Stephen Miller, the Architect of Trump’s Immigration Plan

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Donald Trump began his Presidential bid, in 2015, with an infamous speech, at Trump Tower, in which he said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But it was not until a former aide to Jeff Sessions joined Trump’s campaign that the nativist rhetoric coalesced into a policy platform—including the separation of children from their families at the border. Jonathan Blitzer, who writes about immigration for The New Yorker, has been reporting on Stephen Miller’s sway in the Trump Administration and his remarkable success in advancing an extremist agenda. “There has never been an American President who built his campaign around the issue of immigration and later won on that campaign on immigration. Trump was the first and only President really ever to do it,” Blitzer tells David Remnick. Despite this influence, Miller remains largely behind the scenes. Blitzer explains why: “He knows that the kiss of death in this Administration is to be identified as the brains behind the man. He can’t let on that he’s the one who effectively is manipulating Trump on these issues.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United States is a nation of immigrants, but it also has a long history of hostility to immigration.
0:20.0	In modern times, certainly no precedent has taken on the
0:23.5	anti-immigration mantle as assertively as Donald Trump. During his first week in office, he signed
0:29.2	three executive orders on immigration to begin building the wall, to cut federal funding for sanctuary
0:34.5	cities, and the order that became known as the Muslim ban,
0:38.5	which has just been expanded to prevent immigration from Nigeria and five other countries.
0:43.7	And there's also child separation, the cancellation of DACA, preventing asylum seekers entry.
0:49.5	These are all initiatives from the White House policy chief named Stephen Miller.
1:00.0	Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial
1:05.7	and will not be questioned.
1:07.3	Our immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer has profiled Miller in this week's issue of The New Yorker.
1:12.6	John, you write about a moment in 2013, the last time that a comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill ever came before Congress.
1:20.2	And you describe in detail about how a very young Capitol Hill age still in his 20 named Stephen Miller, went about sabotaging the process.
1:28.7	So what happened?
1:31.1	It's quite incredible. I mean, now we think, looking back, we think, you know, do Democrats
1:36.1	believe in workable solutions on immigration? The issue is so polarized. How do we get both
1:42.9	sides to come to some consensus state on the issue is so polarized, how do we get both sides to come to some
1:44.4	consensus state on the issue? The consensus existed in 2013, and the votes were there. What was the
1:51.1	consensus? I mean, this was rough outline. Sweeping comprehensive immigration reform that would
1:55.9	have granted a pathway to citizenship to a large chunk of the 11 million undocumented people living in the
2:02.7	U.S. in exchange for what were fairly typical establishment kind of hardline compromises,
	...

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