Graham torches Stephen Miller: As long as he's in charge of negotiating immigration, we're "going nowhere" https://t.co/gjTXG3MUnD pic.twitter.com/g44DcO1Xv5
— The Hill (@thehill) January 21, 2018
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Imagine lucking into position of immense power for reasons unrelated to any personal merit & choosing to wield it to hurt vulnerable people. https://t.co/fWTDtSvWXb
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) October 14, 2017
Never found the space to post this link when it came out last October, but the GOP shutdown “impasse” means Stephen Miller is in the spotlight again. Jonathan Blitzer, at the
In 1980, the year that Congress passed the Refugee Act, the U.S. accepted more than two hundred thousand refugees. The law created a robust program for accepting people who had been displaced by war and strife, and made refugee policy a new tool of American foreign policy, improving the country’s standing with foreign allies and helping the military and intelligence communities find partners in conflict zones. Since then, the mandated refugee “cap” set by the President has fluctuated; during the Obama Administration, it averaged seventy-six thousand, and, in 2017, Obama raised the cap to a hundred and ten thousand to allow in more Syrians fleeing civil war. Then came Donald Trump. In January, he signed an executive order temporarily freezing the refugee program, barring all Syrians, and slashing the number of refugees allowed into the country for the remainder of the year. Late last month, the White House announced that next year’s cap would be forty-five thousand, a record low. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Vice-President, and the Office of Management and Budget had wanted the number to be higher. But they had all been forced to compete with one influential White House official: Stephen Miller, the thirty-two-year-old former aide to Jeff Sessions who has become Trump’s top immigration adviser…
Miller, who has gone from the political fringe to the White House on the strength of his reputation as an anti-immigration ideas man, joined the Trump campaign early. He is close to both the President and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and has had a direct hand in several of the Administration’s most significant immigration decisions, including the travel bans and the cancellation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “He’s been thoughtful and low-key about overtaking the policy-making process,” one White House official told me. “That’s the reason he survived.”
The chain of events that led to the announcement of the new refugee cap began on June 5th, when Miller met with officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and a policy group called the Homeland Security Council. Every summer, the State Department and the N.S.C. lead a series of discussions to decide the next year’s cap. Officials weigh dozens of different considerations, solicit input from the various stakeholder agencies, and ultimately bring a number to the President for his approval. The process is technical and exacting, a months-long slog through meetings, position papers, and constant recalibrations. Miller’s presence at the June 5th meeting itself was unusual: he heads the Domestic Policy Council, a body staffed by political appointees, which had never before played a role in refugee policy.
“We know how this used to go in the past,” he told the officials in the room. “But we also know that the President views this as a homeland-security issue.” Everyone understood the significance of Miller’s words. “Miller basically made clear that it was not going to be looked at from the typical lens of foreign policy,” a second White House official told me. “It was a domestic-policy issue, an immigration issue. The Department of Homeland Security was going to get involved.”…
When evidence emerged that didn’t suit Miller’s aims, he squelched it. In March, the White House had asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study the costs of refugee resettlement. The department returned with a study, in July, showing that the revenue generated by refugees in the form of local, state, and federal taxes exceeded the costs of resettling them by sixty-three billion dollars. According to the Times, Miller suppressed the study and demanded that H.H.S. recalculate the numbers. Two of the White House officials told me they’d heard that Miller had given H.H.S. strict instructions at the outset. “The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President,” he had told people at the agency. (The White House denied that Miller was involved with the H.H.S. report.)…
GOP Monsters Open Thread: Stephen Miller Is A Decency RoadblockPost + Comments (55)