Bulwark Takes - Stephen Miller’s Secret Immigration Regime

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Andrew Egger and Catherine Rampell take on the Trump administration’s sweeping push to strip work permits and legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants who followed every rule. They cover Stephen Miller's quiet bureaucratic campaign to “de-document” legal workers, what it means for construction, caregiving, and tech, and why states like Florida, Texas, and New York are bracing for major labor shocks. Get 40% off access to Calm’s entire library at https://Calm.com/BULWARKTAKES

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Hey guys, it's Andrew Egger with the bulwark. Illegal immigration has been in the news a lot all year. Legal immigration is now something we are talking more and more about, particularly the TPS temporary protected status, which many, many, many migrants in the U.S. currently hold. It's one of the, one of the kind of forms of legal status that exist out there for people from countries torn by war, various other forms of, you know, violence and unrest to come and have legal status here. Trump over the weekend kind of made some news because he took aim at specifically TPS holders from Somalia. He's been feuding with, you know, Representative Ilhan Omar, who is Somali, who is representative from Minnesota, from a district with a high portion of Somali constituents. And so that was kind of back in the news because he did that.

But that's just kind of just one small part of a longstanding theme this year, which is the president kind of clamping down on this program and other forms of legal immigration across the board. So here to talk about it all a little bit is our economics reporter, Catherine Rampel. Catherine, how you doing today? I'm great. How are you? I am not so bad. So can you just lay this out for us a little bit? Because this is one of these things that's been sort of like burbling beneath the surface while we careen from crisis to crisis in the Trump administration. But, but, you know, not less important for having not been paid as much attention to as maybe we ought to have. Sure. So there's obviously, rightfully been a lot of attention.

paid to the really horrible, aggressive, ghoulish raves that are happening, where ICE agents and CBP agents are snatching people off the streets and busting into workplaces and all of that, primarily going after people who are undocumented, although some people are getting swept up in that who actually do have legal status or are they even citizens, but that's not really the target. Meanwhile, the administration has also been going after 100, of thousands of people who have documents and essentially de-documenting them. You mentioned TPS. So there are a lot of people who are on this, it is temporary protected status. It doesn't confer like a green card. It's not the same kind of thing. But the idea is that you are lawfully

present. The government knows you are here. You are eligible for a work permit. And there are like, I don't know, half a million people who have work permits through that, program who are currently able to hold down a job who are expected to lose their ability to legally work by the end of the year. There are also a lot of other kinds of visa programs and work permits that are also being snatched away from people, whether we're talking about international students and their ability to work after college in particular or come here in the first place. Skilled worker visas called H-1Bs. There have been a bunch of changes to that program to make it harder to come here, to stay here, to work here. Asylum seekers,

there are a lot of these different categories of visas and, you know, various kinds of legal status that, for the most part, Americans don't have to think about because it's a really complicated system and who cares and you just sort of take it for granted. Of course, if you're in one of these programs. It consumes your whole life. But now all of those kinds of legal status are being taken away from people through no fault of their own. They haven't actually done anything different. They haven't broken any laws. They've done everything right. They've gotten in line and filed the paperwork and paid the fees and the attorneys and all of that. And their ability to stay here, to work here is just being taken away from them anyway. Effectively, the government through Donald

Trump is creating a larger population of undocumented people. because it is taking people who are legal and rendering them illegal. So, yeah, the Somali case is just the most recent one that's gotten some attention, in part because there's some drama between him and Ilhani Omar. But this goes way beyond that. Again, it's like hundreds of thousands of people who are going to lose their ability to work legally, to work on the books and pay taxes and feed their families and all that. It's going to be really tough on them.

but also presumably tough on the employers and the communities where they're intertwined right now. Yeah. And this is always been a big part, or at least not always, this whole year, you know, as, as Donald Trump has ramped up these deportations, there's been all these conversations about, you know, rule of law concerns, you know, the, the, there are, you know, not insignificant arguments on the, on the Republican side about like, well, look, these people are in the country illegally. They have been forever. Are we just going to like, accept that as the status quo indefinitely for like the rest of time or or are you at some point going going to start deporting people on the other side there are there are these arguments about how they've been here you know they're embedded in these communities they're generating economic activity by going to work and and all of these are only heightened obviously these concerns are only heightened when it comes to these people who are not here illegally right i mean there are policy questions uh like fine policy questions to ask about tPS Joe Biden during his term did

