The last four years under Donald Trump have been…not good. In addition to all the chaos and incompetence, there’s been the wanton cruelty, perhaps most consistently embodied by his administration’s abhorrent immigration agenda: The travel ban; the stupid wall; children separated from their families. Trump ran in 2016 on an anti-immigration agenda, and his administration has been every bit as brutal as advertised.
And yet, it seems likely that things would get worse in a second Trump term. Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, Stephen Miller—the administration’s foremost anti-immigration zealot—outlined his goals for the next four years should the president manage to stay in office. The overarching plan, he told the outlet, will be to restrict immigration even more than they already have by limiting asylum grants, broadening the travel ban, curbing work visas, and “cracking down aggressively” on sanctuary cities, which he said would be both outlawed and punished in a second Trump term.
“It’s going to require a whole government effort,” he said of his plans, noting that the difference between his agenda and that of Trump’s challenger, Joe Biden, “underscores the depth of the choice facing the American people” this election. “We are going to win this election so that people like Stephen Miller don’t get the chance to write more xenophobic policies that dishonor our American values,” Jen Molina, director of Latino media for the Biden campaign, told NBC.
Immigration had been Trump’s defining issue during the 2016 campaign, but Miller has been the architect of that platform. The pandemic, civil unrest, and a battered economy have taken center stage this race, but that doesn’t mean the senior adviser hasn’t been behind the scenes, intent on pursuing his xenophobic agenda. As my colleague Abigail Tracy reported last week, Miller remains one of the most powerful figures in Trumpworld, exerting a shadowy influence across multiple agencies—including the Department of Homeland Security, which he manipulates through Chad Wolf, the acting secretary. In a second Trump term, it’s possible Miller’s power could grow even more. Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who has become a prominent conservative critic of the president (and revealed himself this week to be the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed), recalled in a recent interview that a “very senior adviser to the president,” who was clearly implied to be Miller, said a second term agenda would be “shock and awe,” with a suite of executive orders “so extreme” a president seeking re-election otherwise couldn’t risk. “There’s a number of things they have been cautious about because of the legal and political risks in the first term,” Miller biographer Jean Guerrero told the Guardian this week. “I think that in a second term you would see Stephen Miller get much freer rein when it comes to his wishlist of items.”
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