Chuck DarwinA striking report in The Wall Street Journal suggests Trump may be moving to marginalize Stephen Miller’s influence.
But Trump appears to think the difficulty can be cured by a few optical tweaks, when the real culprit is a deeper ideological one.
Trump wants to “lower the profile of his mass deportation effort,”
the Journal reveals.
He wants voters to think the targets of these deportations are
“bad guys,”
not noncriminal undocumented residents.
He wants less visibility for ICE raids in cities,
fewer public confrontations with local officials,
and less public talk about “mass deportations,”
which, he now grasps,
are hideously unpopular.
Tellingly, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles now sees deportations as a liability for the midterms, per the report.
That Trump is siding with her on the politics here is a sign of political panic and a rebuke to Miller,
who apparently delights in flaunting the administration’s vicious sadism and overt white nationalism
—and seems certain that latent majorities are quietly cheering along.
To be clear, this report deserves serious skepticism.
It very much bears watching whether ICE will actually end up deprioritizing the removal of noncriminal immigrants.
Trump mostly wants the appearance of a pivot:
According to the Journal, he wants a focus on “criminals” in GOP “messaging.”
But recalibrating the “messaging” won’t address the public’s broad rejection of Trumpism’s deeper anti-immigrant project.
And all signs are that this project is fully forging ahead.
Case in point:
Miller just met with Texas state legislators and floated a truly extreme proposal.
The New York Times reports that Miller discussed the idea of ending state public funding for the education of undocumented children,
and asked the lawmakers why they hadn’t passed a bill limiting funding for education so it only goes to kids who are citizens or are lawfully present in the United States.
This idea
—denying public school to undocumented children
—has mostly passed under the radar,
but it’s a long-held dream of the anti-immigrant right.
The basic aim is to destabilize the lives of undocumented families as another way to encourage them to self-deport.
But there’s an even more pernicious ideological aim at work here.
Getting a red state to attempt this would run afoul of a 1982 Supreme Court decision,
which blocked states from denying public education to young people based on immigration status.
"Plyler v. Doe" is not as well known as the other big civil rights rulings,
but it’s momentous:
It held that restricting public education this way would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s enshrinement of equal protection before the law.
Miller and his allies are gunning for Plyler.
If a state did restrict education to migrant kids, it would likely provoke another court battle—possibly providing an opening for the right-wing court to overturn Plyler.
That would be seismic.
The basic principle at issue is whether these kids are to be regarded as equal persons despite being undocumented.
The Burger court found that denying them education would relegate them to an unacceptable subclass status.
As immigration law scholar Hiroshi Motomura explains,
the ruling embodied the idea that
“the emergence of a permanent subcaste is intolerable within a national constitutional culture based on equality.”
Miller really wants to end that “constitutional culture based on equality.”
It’s hard to know whether Texas lawmakers will do his bidding
—or how the high court would rule if they did.
But if it worked, other red states with many immigrant families in them could follow.
This would immeasurably impoverish our nation,
but the effort advances Miller’s ideological project in still another sense.
Trump wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of his 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship.
That of course also involves the Fourteenth Amendment
—its guarantee that all persons born in the United States are automatic citizens.
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