Several former and current officials have said that the president is punishing his top immigration goon.
Donald Trump is freezing out top adviser Stephen Miller after he devised one of the most glaring missteps of the president’s second term, according to a bombshell new report.
Miller, ostensibly the second-in-command to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, has been Trump’s point man on immigration for a decade. During Trump’s first term, he cooked up the idea to separate migrant children from their mothers at the U.S. border, and this term, he pushed hard for 3,000 daily ICE arrests, as well as inflaming dangerous rhetoric against protesters.
He called Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old shot dead by border agents in Minnesota in January, a “domestic terrorist,” putting Trump in a tough position. The 79-year-old did not adopt Miller’s description of the protester, the second to die in January, a month that saw the Department of Homeland Security assume a softer approach after severe pushback from critics from both sides of the political divide.
Trump has since spoken about Miller’s propensity to “sometimes go too far,” according to White House advisers who spoke to The Atlantic.
Despite White House Communications Director Steven Cheung’s protestations that “the president loves Stephen,” the shift away from his inflammatory rhetoric and hardline approach has been undeniable.
Internal data shows that ICE made about 30,000 arrests in March, down from roughly 36,000 in January—a decline of about 17 percent, and still far short of Miller’s reported target of 3,000 detentions a day. The slowdown comes despite a major staffing push last fall, championed by Miller, that added around 12,000 ICE officers and agents. ICE detention figures have also dropped sharply, with the number of immigrants being held falling from about 70,000 in late January to roughly 60,000 by the end of last month.
The leaks from the White House paint a picture of the regard he commands, too. “I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. Another adviser described Trump’s view of Miller, 40, plainly, saying, “The president knows who he is, period.”
“The White House staff respects him tremendously,” Cheung insisted.
Insiders explained that Miller directed Kristi Noem before she was ousted as DHS Secretary in March. Now, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin has been parachuted in to run the department for Trump, even though he has no federal law enforcement experience.
However, he is being managed by Trump’s experienced border czar Tom Homan, whose tone suggests a return to the firebrand rhetoric of early Trump 2.0. “You ain’t seen s--t yet,” the former ICE director declared at a border-security conference in Phoenix, Arizona, last week.
However, Mullin has publicly adopted a different tone and privately lobbied for a push away from the Home Depot raids that set the tone for the apparently-shelved Miller-led immigration crackdown. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said when the Senate confirmed him in March.
But, despite Homan’s tone and Miller’s general modus operandi, he insisted in a statement to The Atlantic that “everyone’s on the same page.”
Two DHS officials, however, said that it was Homan and Mullin who led the charge to secure funding for the department on Capitol Hill this year, sans Miller. Miller was involved last year. Two others with inside knowledge said that while he still leads daily briefings regarding hands-on immigration matters, the tone has died down of late.
And there are fewer diktats and more collaboration, they added. “The new secretary [Mullin] is listening to Tom Homan and Rodney Scott [CBP Commissioner] before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told The Atlantic. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”
But despite different approaches to border control, Homan insists all is well. “I have always worked, and continue to work closely, with Stephen and now Secretary Mullin to deliver on the President’s commitment to the American people,” he said in a statement.
A former White House official described Miller as an ideas man, while Homan is the person who delivers those brainwaves. “As much as everyone loves Tom Homan, he’s not going to say ‘Here’s a unique authority we could use to do X, Y, and Z.’ But the president likes Homan’s approach at the moment.”
“Stephen Miller is one of President Trump’s most trusted and longest-serving aides. Stephen has worked relentlessly to expeditiously implement every facet of the President’s America First agenda and he will continue to do so,” Cheung added in a comment given to the Daily Beast.
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