: many of the workers he claimed could get a possible reprieve from mass deportation – such as restaurant and hospitality workers – call major cities their home. And as the Cato Institute’s David Bier also noted, other kinds of arrests angering the public will likely only get worse under “desperate ICE agents prowling the streets for victims.”
And, following this week’s news, it’s clear who is in charge of the Oval Office. “Make no mistake: President Trump may be the one sitting behind the Resolute Desk, but Stephen Miller is the one running the show when it comes to immigration in the Trump White House,” responded America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas.
And as Marcy Wheeler writes at Emptywheel: “Increasingly, it appears that Miller issues the decisions (or countermands the others), all while handing Trump pieces of paper and a Sharpie to make him feel — and, if he doesn’t fumble his papers or his lines — powerful, and give Miller’s assumption of presidential powers the patina of legitimacy. Trump, the reality TV star, is just there for the press conferences.”