The New Yorker Radio Hour - Stephen Miller, the Architect of Trump’s Immigration Plan

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Donald Trump began his Presidential bid, in 2015, with an infamous speech, at Trump Tower, in which he said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But it was not until a former aide to Jeff Sessions joined Trump’s campaign that the nativist rhetoric coalesced into a policy platform—including the separation of children from their families at the border. Jonathan Blitzer, who writes about immigration for The New Yorker, has been reporting on Stephen Miller’s sway in the Trump Administration and his remarkable success in advancing an extremist agenda. “There has never been an American President who built his campaign around the issue of immigration and later won on that campaign on immigration. Trump was the first and only President really ever to do it,” Blitzer tells David Remnick. Despite this influence, Miller remains largely behind the scenes. Blitzer explains why: “He knows that the kiss of death in this Administration is to be identified as the brains behind the man. He can’t let on that he’s the one who effectively is manipulating Trump on these issues.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United States is a nation of immigrants, but it also has a long history of hostility to immigration. In modern times, certainly no precedent has taken on the anti-immigration mantle as assertively as Donald Trump. During his first week in office, he signed three executive orders on immigration to begin building the wall, to cut federal funding for sanctuary cities, and the order that became known as the Muslim ban, which has just been expanded to prevent immigration from Nigeria and five other countries. And there's also child separation, the cancellation of DACA, preventing asylum seekers entry. These are all initiatives from the White House policy chief named Stephen Miller.

Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned. Our immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer has profiled Miller in this week's issue of the New Yorker. John, you write about a moment in 2013 the last time that a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration bill ever came before Congress. And you describe in detail about how a very young Capitol Hill aide, still in his 20s, named Stephen Miller, went about sabotaging the process. So what happened?

It's quite incredible. I mean, now we think, looking back, we think, you know, do Democrats believe in workable solutions on immigration? The issue is so polarized. How do we get both sides to come to some consensus state on the issue? The consensus existed in 2013, and the votes were there. What was the consensus? I mean, this was rough outline. sweeping comprehensive immigration reform that would have granted a pathway to citizenship to a large chunk of the 11. million undocumented people living in the U.S. in exchange for what were fairly typical establishment kind of hardline compromises, increased border security, increased enforcement personnel, the kind of tough on illegal immigration kind of measures in exchange for a legalization program. So what role does an aid like Stephen Miller play in making it all crash and burn?

So at the time, there were already the votes in the Senate to pass the bill out. of the Senate. But Sessions was in on all of the discussions, as were all of the Republicans of the time, for the most part, the hardline Republicans were thinking, okay, we can't stop this bill from becoming a law, but we can try to get our kind of key issues into it. Miller comes to the table as Sessions communications staffer, not as his policy person. And the only thing that Miller is doing when he enters the room is he's listening into the conversations. He's cribbing what he can from the policy discussions. And he's learning how to take some of those policy details out of context, to pump them into talking points.

How did you do it? You know, little things, little details that probably didn't even strike people in the room as being terribly consequential at the time. There was one measure, and this is a particularly dramatic one, where Marco Rubio, who was one of the members of what was called the Gang of Eight, who were driving this reform bill, Rubio, in a bid to show that he could be tough on crime along the border, proposed distributing cell phones to residents in the borderlands so that they could call, with reports of criminality, border crossings, things like that.

Miller takes that detail and turns it into what he called amnesty phones for illegals. And in the right-wing media, that crazy detail starts to circulate. Amnesty phones. Amnesty phones. Wow. You actually can be eligible for a grant for a phone, it looks like, a two-year grant program to receive a cellular phone. And the articles this morning, as you can imagine, are fairly amusing. Move over Obama phone. This is the, you know, this is the amnesty. So, you know, that's a

ridiculous example. There are, of course, much more sort of piercing examples that really scare Republicans. So for example, there's always this issue of how are you going to deal with people who've committed crimes. Where do you draw the line in offering some sort of path to legalization for people with criminal records. So here's Chris Kobach when he was the Kansas Secretary of State in 2013, speaking very much in the same voice as Miller in opposition to that bill. This administration has been drawing a very strange line and saying, we don't regard you as a criminal. We don't regard you as a threat to public safety until you've been convicted in a court of law. Merely being arrested for drunk driving or arrested for assaulting a federal officer

isn't enough. And I think that's a really problematic line. So by the time the bill passes out of the Senate and makes it into the House, House Republicans are thinking, why on earth would we get into this? So it's, what we're saying is that a flack, a flack for Jeff Sessions played an important role in bringing a comprehensive immigration bill to Cropper. That's right. He had just a total obsession with sinking that bill. So the failure of that bill can be seen as a kind of turning point, certainly in immigration

reform and the whole drama. after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee commissioned a report that warned that if the party did not embrace immigration reform, it would keep on losing elections. And four years later, we have perhaps the most anti-immigration president in the history of the country. What happened?