dramatically expand the TPS program. There are a lot more people here under TPS today than there were, you know, in 2020 when Biden took office. So, you know, it's not, it's not completely like beyond the pale for Donald Trump to, in theory, you know, tighten up that program somewhat. But I think the one of the other things here is that it's not just about these people, right? I mean, like, it's really bad for these people that this stuff is happening for these people who, like you say, got in line and did things correctly. But, but one thing that I saw you posting about, just today, was this new report, I think, from the Penn Wharton Business School about just sort of like the overall economic activity that is likely to be lost just from these, you know, basically from

the Trump administration ripping up these people's work permits. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So like I said, you know, I do want to center the pain of all of this on the actual immigrants whose lives are being destroyed, but it's not only them who will be affected. So if you look at the Pennward and budget models analysis on all of this. They're the ones who had done this calculation that like 700,000 TPS holders are going to lose their ability to stay here. And of those about a half a million, 550,000 have work permits right now and will lose their ability to work legally. And so that's going to lead to big labor shortages in sectors like construction. There are a lot of TPS holders who are in construction. There are a lot of TPS holders who work as

home health care AIDS. Like there are a lot of members of the Haitian immigrant community, for example, who work as home health care aids or in other kinds of critical care work to take care of lots of patients, including American-born ones.

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internet. So there are, you know, big impacts to local economies, to particular industries, and to the economy at large, the three states that will be affected the most, according to this report, are Florida, Texas, and New York, because there are big immigrant communities in those places where, again, we're talking about a population of people who currently have legal status who are losing their legal status and therefore their ability to work. I should mention, by the way, that there is some litigation challenging a number of these policy changes. For example, there have been a bunch of attempts by the Trump administration to take away this kind of, this special status from Venezuelans, and there's been litigation over

that. So it's not a done deal yet, but it certainly makes it much riskier for these people to continue working and contributing to their communities and caring for your grandma and building homes and and, you know, serving food and all of the other occupations and industries that this population of immigrants, immigrant workers are currently concentrated in. So yeah, it will be felt. And, you know, when we had big labor shortages a few years ago coming out of COVID, part of the reason why at the time was that we had a big decrease in. immigration. And again, in certain sectors where there is a larger immigrant labor force, you really felt that you had less lawful immigration also, you know, for a while less undocumented

immigration as well. That eventually reversed. But there was a period of time when there was just very few people crossing over the border, even legally. And that had impacts on the economy. You know, there was a lot of talk at the time of like, how come no one wants to work anymore? And the problem was literally there were fewer people coming into the labor force, regardless of whether people wanted to work or not, there were just fewer bodies. So we saw this happen before. And one other change that I didn't mention, by the way, in terms of like bureaucratic policies that have kind of gone under the radar is that until now, I should say, when people try to get their work permit renewed, because depending on what visa you're on, you have to get

it renewed every so often, you know, every few years, there has been a really long lag time between when you file, like when you file the paperwork to get it renewed and when it, you know, like when it actually gets processed. And there was a really long lag time during the pandemic because all government services, like lots of private sector services, were backed up. And the Biden administration said, okay, we're just going to like automatically renew you or at least give you a grace period until we get around to figuring out the paperwork. And the Trump administration said, no, if we don't get a, if we haven't processed your paperwork by the time your visa runs out for, you know, and we don't get it, we don't send you back the renewal in time,

too bad. Like, you're just, you're going to lose the ability to legally work. So there are probably going to be a lot of people who are just stuck in this like very slow bureaucracy who, again, are doing everything right. Let's say the administration hasn't taken away. their legal ability to work officially, but they can de facto take it away to work by just slowing things down so much that they never actually processed people's paperwork. The upshot being like, again, you're going to have even more workers who lose their ability to continue being employed legally because the Trump administration is either slow walking their paperwork or deliberately saying, never mind, you're, you know, we are rendering legal, we are illegalizing you

or de-documenting you. You're going to see a lot more of that in the months ahead. One of the things I have a hard time wrapping my mind around with all of these things is it's not like this is the same thing as deportation, right? At least in kind of like approximate short-term way. These are still people who are here who are going to be here. Maybe some of them will, you know, self-deport if they lose their work permits or whatever, but not necessarily.

