As the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
And from later in the piece: "To most Republican staffers, [Miller] was known for his mass e-mails about immigration, full of links to articles from fringe Web sites. “I just started deleting them when I’d see his name,” a senior Republican staffer told me. “Everyone did.”
“As a staffer, serving his boss, he was excellent,” Julia Preston, a former correspondent for the Times, told me. She spoke to Miller regularly. “This stuff is emotional for him.” In a conversation about H1-B visas, “he was talking so passionately that he actually wept.”
On family separation: "He was obsessed with the idea of consequences...the consequences were specific. The official said, “Miller made clear to us that, if you start to treat children badly enough, you’ll be able to convince other parents to stop trying to come with theirs.”
Miller tried to enlist officials to bolster the President’s claims about immigrant crime. A ret. colonel who worked at DHS told me, “He’d say, ‘You need to work harder to show how bad immigrants are. Highlight stories on criminal immigrants getting charged after being released.’”
"At meetings, he would ask for data that were irrelevant to the discussion, then launch into a monologue. Another DHS official said, 'You didn’t know which Stephen you were going to get. He could be very articulate, then he’d be quoting Breitbart. It was all over the place."
"His policy ideas were often impracticable or unrelated to the issue under discussion. He wanted the department to house all migrants at Guantánamo Bay & the F.B.I. to conduct immigration arrests. One official told me, “It got tedious. None of it would solve the problem we had."
"Convinced that a cabal of deep-state actors was trying to thwart Trump’s agenda, Miller had effectively forced officials to go underground. “Stephen’s experience has deepened his belief in the deep state, that they’re all going to leak in an attempt to stop his policy efforts.”
"He already resented Cissna for what he called the “asylum fraud crisis." After he hectored Cissna on one interagency phone call, with dozens of officials listening in, Cissna told him to stand down. “I won’t stand down,” Miller shouted. “I won’t stand down. I won’t stand down.”
Miller "lambasted" ICE chief Ronald Vitiello over federal rules for detention of children: “You ought to be working on this regulation all day, every day. It should be the first thought you have when you wake up. And it should be the last thought you have before you go to bed.”
“With the border virtually sealed, Miller is turning his attention inward. There’s no one left at D.H.S. to say ‘No’ to Miller anymore,” a senior official said. Another was present at a meeting in which Miller advocated allowing ICE officers to pull children out of school."
"If the Supreme Court ends DACA, then 'Miller will be in ecstasy. He’ll finally have the leverage over the Democratic Congress that he’s been dying to have this entire time. He’ll say, ‘Well, you’re all worried we’re going to deport them. What will you agree to?’"