Well, there's a key moment in between that from 2012 and the election of 2016, and that is in 2015, the Republicans, take control of the Senate. They have at this point sort of ridden the tide of the Tea Party movement, the anti-Obama sentiment, Sessions now is in a position of more power than he ever was. And he and Miller in 2015 create a document called an immigration handbook for the new Republican majority. And if you read that document now, it's actually uncanny how similar all of the policy proposals are to the very things that Trump campaigned on.

As a kind of playbook on immigration. It's essentially a playbook. How did Steve Miller find his way onto the Trump campaign and the Trump circle? Trump was not an obvious candidate for members of the restrictionist movement. All those guys loved Ted Cruz initially. No one took Trump seriously. And Trump wasn't someone who actually had a vision on immigration. His view of the issue was a kind of run-of-the-mill.

Illegal is bad. Legal is fine. And that wrangled with the real kind of hardline true believers, as the Stephen Miller types. But a key figure in all this was, of course, Steve Bannon, who saw in Trump a real spokesperson, a kind of charismatic lightning rod type figure who could help, as he once told Jeff Sessions,

personify these issues for you. And they can feed him his line. Because Trump is soft clay in this way? Because you can manipulate him and get him to say what you need? To one degree, yes. But I also think that what Trump offered to them was a really kind of visceral,

identification with the cause. So when Trump famously descends the elevator of Trump Tower and talks about Mexican rapists, there it is. It's true. And these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems. And they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border. It's chilling to hear that even now, after hearing it countless times. Absolutely. But, you know, even then, as bald and over the top as that rhetoric was, immigration hardliners in the Republican Party didn't take Trump all that seriously. For one thing, he's launching this long-shot presidential bid. But what's more, at this point, there still isn't clear. language about what Trump's immigration policy would actually look like. And that language comes later in the campaign after Stephen Miller joins the campaign and becomes his principal speechwriter.

And in August of 2016, just a few months before the November election, Donald Trump gives a major immigration address in Phoenix, Arizona. And that speech was written entirely by Stephen Miller. This will be a little bit different. This won't be a rally speech per se. Instead, I'm going to deliver a detailed policy address on one of the greatest challenges facing our country today, illegal immigration. What was different about that speech? Why was it so important? There are two audiences for that speech. So this is, you know, only a few months before the election. You've got the Republican base. They want to hear a riproaring speech about immigration. They want the kind of caustic language that the president has used from day one and that's drawn them. to him in the first place. And so the president starts the speech by talking about immigrant crime. He talks about the fact that because of the Obama administration, people have died in the U.S. who didn't have to. I mean, really the most extreme, outlandish things.

I have met with many of the great parents who lost their children to sanctuary cities and open borders. So many people. But then there's also this other audience for that speech. And this audience is basically people who are inside the Republican Party, who are government officials, who are Hill staffers, who are already on the conservative edge of the Republican Party when it comes to immigration. And who want to be convinced that Trump isn't just a big talker, but there is actually an agenda that he will set in motion. Zero tolerance for criminal aliens, zero, zero. And that's where in this speech, this 10-point list that he starts to rattle off, has the kind of focus and specificity that immediately reaches this type of listener. We will restore the highly successful secure communities program, good program.

We will expand and revitalize the popular 287G partnerships, which will help to identify hundreds of thousands of thousands. thousands of deportable aliens in local jails that we don't even know about. I've spoken to a number of people who very much were the intended audience of this speech, who on hearing that 10-point list said, okay, you know what, in spite of my misgivings about Trump, I like Trump. He seemed vulgar and obnoxious. He wasn't my type of politician, but no one else in the Republican Party and obviously in the Democratic Party has ever come. come so close to articulating such specific policy positions on the hard line of immigration policy

that we're going to cast our lot with this guy. These 10 steps, if rigorously followed and enforced, will accomplish more in a matter of months than our politicians have accomplished on this issue in the last 50 years. That's what's going to happen, folks. Is there any way of knowing how important Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller's influence was on the 2016 election victory for Donald Trump. Think of it this way. There has never been an American president who built his campaign around the issue of immigration and later won on that campaign on immigration. And so it's not a surprise

