Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire writes:

During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker.

LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry.

No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff, has returned to the White House stronger and more determined than ever to silence the derision and plow through legal constraints.

Miller tried to deter migration during Trump’s first term with a series of moves implemented by trial and error, mostly one at a time. He tried “zero tolerance” family separations, asylum bans, and the “Remain in Mexico” policy. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Miller finally had a plausible justification for using the emergency public-health law he had long coveted as a border-control tool, and he rode that policy—Title 42—to the end of Trump’s first term.

Miller’s policy making was generally reactive then, a response to the border pressures the administration was struggling to contain, former officials who worked with him say. As one career DHS official told us on the condition of anonymity, he was “throwing mud at the wall to see what would stick.”

Miller’s approach is different this time. He has unleashed an everything-at-once policy storm modeled after the MAGA guru Stephen K. Bannon’s “flood the zone” formula. Drawing on policy ideas worked up in conservative think tanks during the four years between Trump’s terms, Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us.

This tactic also gives Miller multiple ways to seal the border, shut down the U.S. asylum system, and ramp up deportations. “It’s Do everything all at once everywhere,” says Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group aligned with Miller that has incubated some of his policy ideas. [Continue reading…]