In a meeting last month, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller tore into senior leaders at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, demanding a massive surge in arrests of undocumented immigrants. As ICE tried to comply with Miller’s orders, immigration activists and other concerned Americans launched a series of protests in defiance of the mass deportation agenda. But it was a different set of protests that got the attention of Miller’s boss, President Donald Trump.
While Miller cares little about the secondary effects of mass deportations, the rest of the administration can’t ignore them entirely.
Last Thursday, the administration abruptly paused raids and arrests at hotels, farms and restaurants, a stunning shift in priorities that was clearly contrary to Miller’s orders. But the change was short-lived. The Department of Homeland Security reversed that guidance Monday, according to The Washington Post, allowing the immigration raids on those industries to resume and letting Miller retake control of the policy that has been the focus of his years in both Trump administrations.
Since Inauguration Day, Miller has had carte blanche on immigration policy in his dual role as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser. His insistence that ICE make 3,000 arrests per day kick-started a scramble from field offices to meet his demand. But as Vox’s Eric Levitz recently noted, Miller’s own strategy of deterrence at the border has led to a decline in the kind of encounters that would make it easy for ICE agents to rack up those numbers:
Over the past two months, America witnessed the largest decline in its foreign-born workforce since the pandemic in 2020. This contraction was driven partly by a collapse in unauthorized border crossings. Between January 2022 and June 2024, US Customs and Border Protection encountered an average of 200,000 people per month at America’s Southwest border. According to an analysis of government data from Deutsche Bank, that figure has fallen to just 12,000 people per month since Trump’s inauguration.
That has meant ICE has had to expand its list of targets to meet its quotas, including rounding up day laborers in Home Depot parking lots and field workers toiling on farms. The resulting climate of fear has scared more than just undocumented immigrants in these workforces. A Texas farmer recently told NBC affiliate KVEO of Brownsville, Texas, that within the last three weeks, there have been “zero people wanting to come out and be exposed to be able to be picked up whether they are legal or illegal.”
Miller will need to work to maintain control over the system that he’s building in the face of other competing pressures.
Business owners’ concerns have filtered upward through GOP members of Congress and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins until finally reaching Trump’s ears last week. The president posted Thursday on Truth Social to lament that the “great farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them,” promising that “changes are coming.” According to The New York Times, that night an email went out to ICE regional offices telling Homeland Security Investigations staffers to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”
The rapid shift is a reminder that while Miller cares little about the secondary effects of mass deportations, the rest of the administration can’t ignore them entirely. For all his demagoguery about immigration, Trump has never been as a pure an ideologue as Miller. In both business and politics alike, the president often happily promises competing sides whatever they want to hear to get his way in the moment, only to flip sides again at his convenience. Facing irate farmers, who have been a key base of support, and with his own ties to the hotel industry, Trump (at least briefly) chose to sacrifice some deportation numbers to appease them.
The whiplash-inducing flip-flop shows that Miller will need to work hard to maintain control over the system that he’s building in the face of other competing pressures. For now, as the decision to reverse course and resume the raids shows, Miller has the upper hand among his would-be rivals in the administration. Trump’s order to have ICE increase operations in Democratic-run cities likewise underscores that the broader attack on immigrants hasn’t lost cachet with the president. The costs are piling up, though, as DHS pulls in more resources to fuel the deportation drive, with ICE reportedly already around $1 billion over its budget for the year.
None of that is likely to deter Miller, though, in his drive to deport roughly 1 million people each year. But as the damage of Miller’s monomaniacal obsession deepens, Americans are less and less happy with the results. In other words, the more successful Miller’s anti-immigrant purge is at disrupting the status quo, the likelier Trump will wind up second-guessing him. This likely then won’t be the last time we see Trump overrule his most loyal attendant if he feels the downsides are outweighing the benefits.
