immigration stories. The far-right press
characterized a provision introduced by
Rubio to distribute cell phones in bor-
der areas, so that residents could report
border crossings, as a measure to give
“amnesty phones” to migrants; a path-
way to citizenship would end in “benefits
to line-jumping illegal aliens.” Miller
took reporters’ calls late into the night,
making himself indispensable to any-
one covering the policy fight in Wash-
ington. “As a staffer, serving his boss, he
was excellent,” Julia Preston, a former
correspondent for the Times, told me.
She spoke to Miller regularly. “This stuff
is emotional for him.” In a conversation
about H1-B visas, “he was talking so
passionately that he actually wept.”
Opponents of the bill began to feel
more confident. “Miller played a pretty
substantial role” in “bruising” the legis-
lation, the senior Senate aide said. A
crisis was developing at the southern
border, where tens of thousands of un-
accompanied children, as well as fami-
lies from Central America, were arriv-
ing in search of asylum. The Obama
Administration tried to downplay the
situation, but the crisis coincided with
the Republican primary campaigns, in
which populist Tea Party members were
challenging members of the G.O.P. es-
tablishment. On June 10th, the day be-
fore Republican staffers in the House
were scheduled to present a version of
the bill to the Party leadership, the sec-
ond-highest-ranking Republican in the
House, Eric Cantor, of Virginia, lost his
primary to Dave Brat, an academic and
a political neophyte, who had run to the
right of Cantor on immigration. “That’s
really when the bottom started falling
out,” Cecilia Muñoz, who worked at
the White House at the time, told me.
The immigration bill had already passed
the Senate, but the Speaker of the House,
a Republican, never brought it to the
floor for a vote.
Miller “got a master’s degree in im-
migration policy during that process,”
one of the Republican aides who worked
with him at the time told me. “Before
that, he didn’t have any policy experience
at all. It was all communications. In 2013,
he learned where all the bodies were bur-
ied.” Miller studied decades’ worth of im-
migration regulations, rules, and discre-
tionary judgments, which were designed
to guide and temper enforcement. He
objected to the reluctance of establish-
ment politicians to strictly interpret the
existing laws. “He’d say, ‘It’s easy to sim-
ply execute the law as it’s written,’” a for-
mer colleague of his told me. “That’s ac-
tually when he would make his most
impressive arguments. Fact-based, legal
arguments. He used to say, ‘There’s a lot
of bureaucratic procedure imposed on
the law. Why do we need to concern our-
selves with all the extra stuff ?’”
Miller pointed out the many loop-
holes in immigration laws, especially
the widespread practice of “catch and
release,” in which large numbers of mi-
grants were allowed to remain in the
U.S. while they waited for their cases to
be heard by immigration judges. Sessions
had proposed amendments to end the
policy, but they failed to gain support
among Republicans. “Miller’s response
was ‘The laws need to change,’” the aide
said. “He was unimpressed by the prom-
ises of more border-patrol agents, or a
trillion dollars for a virtual wall. People
were taking advantage of the laws, not
just of a porous border.”
In January, 2015, when Republicans
took control of the Senate, Miller and
Sessions published a rebuttal to the Par-
ty’s 2012 postmortem, called “Immigra-tion Handbook for the New Republi-
can Majority.” They wrote, “On no issue
is there a greater separation between
the everyday citizen and the political
elite than on the issue of immigration.”
Five months later, Trump declared
his candidacy, and, in January, 2016,
Miller took a leave from Sessions’s office
to join the campaign. Sessions, who
considered Trump an ally on immigra-
tion, had doubts about his electability,
but in February Bannon convinced him
that Trump could win. Sessions became
the first senator to endorse him. Ban-
non, who was advising Trump, had also
persuaded Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s
main handler, to promote Miller to the
position of speechwriter. “You just can’t
wing it. Immigration is too important,”
he recalled saying. “You need policy peo-
ple on this.”
Trump’s candidacy felt more like a
low-grade insurgency than like a profes-
sional operation. The campaign rallies,
with their ecstatic crowds, emboldened
Miller, who often served as a warmup
act for Trump. Pacing the stage with a
relaxed smile, he resembled an insult
comic, leading chants of “Build the wall.”
He’d flash a peace sign, and make way
for Trump, who would recite a list of“He really embodies the soul of mid-level management blues.”