Perhaps Stephen Miller (Also) Believes in the Efficacy of a Deportation Gulag as a Tool to Usher in Fascism

Like me, Greg Sargent continues to focus on the messaging opportunities presented by recent developments in Stephen Miller’s deportation gulag. (In the wake of NYT’s coverage and Sargent’s interview with Carol Hui the other day, Hui has been released from detention.)

This post reacts to this NBC story which, in turn, follows up on the Washington Examiner (!!!) story reporting on Miller’s recent meltdown about the number of deportations. NBC added to the story about Miller’s meltdown by pointing to how Trump has shifted law enforcement’s focus from their day jobs — hunting child sex traffickers, hackers, spies, and terrorists — to instead hunt peaceful undocumented migrants.

It is the latest example of how President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations is reshaping federal law enforcement as officials shift resources toward immigration-related cases — including nonviolent administrative offenses — leaving less time and attention for other types of criminal investigations.

The plan calls for using 3,000 ICE agents, including 1,800 from Homeland Security Investigations, which generally investigates transnational crimes and is not typically involved in arresting noncriminal immigrants; 2,000 Justice Department employees from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration; and 500 employees from Customs and Border Protection. It also includes 250 IRS agents, some of whom may be used to provide information on the whereabouts of immigrants using tax information, while others would have the authority to make arrests, according to the operation plan.

Sargent argues that if Democrats (I would argue, Trump opponents generally) can explain how Trump is making the country less safe to hunt down people like Carol Hui, they’ll grow even more opposed to Miller’s deportation gulag.

It’s a good point — similar to the one I made about the extent to which Miller’s jihad is depriving Americans of cancer cures. There are a bunch of opportunity costs that come with Miller’s deportation gulag, including hunting child sex traffickers and curing cancer. All of them are bad. We need to tell that story.

Along the way to making that point, though, Sargent makes this claim about Miller’s beliefs. Miller believes, Sargent argues, that migrants poison the nation’s blood. He believes hunting down people like Carol Hui is an emergency.

Unlike Miller, that is, majorities are not ideologically hostile to the mere presence of peaceful unauthorized immigrants in this country; they just want the system to work. Yet Miller and Trump see that presence as itself posing a dire public emergency, or even a civilizational one. In this worldview, there can be no desirable pathway to lawful status here for these people, because they inherently represent a public threat—they are “poisoning” the nation’s “blood.” Making them legal wouldn’t change that. It would only make the threat they pose more insidious.

That’s why Miller is capable of tweeting that the House GOP budget bill is the “most essential piece of legislation” in “the entire Western World,” largely because it ramps up deportation resources. To him, saving the “Western World” rides on deporting all those unauthorized people, including all those “moms.”

All this gets at the deeper reason Miller and Trump are shifting extensive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes into deporting noncriminal immigrants: They simply do see the presence of these people as an extraordinarily urgent national emergency, perhaps more urgent than all those other serious crimes.

I want to suggest that Miller’s unrelenting obsession with his deportation gulag may be more than just uncontrolled racism (though I have no doubt it is that, at least).

When you shift law enforcement from the FBI to DHS, you do more than simply shift law enforcement from focusing on child sex traffickers, hackers, spies, and terrorists to focusing on nice ladies like Carol Hui.

You also shift from a law enforcement that must meet increasing evidentiary standards — first probable cause and then beyond a reasonable doubt — to jail people, to one that has a far more lower threshold, one that affords the claims of the Executive great deference. And even in that context, Miller keeps looking for ways to lower the burden of law enforcement still lower; that’s the reason he pursued his Alien Enemies Act project: because he believes and wants Judges to get no review of such deportations. Next up, Miller wants to eliminate habeas corpus, such that the Executive could detain anyone with no judicial review.

Shifting from the FBI, which must adhere to written rules developed over decades in the wake of past abuses, to DHS, frees you from a great many strictures on how you investigate people. (This would be one effect of making ICE a bigger law enforcement agency than FBI.)

Shifting from FBI to DHS shifts you from a legalized culture to thug culture.

And Stephen Miller has never hid that he wants to apply this abusive law enforcement approach to US citizens to. He’s just not sure how he’ll get there.

Miller explicitly wants to be able to jail and deport people — and he has swept up legal aliens and even American citizens — without any review. That’s the goal. False inflammatory claims about immigration is the means.

I would suggest that Miller’s fondness for deportation gulags is about more than racism (though, again, it is definitely about racism). Miller’s false claims about immigrants are the means he plans to use to lower or eliminate the legal protections that all people in America — citizen and migrant alike — have against abusive Executive power.

Stephen Miller both believes in white supremacy but also that the United States should eliminate due process for all enemies of Donald Trump.