In March of 2016, Donald J. Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was in trouble. His poll numbers were collapsing, and he was repeatedly the subject of jokes on major TV networks and elsewhere for his attacks on women, Muslims, and Mexicans. Fox News criticized his “extreme, sick obsession” with Megyn Kelly. “The bottom is dropping out for Donald Trump,” read one article on NBC News. Even immigration hard-liners weren’t sure about the reality-TV star. They knew his promised border wall was a costly, impractical symbol; for decades, border barriers had underwhelmed in their ability to decrease immigration.
Stephen Miller had a plan, though. Trump’s lanky 30-year-old senior policy adviser and speechwriter had connections in the Border Patrol and ICE unions from his time derailing a bipartisan immigration reform bill as communications director for then–Alabama Senator (soon-to-be Attorney General) Jeff Sessions. Miller reached out to the Border Patrol union’s president, Brandon Judd. It was the first in a long chain of decisions that would help transform the Department of Homeland Security—with its mandate to defend against everything from terrorism to pandemics—into a tool for pushing Trump’s political agenda, focused on strangling legal immigration and social justice causes.
When Trump became president, Miller went to work. It should be no surprise, then, that less than four years later the Department of Homeland Security is openly defying a US Supreme Court decision to maintain Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era deportation protection program for people brought to this country as children. The DHS has also been cracking down on anti-racist protesters at demonstrations in Democratic-run cities that began after George Floyd was murdered. The department has become a partisan weapon largely detached from its mission of protecting homeland security.