Less than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Republicans came within inches of achieving their immigration dreams with a deal that would build a border wall and more detention facilities while curbing legal immigration and enacting E-Verify.
The only concession they had to make was to permanently and constitutionally protect 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, Americanized immigrants brought here illegally as children through no fault of their own.
The political cost for the GOP was almost nonexistent. Two-thirds of Republicans already supported a path to citizenship for DACA recipients at the time. But the single most prominent obstacle to this deal proved to be Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller. Miller’s intransigence cost Trump what leverage he had from DACA, and Trump got no deal.
Less than a year later, Trump tried the same gambit but with less leverage and even more desperation as Republicans were about to lose control of the House. Once again, Miller’s insistence on slashing protections for DACA recipients killed negotiations, forcing Trump to re-open the government after its longest shutdown in history with his tail between his legs and not one cent allocated for the wall, let alone any legislative achievements.
In an interview with PBS, Ann Coulter, perhaps the most significant influence on Trump’s immigration stance, weighed in on Miller’s unwillingness to make a deal.
“He’s never taken to heart the important Reagan slogan, there’s no end to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit,” Coulter told Frontline. “He’s the one blocking a lot of the things in the Trump administration, like hiring anyone who knows how to get it done.”
Sadly, the answer appears to be much simpler than that. A damning email dump from former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh points to Miller simply being a racist who hates immigrants.
For years, Miller shared stories from white nationalist news sources. McHugh, who has since disavowed her alt-right sympathies, alleges that Miller cited with familiarity work from American Renaissance, the pseudoscientific white supremacist website run by racial segregationist Jared Taylor. Miller also reportedly shared a story from VDARE, yet another white nationalist site that published the likes of Taylor and Steven Sailer, as well as Infowars, the conspiracy-mongering website run by 9/11 and Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones.
This information has been laundered through the Southern Poverty Law Center, so you can’t take it seriously beyond the source material itself. For example, Miller’s embrace of a bad immigration policy from the Coolidge era probably doesn’t stem from the fact that Adolf Hitler liked the same policy, as the SPLC tries to put it. But the SPLC’s contribution here is almost irrelevant, unless the emails are fabricated. The fact is that a Senate staffer who worked his way into the upper echelons of the White House was egging on McHugh to bring unabashedly racist online narratives about immigration into a more mainstream publication.
Interns have been fired for less than this. We can’t say with certainty what hate is or isn’t in Miller’s heart, but we know that he was happy enough to use the work of hatemongers and kill the GOP’s last shot at immigration reform, apparently because it would help predominantly Mexican immigrants. It’s long past time for Trump to dump Miller.