that you basically see the administration right now prosecuting its immigration agenda as though it's still campaigning. The idea of immigration policy and campaign rhetoric are one and the same with these guys. And that is a mark of how influential and successful Miller was in 2016. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to take our country back, folks. This is a movement. We're going to take our country back. Thank you. I'm talking with the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer. John has a profile in the magazine of Stephen Miller, the policy advisor who's widely regarded as the architect of Donald Trump's immigration platform. And in a moment, we'll continue with Miller's influence on the 2020 campaign.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about the enormously influential White House advisor, Stephen Miller, whose far right-wing views on immigration have become absolutely mainstream in the Trump administration. The New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer has written a thorough and important account of Stephen Miller, his rise, and his role in the White House. John, what's the relationship like between Trump and Miller? What I've always heard is that they kind of have this good cop, bad cop sort of relationship that Trump really loves. Which was the good cop? Exactly. It's a suspenseful question. I think for the most part, Trump likes to say, you know, I'd be open to this thing, but Stephen, Stephen would never go for it. And that's kind of the dynamic. And it allows Trump to feel. So the 70-odd-year-old president is trying to make sure that he's policing the young aid in his 30s? You know, it's something that Miller, for all of his bravado, is actually very careful about. He knows that the kiss of death in this administration is to be identified as the brains behind the man. You know, he can't let on that he is the one who effectively is manipulating Trump on these issues. Back in November,

the Southern Poverty Law Center released a collection of emails that Miller had exchanged with some editors at Breitbart. Those emails from 2015 to 2016 included links to white supremacist websites and novels. Do you think Miller's policies are influenced by that kind of raw ideology? I think yes. He denies it, of course. I think what's specifically alarming about what came through those emails was, one, his source material, who he's reading. He's reading actual white supremacist websites that peddle the view that the, you know, the white population in the U.S. is being overtaken, that, you know, the idea of diversity in the U.S. is tantamount to sort of mongrel hordes. Right.

Cultural surrender. Did Miller suffer any consequences after the email dump? Seems not. None. This is kind of one of the surreal aspects of covering this administration. In the broader public, of course, it was national news. I think in the White House, this was not really an issue at all. For all the noise about many issues, including the wall, build the wall, build the wall. Since Trump took office, what concrete changes has he made to our immigration system? How is it markedly different? Well, for one thing, he has effectively ended the practice of asylum at the U.S. southern border, which the U.S. is obviously always seen in a bipartisan way as a key part of its identity. He's completely slashed the refugee program. In the last year of Obama's presidency, for example, the U.S. vowed to resettle 110,000 immigrants a year. Under Trump, the number is now 18,000. And so he's really dismantled kind of the whole of the asylum and refugee program. And through rules and regulations and a lot of obscure

technical stuff, the White House has essentially redefined who can qualify. for legal residency in the U.S. I think Miller was behind the Trump administration's child separation policy, the most controversial thing of all. And he apparently advocated for ICE officers to yank children out of school. And in December, he instituted plans to use unaccompanied migrant children as bait, as bait to catch their undocumented parents. Why the focus on children?

Well, Miller's view is an extreme manifestation of what had always been a certain establishment position in some ways, which was border policy is going to help the U.S. control even who makes the trip to the U.S. And so for years from the George W. Bush years, through the Obama years, there was a thing that the Department of Homeland Security in an Orwellian way called the consequence delivery system. And the idea was, if you treated people harshly enough at the border, you sent a deterrent message throughout the region. Miller is so obsessed with the idea of punishing people at the border itself, it becomes an end in itself. And And so his actual thinking on, for example, the treatment of immigrant children is if you treat children badly enough, in theory, maybe you can scare parents away from ever traveling with their kids or sending for their kids once they arrive in the U.S.

As Adam Surr once wrote in the Atlantic, the cruelty is the policy. That's right. The cruelty is the point. That's right. And, you know, early on, even people like Lindsey Graham, who at the time was seen as a moderate Republican bellwether in Congress, recoiled from a lot of the positions that were propounded by Stephen Miller. The reason we yank these things back is because Mr. Miller, I've known him for a long time. I know he's passed, and I know he's an early support of the president.

