THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 51
measure for enforcing immigration laws.
Forty-eight hours later, Trump ended
the separation policy, blaming Nielsen
for his political defeat. “I have no idea
how Miller managed to escape this one,”
the official told me. “He knows just how
and when to disappear.”
A
s Trump has consolidated his con-
trol over the Republican Party, it is
easy to see Miller as an embodiment of
the rightward turn of conservative pol-
itics. But, in the past year, he has made
enemies among people at D.H.S. who
shared his goals of tightening enforce-
ment and revamping the legal-immi-
gration system yet were alarmed by his
contempt for policy channels and his
disregard for the law. As one of them
told me, Miller was conducting “a kind
of permanent political campaign.” Miller
tried to enlist officials to bolster the Pres-
ident’s claims about immigrant crime.
David Lapan, a retired colonel who
worked for John Kelly at D.H.S., told
me, “He’d say, ‘You need to work harder
to show how bad immigrants are. High-
light stories on criminal immigrants get-
ting charged after being released.’”
On Fridays, Miller convened a meeting
at the Eisenhower Office Building, next
to the White House, to discuss the ways
in which federal bureaucrats were falling
short of implementing Trump’s agenda.
Eventually, career officials stopped at-
tending, and Miller’s audience became
the political appointees who were already
aligned with him. He harangued them,
too. At one meeting, displeased with an
ICE official who had once worked at the
Center for Immigration Studies, he told
him, “I’ll send you right back to writing
blog posts for C.I.S.”
After Trump ended the family-sep-
aration policy, he was forced to make
another concession. More families were
fleeing Central America and travelling
to the U.S., owing in part to the cycle
of restrictive measures being adopted,
then refashioned and sometimes aban-
doned after court challenges and po-
litical setbacks. When border policy
changes in frequent and conspicuous
ways, news tends to spread through
Central America. “Trump made for the
perfect sales pitch for smugglers: Come
now, before it’s too late!” James Nealon,
a former senior D.H.S. official, told me.
The department ran out of detention
space, and had to resume the catch-and-
release policy.
According to a D.H.S. official whoworked closely with Miller, as “the prob-
lems got more complex, and as the frus-
trations mounted,” his behavior became
erratic. At meetings, he would ask for
data that were irrelevant to the discus-
sion, then launch into a monologue. An-
other D.H.S. official said, “You didn’t
know which Stephen you were going to
get. He could be very articulate, then
he’d be quoting Breitbart in a diatribe.
It was all over the place.” His policy ideas
were often impracticable or unrelated to
the issue under discussion. He wanted
the department to house all migrants at
Guantánamo Bay, and the F.B.I. to con-
duct immigration arrests. One official
told me, “It got tedious. None of it would
solve the problem we had. And, at the
end of the operations he was pushing,
the question would just be: Are you going
to have something meaningful and sus-
tainable that isn’t just a sharp elbow?”
Department officials felt that they
knew how to manage the border crisis.
They needed more resources, to house
families and children, and other agen-
cies needed to absorb the overflow. But,
the official said, Miller “had unreason-
able expectations about how fast the
bureaucracy could write rules to fix the
biggest problems we had. His default
position was that there was a bunch of
bureaucrats in the bowels of ICE or Cit-
izenship and Immigration Services who
didn’t want this to happen.”
Because Miller had inserted himself
into D.H.S.’s policymaking process, offi-
cials felt obliged to shield their work
from him. At one point, to keep Miller
from discovering the details of a policy
discussion, the head of D.H.S. held
meetings in a classified security bunker,
known as a SCIF, where cell phones are
prohibited and strict rules of confiden-
tiality are in effect. Convinced that a
cabal of deep-state actors was trying to
thwart Trump’s agenda, Miller had effec-
tively forced officials to go underground
in their own agencies. Steve Bannon
told me, “Stephen’s experience has deep-
ened his belief in the deep state, that
they’re all going to leak in an attempt
to stop his policy efforts.”
Increasingly, Miller lashed out at high-
level D.H.S. officials, even those who fa-
vored many of the same policies. A fre-
quent target was Francis Cissna, the
director of Citizenship and Immigration
Services since 2017, who had worked tothe temporal waves,
waves smashing and lippingthe pulverized stone; a bird dissolving
into a cloud bank in late day;the happy and sad steps we walkedalong the plaster walls and steel bridges,
the glass façades, highways of glistening moneythe objects we caress in dreams
from which we wake to find the hallway dark,the small light at the bottom of the stairs,
the kitchen waiting with a scentof zucchini sautéed in olive oil
onions and oregano,a waft of last night’s red wine—a gulp
of cold water to bring on the day.—Peter Balakian