Has Donald Trump finally figured out that Stephen Miller’s fascist cruelties have become a niggling political liability for him? Well, maybe. A striking report in The Wall Street Journal suggests Trump may be moving to marginalize 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 Suzie 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 restricting education 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 that 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.
Here again, Trump and Miller are aiming at something very profound, if maliciously so. As legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes, the “big idea” animating the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, its “moral north star,” is that birthright citizenship enshrines a guarantee that all persons are born free and equal—their status is not dictated by blood. The goal of undoing this, Amar notes, is to make the constitutional order more “hereditary” and “caste-like.”
That’s precisely what Trump and Miller want. You can hear echoes of this in JD Vance’s now-infamous suggestions that heritage, not adherence to creedal ideals, makes one American. As Jamelle Bouie explains, Vance’s vision is of “tiered citizenship” based not on equality of birth but on one’s “connection to the soil and to the dead.” Substacker Ned Resnikoff hears hints of this in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Western-civilizational-supremacist rhetoric, as well.
Miller’s apparent push to end the guarantee of public education involves undocumented kids, not American-born citizens. But it, too, would create a permanent subclass by denying those kids equality before the law. “Miller’s true goal is to use immigration as a tool to chisel away at the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chris Newman, counsel at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. “Until he’s ejected from the White House, all our rights are in danger.”
The true essence of Miller’s project resides here. It is to treat immigrants—not just undocumented ones but lawfully present ones, and even their American-born children—as fundamentally unfit to become American, as a civilizational threat of existential proportions. That threat must be arrested via mass forced removals—hence the Department of Homeland Security’s rhapsodizing about 100 million deportations—and via an end to treating immigrants and their kids as equals.
Overturning Plyler and ending birthright citizenship are aimed at that goal—and both initiatives are alive and well. So are Miller’s efforts to snuff out every legal pathway for migrants to come here for humanitarian reasons. So too is his construction of massive prison camps to facilitate all those expulsions. So is his effort to deport as many people as possible regardless of their deep ties to communities here: In 2025, only 14 percent of those arrested by ICE had violent criminal records.
Trump can dress this up with spin about targeting “criminals” all he likes. But until all the ethnonationalist, civilizational-emergency-mongering nonsense is exorcised, the deeper problem will fester. Trump believes all those ideas himself, but the depth of his commitment to them has never been all that clear. One doubts he’ll be so inclined, but should he ever want to end this madness, only one move on his part—a big personnel move—can truly put an end to it.
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