And so if you're weighing sort of like, you know, even from the point of view of the Trump administration, it's a little hard to wrap your mind around some of this stuff. where you're basically removing the economic benefits to the country and even to your own voters of having these workers here and productive and, you know, contributing. But, you know, but not actually, you know what I'm saying? Like all the, from the point of view, the Trump administration, even the good stuff about having them here is the stuff that you're getting rid of.

I wanted to ask a little bit as well about another thing. I hate to make you like sort of speculate about what Donald Trump is thinking. But this is something, another thing I have not been able to really. wrap my mind around is that when you talk about this sort of push and pull between, you know, more migration and less migration and thinking about it in terms of economic activity, obviously from the point of view, illegal immigration, they've been pretty straightforward. They think, in their view, if you're in the country illegally, it doesn't matter how much, you know, economic behavior or activity you're putting into the end of the pot. You need to go. You're out of

here. But when it comes to these people who are currently legal, but who various parts of the MAGA coalition would rather not be, it seems like Trump has. taken sort of diverging paths because I'm thinking of like the fight over the H-1B visas that we just saw a couple weeks ago where Trump kind of siding with the tech companies in his coalition, the tech bros in his coalition, basically declined to do what some megatotypes like Marjorie Taylor Green wanted to do and really clamp down on the number of H-1B visas as we were giving out to, you know, foreign workers in tech, things like that. So is there a way that to make this all makes sense, that in this one case, he's going with the more economic generation?

Genuinely, I think he has no idea what his own administration is doing. He has outsourced all of this to Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is anti-immigrant. Again, not just anti- undocumented immigrant. He is anti-immigrant, period. That's why he is putting in place all of these policies that de-document documented immigrants. And I think Trump just has no idea. It's not only about skilled worker visas, which, by the way, under Stephen Miller, have been much harder to get whatever Donald Trump is saying on podcasts and the like. It doesn't matter what he's saying. What matters is what the administration is doing. Not only on those kinds of visas, you may recall that a few months ago, again, amid all of

these like lurid videos of ice raids and CBP raids at workplaces, Donald Trump said something along the lines of, oh, we're not, we're not going to raid home depots and restaurants and farms because we know it's really important for the employers in those industries to have these reliable, loyal workers. Meanwhile, he said this, but the administration was continuing to do those things. So I think Trump just has no idea what's going on under his own roof, and not that that absolves him of any responsibility. Obviously, the buck stops with. him, but even on the isolated kinds of ideas that he has that seem, I don't want to even say compassionate, seem more, I don't know, rational, right? Like, why are we pulling the agricultural

workforce out of commission at a time when we're concerned about high grocery prices? Like, that's a very rational, rational, self-interested way to think about his policies. He might say those kinds of things. He might want those kinds of things, but he is doing nothing to execute them. Stephen Miller is in charge. And Stephen Miller really understands this system in a way that is effective and also dangerous. He knows all of the different bureaucratic hurdles that he can throw up for skilled workers, for student visas, for agricultural visas, for asylum. like every one of these like nitty gritty categories of immigrants, of work permits, of visas,

he understands all of the mechanisms available to destroy them. And he's doing that. Whatever it is his boss wants, he's doing it because he is single-mindedly focused on doing it, on getting immigrants out of this country and keeping new ones away from this country. You know, I know what you mean when you say Trump doesn't know what's going on under his roof, but also in another sense, I feel like the stuff going on under his roof is the one thing he is really attentive to. You know, all the brick of wreck on the walls in the Oval Office and the East Barroom. Well, yes. The new ballroom construction and the flag pull outside and the patio and all that. All that stuff, he is way on top of some of the policy stuff, not so much.

But yeah, I take your point there. I think we can leave it at that. We're going to keep following this story. Catherine's going to keep following this story. Thanks, Catherine, for coming on and talking us all through it. Thanks to you all out there for watching. head over to the bulwark.com, subscribe to receipts, Catherine's economics-focused newsletter.

She's been hitting home runs in her first few already. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. It's that time of year again. Happy Honda Days, where you can drive in a Honda Wonderland of your own, with a great offer on a fun to drive new Accord, Civic, CRV, or HRV. For a limited time, well-qualified buyers can get a 3.99% APR on a 2025 Accord or a 2026 CRV, a 4.9% APR on a 20, 26 Civic, or 3.49% APR on a 2026HRV.

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