THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 49
issued a statement saying that “we should
not turn our backs on those refugees
who ... pose no demonstrable threat to
our nation, and who have suffered un-
speakable horrors.” Jared Kushner, the
President’s son-in-law and senior ad-
viser, was enraged. The next day, when
the President’s senior staff assembled
in the Situation Room, Miller told John
Kelly, the head of D.H.S.; Tom Bossert,
the President’s homeland-security ad-
viser; and officials from the State De-
partment, “This is the new world order.
You need to get on board,” according
to an account in “Border Wars,” by Julie
Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear.
The ban was immediately challenged
in federal court; it took eighteen months,
and three versions of the order, before
it passed legal muster. Instead of cen-
suring Miller, Trump blamed the courts
and lawyers at the Justice Department,
including Sessions, who was now his
Attorney General, for “watering down”
the order.
M
iller wasn’t so much channelling
Trump as overtaking him. Inside
the White House, he was known as a
“walking encyclopedia” on immigration,
and the President’s political advisers,
who acknowledged that campaigning on
the issue had been the key to Trump’s
victory in 2016, deferred to him as an ex-
pert. Those with reservations—like Rex
Tillerson, the Secretary of State, and
H. R. McMaster, the national-security
adviser—had other responsibilities. Miller
could outmaneuver them if he used the
right interagency channels. He sent e-mail
sparingly and avoided calling officials di-
rectly to issue orders, relaying his mes-
sages through intermediaries.
Since Trump could rarely compre-
hend the full substance of his own Ad-
ministration’s agenda on immigration,
it fell to Miller to define what victory
looked like. One of the President’s fa-
vorite routines, according to someone
close to both of them, is to play the good
cop to Miller’s bad cop: “He’ll smile and
say, ‘Well, that sounds O.K. to me but,
Stephen, I know you’d never go for it.’”
Miller invoked the President con-
stantly, especially when he encountered
resistance from other officials. One of
them told me, “Someone would say to
him, ‘Stephen, what you’re trying to do
is not possible.’ And his response would
be ‘It is possible. I spoke to the President
an hour ago, and he said it had to be
done.’” (Hogan Gidley, a White House
spokesperson, told me, “The policies
Stephen works on are not his own but,
instead, a faithful and vigilant imple-
mentation of the agenda Donald Trump
brilliantly laid out.”)
For the first seven months of his Pres-
idency, Trump vacillated about cancel-
ling Deferred Action for Childhood Ar-
rivals, a highly popular program that
Obama had instituted through execu-
tive action. DACA protected from de-
portation some seven hundred thou-
sand people who had come to the U.S.
as children. Trump had campaigned
against it, then reversed himself. Miller
was viscerally hostile to DACA. In an
e-mail to a Breitbart editor, he said that
expanding the “foreign-born share” of
the U.S. workforce was an instance of
“immigration” being used “to replace ex-
isting demographics.” In September,
2017, under pressure from Miller and
other White House advisers, Trump
agreed to cancel DACA, setting a six-
month deadline for Congress to find a
legislative solution. The fight that en-
sued led to a brief government shut-
down. Republicans refused to grant any
form of “amnesty” unless they could get
something significant in return, but,
given Trump’s inconsistency on DACA,
the Party leadership couldn’t gauge what
he wanted from the negotiations.
Mostly, Trump cared about building
a wall along the southern border. For
Miller, the main goal of negotiations was
to reduce the number of legal immi-
grants, which was not something that
Congress had previously been willing to
contemplate. But, with DACA recipients
as a bargaining chip, the circumstances
were different. “Miller knew the window
was closing, that his only chance to force
his agenda was if DACA kids were on the
line,” a Republican aide who worked
closely with Miller told me.
On January 11, 2018, Trump sum-
moned Dick Durbin, a Democratic sen-
ator from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham,
from South Carolina, to the White House
so that they could explain the terms of
a bipartisan deal they’d reached. It would
offer a path to citizenship for DACA re-
cipients in exchange for increased bor-
der security and enforcement measures.
The President told the senators that he
was ready to back their plan. But, two
hours later, when they entered the Oval
Office, they found that they were not
alone. Miller had invited a group of far-
right Republicans—including Tom Cot-
ton and David Perdue, the sponsors of
a bill to cut legal immigration in half—
to join them. The “fix is in,” Durbin told
an aide. When Graham brought up
Haitian immigrants, while explaining
an aspect of the agreement, Trump asked,
“Why would we want all these people
from shithole countries?” He now re-
fused to endorse the deal he had sup-
ported that morning.
In the weeks that followed, when-
ever Trump responded positively to an
overture by Democrats, Miller inter-
ceded. “Whoever has access to the Pres-
ident last—that’s what sticks,” a White
House official told me. “Miller always
made sure he was that person.” Graham
said, “As long as Stephen Miller is in
charge of negotiating immigration, we’re
going nowhere.”
T
he images first began appearing on
Fox News in early April, 2018: a
thousand migrants from Honduras, most
of them travelling with their families,
massing at the border between Guate-
mala and Mexico before heading north
toward the United States. Trump regu-
larly updated his Twitter feed as the group
advanced into southern Mexico, more
than a thousand miles from the U.S. He
renewed calls for a border wall, attacked
Mexico for failing to do more, and ex-
coriated Democrats for “ridiculous lib-
eral laws like catch and release.” In the
first year of his Presidency, border cross-
ings were down, owing in part to what
analysts called “the Trump Effect,” as
migrants and smugglers paused to con-
sider whether Trump’s actions toward
migrants would match his rhetoric. But
by May, 2018, there were roughly fifty
thousand apprehensions a month at the
border, double the number when he took
