Stephen Miller has a plan | The White House point person on immigration is pursuing a strategy that is bedeviling his opponents and could provoke a constitutional crisis

> During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker.

> *LOL Stephen*, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry.

> No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff, has returned to the White House stronger and more determined than ever to silence the derision and plow through legal constraints.

> Miller tried to deter migration during Trump’s first term with a series of moves implemented by trial and error, mostly one at a time. He tried “zero tolerance” family separations, asylum bans, and the “Remain in Mexico” policy. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Miller finally had a plausible justification for using the emergency public-health law he had long coveted as a border-control tool, and he rode that policy—Title 42—to the end of Trump’s first term.

> Miller’s policy making was generally reactive then, a response to the border pressures the administration was struggling to contain, former officials who worked with him say. As one career DHS official told us on the condition of anonymity, he was “throwing mud at the wall to see what would stick.”

> Miller’s approach is different this time. He has unleashed an everything-at-once policy storm modeled after the MAGA guru Stephen K. Bannon’s “flood the zone” formula. Drawing on policy ideas worked up in conservative think tanks during the four years between Trump’s terms, Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us.

> This tactic also gives Miller multiple ways to seal the border, shut down the U.S. asylum system, and ramp up deportations. “It’s Do everything all at once everywhere,” says Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group aligned with Miller that has incubated some of his policy ideas.

> “Very rarely at this level do you get a second chance at the same issues,” the official told us; Miller “knows what works and doesn’t work.”

> Miller boasted during a November interview with Fox News of his plans to overwhelm opponents with rapid-fire executive actions from “the moment President Trump puts his hands on that Bible.” In the past two months, the administration has attempted to end birthright citizenship, declared an invasion at the southern border, suspended asylum processing, restored the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and deployed the U.S. military to guard the border and send deportees to Guantánamo Bay. Trump has enlisted nearly every federal law-enforcement agency to help with his mass-deportation campaign, a mobilization akin to a wartime effort.

> Trump, Miller, and their allies have spent years attempting to convince the public that illegal immigration is an existential threat. While Democrats and skeptics roll their eyes at “invasion” rhetoric, the administration is systematically asserting wartime authorities predicated on the notion that the United States is facing a foreign invasion that justifies extraordinary powers that go well beyond those that presidents have typically employed. Miller claims that the administration is “liberating” U.S. states and cities from murderers and rapists, a position he uses to depict his critics as treasonous.

> The invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was partly meant to bolster the number of deportations. Trump has been frustrated at the pace of removals so far in his term, which is well below the “millions” he promised, one senior White House official told us. But the move also sent a pair of other, secondary messages.

> It was a dare, the official said, for critics to defend people who include immigrants with violent criminal records and alleged ties to a gang the administration has designated a terrorist organization.

> “These are the worst of the worst,” the official said. “Do Democrats really want to be out there on a limb defending them?”

!ping IMMIGRATION&LAW

The broader strategy is to redefine the meanings of “war” and “enemy” so that the adminstration can claim unlimited powers in response to the non-existent war.

One of the reasons for gunning for Canada and Mexico is so that it can be claimed that the US is surrounded by enemies.

In the worst case scenario, this means troops in the streets and treason being defined as anything that is not aligned with the administration.

If the Dems and other opponents are smart, they will take up the “war” language and use it against the White House.

Trump’s War on America, profiling seniors and veterans and kids as Trump’s targets. Go run with that, Dems.