Washington, DC — As we’ve been describing, many Republicans are desperate to signal to the American public that they’ve turned the page on their deeply unpopular mass deportation agenda. Yet the reality is that as long as President Trump and de facto President Stephen Miller are calling the shots, no revamped messaging or new DHS Secretary will amount to the real change Americans are demanding on immigration and the misplaced priorities it embodies.
Just this week, Stephen Miller’s fingerprints have been all over a host of unpopular ideas and examples of the cruelty, chaos, and costs inherent to the mass deportation agenda – including deploying ICE agents to airports; the ProPublica investigation highlighting that more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children had their parents detained in the first seven months of the administration; and an NPR investigation detailing the staggering economic and broader civic costs to cities that have been the focus of the Trump/Miller anti-immigrant deployments. As AG Pam Bondi recently stated, “the unsung hero in all of this is Stephen Miller. Stephen is the architect of making all these plans work.”
If that weren’t enough, Miller is now calling on red states to take on long-settled Supreme Court law and challenge the ability of immigrant children to attend public schools. The New York Times reports that: “Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week … Doing so would break with the Supreme Court precedent set in Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 decision” (Read Harold Meyerson’s American Prospect column in reaction).
According to Joanna Kuebler, Chief of Programs at America’s Voice, “There is a direct correlation between sinking approval ratings for Donald Trump and the GOP and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation crusade and his destructive anti-immigrant obsessions. At a time when Americans are struggling with affordability and worried about the spiraling costs due to war in the Middle East, Miller is laser-focused on his pet nativist projects – like ripping families apart and blocking immigrant children from attending pre-school. The majority of Americans are rejecting what the White House is selling and want Congress to rein in this administration’s violent, lawless and out-of-control mass deportation campaign and to realign this administration’s colossally misplaced priorities.”