But I'll just tell you, his view of immigration has never been in the mainstream of the Senate. And I think we're never going to get there as long as we embrace concepts that cannot possibly get 60 votes. One of the concepts that I just completely reject is that we have. have too much legal immigration. That was Lindsey Graham speaking in early 2018. He has since become one of the president's most vocal defenders in Congress. So much of what Miller proposes seems legislatively inconceivable or just totally outside the mainstream, long past any boundary of thought. What's the purpose of pushing such extreme immigration platforms?

What's in it for Trump? Well, from Miller's standpoint, there are two gains for Trump in taking that approach. The first is the conversation has shifted well to the right of where it's ever been. And second, Congress no longer has the power to legislate, given how polarized Washington is. And so for someone like Miller, why bother trying to water down a bill in order to lure moderates into voting for it? if there's never going to be a vote on any of these policies, if the politics are too intractable to begin with, then why don't you just enunciate your principles? This is Miller's thinking. Enunciate your principles clearly. Don't apologize for them and push in other ways. And I think that's really been the approach that we've seen. And it's frankly, it's the scariest fact of his agenda now, that in the absence of Congress, you basically have the executive, which has wide latitude to exercise its discretion on immigration policy, doing whatever it wants. And increasingly now, the courts are starting. starting to buckle. I mean, at this point, the president has appointed more than 180 new judges to the federal judiciary. A lot of, in the past, the nationwide injunctions that immediately

blocked some of Trump's most aggressive immigration policies are being lifted by some of his own appointees at higher appellate levels in the judiciary. And so I think Miller's view is, look, we're playing the long game. This is a fight. Let's duke it out. And of course, that will, that phenomenon will only increase radically if Donald Trump is reelected in 2020. Now, One person to rival Stephen Miller for power and access in the White House is Jared Kushner, who's been circulating a 600-page merit-based immigration bill. And I wonder how aligned Kushner and Miller are on immigration. So Jared Kushner didn't wade into the space of immigration policy by choice.

The president asked him to spearhead this effort to come up with a comprehensive immigration reform plan. And so the plan itself is, is the plan of someone who is generally moderate on immigration, but who is taking the temperature of the Republican caucus in Congress and obviously the White House. So for Miller's view, there is, on the one hand, a lot to like in Kushner's 600-page immigration bill, namely the fact that legal immigration is on the table, which is something that was inconceivable just a few years ago. And yet on the other hand, there are some causes for concern for Miller that are in the bill, namely that the overall number of legal immigrants who would be allowed into the country doesn't change. And so for someone like Miller who wants the net number of people entering the country to go down every year, this bill might be too moderate for his taste. Are they buddies? They get along really well. And where policy is concerned, make these situational alliances. They never say anything bad about the other person, which is something that in Trump's Washington is more or less unheard of. And they are kind of muddling through together.

So this summer, this is extremely important. This summer, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the administration can cancel DACA. What's Miller's plan if this happens? This is probably the most alarming prospect. It really looks like, and one's obviously hesitant to prognosticate and sort of try to predict how the, the justices will rule. But it really does look like based on the oral argument that the justices are pretty skeptical of the argument that the administration doesn't have the ability or the legal authority to cancel DACA. So it seems likely that that program might be in threat,

under threat. Is there an implication for the election? There is. And I think what Miller will do is Miller will seize on that ruling to push all of the most extreme things that he has ever wanted. And so one person said to me, look, if you thought Miller was bad in early 2018, you're going to see that times 10. But that's a winner for them? I understand why it's a winner for the base. Is it a winner for all those contested counties in the states that we know by heart as the crucial states in a November election? It's interesting. I think that if you're a congressional Republican, this is just a huge headache for you. You don't want to have to go on the record one way or the other.

You don't want to buck the president's position because the president's so popular with a Republican base. But dreamers, as we all know at this point, are hugely popular in a bipartisan way across the country. And so why go after them at a moment when your own political future is at issue? I basically think the White House doesn't particularly care about congressional Republicans. I think this is what's in the best interest of the White House, at least as White House senior advisors, see it. And so they're going to charge ahead. And Miller is going to essentially use the population of dreamers affected by the Supreme Court ruling as hostages in a series of negotiations. that he is going to force down the throats of Democrats on the Hill.

And he is basically going to say through it all, and the president is going to say through it all, that the Democrats have an opportunity to help save these DACA kids, and they're not going to take it. Jonathan Blitzer, thanks so much. Thanks, too. Jonathan Blitzer's profile of Stephen Miller is available now on New Yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. And please join us next time for The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYSYerC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon

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