This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
When I covered a Donald Trump Vegas rally in person in June 2016, I found his performance that day—like many others since—so routine as to be completely unmemorable. But one thing that will forever stick in my mind is the viciousness of his opening speakers and the fervor with which the crowd ate up their hate like expiring crab legs at an all-you-can-eat resort buffet. Specifically, I will never forget seeing Stephen Miller, Trump’s then speechwriter, perform for the crowd as the candidate’s warmup act.
Who was this guy, I thought, shrilly promising to roars of approval that Trump would “protect the sanctity and security of the American family” while moaning about “sanctimonious lectures” against separating immigrant families? As Miller declared sarcastically, “Hillary Clinton says, ‘Well, we can’t have a secure border, and we can’t enforce our laws, because if we did that, it would tear apart families,’ ” the crowd booed wildly. I couldn’t help but wonder: What did he mean by “tear apart families”?
Covering immigration at the start of Trump’s first presidency, I would soon learn exactly what he was talking about.
There were the elementary school–age Yemeni refugees who told me they just wanted to be reunited with “Mom, Dad, and my friends” and “go to school every day,” after having been blocked from entering the country by the unlawful and chaotic Miller-orchestrated Muslim travel ban during Trump’s first month in office. There was the mother who had been separated from her nursing infant and other American children after one of the largest workplace raids in U.S. history hit the poultry plant where she worked. Worst of all, for me, was Salvador, a sobbing and suicidal father whose 8-year-old daughter, Rosita, had been ripped from him when they’d arrived at the border, and who still wasn’t sure he would get her back. “My daughter was crying when she left. We had never been separated before,” he told me through tears. “I was worried that she was going to go in the foster care system and go with other parents.”
Salvador and Rosita were eventually reunited, but thousands of other parents and children ripped apart by Miller’s family-separation policy weren’t so lucky.
All of this was the fruit of Miller’s plans in action. He was at the center of it all. Now he’s back. What’s worse, he has promised to turbocharge these policies with even fewer legal guardrails.
I wasn’t yet a parent when I covered these stories from 2017–20, so I mainly viewed them from the perspective of the traumatized children, as exemplified by the sobbing babies—recorded by a whistleblower—being taunted by Border Security agents after having been ripped away from their parents with no promise of return at the height of the family-separation crisis. My primary feeling at the time was: How could this country do this to these kids?
My oldest child was born less than a month before Trump’s first term ended, and my perspective has since shifted. It’s almost impossible to conceive of the debilitating pain, trauma, and horror I would feel if someone tried to violently tear away my kids. There’s a reason that kidnapping Ukrainian children and expropriating them to Russia has been the principal war crime in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal: It is an unimaginably cruel way to treat an enemy.
How could we in this country do this to anyone?
The answer is, we twice elevated a man as amoral as Donald Trump to absolute power, and he brought with him—and is bringing with him again—men and women as violent, vicious, and wicked as Stephen Miller.
It’s hard to think of Miller and his plans for our country without feeling anything but cold, hard pit-of-your-stomach rage and sadness.
Over the years, many of those correctly raw emotions toward Miller have been tempered by media mockery of his awkward manner of public speaking. I’m guilty of this myself, having once compared Miller to Danny DeVito’s Oswald Cobblepot.
Lines like that, though, do not do Miller justice, as either a villain, a demagogue, or a policymaker. Miller’s talent is to use more charming and less venomous personalities—oddly enough, like Trump—to launder the practices of violence and destruction that he then orchestrates behind the scenes. Miller was one of Trump’s first appointees after he won November’s election, with the titles of deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser (jobs that do not require Senate approval). Miller has promised that Trump will issue a “light-speed” flurry of executive orders on Day 1 of his second term, previewing in an interview with the New York Times the reimplantation of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, mass detention camps on the border, sweeping workplace raids, another attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and more.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.” Miller has also reportedly threatened to stop issuing federal identification forms to children born in the United States to immigrants lacking permanent legal status, ending by fiat the constitutional protection of birthright citizenship. Trump’s immigration policies the next four years promise to be another horror show, again with Miller at its center.
The only optimism I have entering this second Trump presidency is the memory of the vigor with which so many ordinary citizens in the first term rose up to oppose the most needlessly brutal Miller policies, eventually forcing even Trump to back down. My hope is that we will collectively prove ourselves worthy once that moment again arrives. My fear is that the collective numbness that has greeted Trump’s return to power will outweigh any potential moral clarity and purpose in the public response.
In that case, we will all truly be at the whims of the Stephen Millers of the world.
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