In Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, the president renewed a long-standing promise to deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” That pitch has always been tailored to help listeners hear what they want to hear. For many of his supporters, “criminal” was the important word, implying that Trump would keep communities safe from the dangerous gang members he had warned them about. But for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the most important part was — and has always been — the words “millions and millions.”
For Trump’s most influential adviser, the more deportations the better, regardless of criminal status.
For Trump’s most influential adviser, the more deportations the better, regardless of criminal status. NBC News reported Monday that in a meeting last week, Miller berated top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for not making enough arrests. “According to two sources who spoke with the attendees,” NBC News reported, Miller at one point was “threatening to fire the leaders of the field offices who post the bottom 10% of arrest figures monthly.” (NBC News has reached out to Miller for comment.)
In the same meeting, which was first reported by Axios, Miller set a new quota for ICE’s 25 field offices: 3,000 arrests per day. He confirmed that mandate in a Fox News appearance Wednesday, calling the figure a “minimum” and promising that Trump would “keep pushing to get that number up higher and higher each and every single day.” That new target is already double the quota from January, when each field office was charged with making 75 arrests per day, or roughly 1,200 to 1,500 in total.
Miller’s rant also indicated that ICE’s already expansive efforts weren’t enough to meet the Trump administration’s unofficial goal of 1 million deportees in its first year. NBC News reported that he “told attendees to look more broadly than immigrants who have committed crimes and to arrest noncriminal migrants anywhere they encounter them as well.” It’s exactly the kind of widened net that I predicted in January when the administration first began stripping migrants of their parole or temporary protected status, an ongoing effort that has left more than a million foreign-born people facing potential removal.
The scope of Miller’s demands is far beyond the supposed focus on criminals that other Trump officials have been careful to maintain (at least in public). Even in cases when mistaken identity or administrative oversight have put people legally allowed to be here on planes, the White House has maintained that the focus is on deporting, as press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country.”
It’s becoming harder to maintain that fiction, though, as the dragnet widens. Outside immigration courtrooms around the country, ICE agents have begun arresting migrants immediately after dismissing their cases, ending the protection that the legal process had granted them. In doing so, immigration court appointments have become a potential trap for migrants seeking asylum or other grounds to remain in the United States.
In the Trump-supporting communities where neighbors are being suddenly arrested, it’s raising questions about just what they’d signed up for with their votes. The New York Times recently drew attention to the case of Ming Li Hui, who goes by Carol, who works as a waitress and housecleaner in a small Missouri town. Twenty years after arriving from Hong Kong, she now faces deportation:
Many are now asking how you can support Carol and also Mr. Trump. “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.” She paused. “This is Carol.”
It’s easy to dismiss those concerns as too little, too late. There were extremely loud warnings that Hui’s removal is exactly what Trump’s return would bring. But if Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his repeated insistence on targeting “criminals” were sincere, there’d be no grounds for the mass deportation efforts that Miller is spearheading.
The only serious crime committed by many of the immigrants Miller is targeting is the sin of being foreign — and, usually, nonwhite — in America.
Under U.S. law, crossing the border illegally is in most cases a civil violation, not a criminal one — but Miller has long worked to blur that line. The earliest executive orders that Trump signed on immigration instructed officials to treat all undocumented immigrants as targets for removal and use expedited removal processes against anyone who arrived in the last two years. Relatedly, Miller and his ilk have insisted, without merit, that the millions of migrants admitted during the Biden administration are all here illegally.
The only serious crime committed by many of the immigrants Miller is targeting is the sin of being foreign — and, usually, nonwhite — in America. In his eyes, there’s little to no difference between a drug-dealing gang member and a churchgoing mother who overstayed a visa. All are criminals in Miller’s view, and he has worked hard to warp the immigration system to agree with him. The administration may not hit the millions of deportations that Trump has promised, but Miller will make sure that as many lives are ruined as possible before he’s done.
