Trump aide who 'quietly' controls the US government just doubled down

President Donald Trump has fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, but that does not mean his draconian anti-immigrant agenda will wind down. According to a recent report, the architect of that agenda remains as entrenched in power as ever.

"Far from acknowledging defeat, Mr. Miller appears to have simply adjusted his strategy in an effort to minimize political fallout," wrote Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Christopher Flavelle, Emily Cochrane and Glenn Thrush of The New York Times in a Sunday report.

The report elaborated that, even as Trump’s “crackdown” has become unpopular in pretty much every American political group outside of the president’s own base, Miller has adjusted to the challenges by treating it as a personal test rather than a sign he should reevaluate his course.

"Mr. Miller, one of the most influential presidential advisers in recent memory and an unabashed champion of Mr. Trump's hard-line immigrant crackdown is at a crossroads,” the Times elaborated. Because of his performance up to this point, “he faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to drive the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and the country have for tactics that proved successful in helping to boost arrests of immigrants but reignited a polarizing debate."

Overall the report observed that “rather than Mr. Miller seeing his power recede, he has moved to apply it in other ways, seeking policies that would pressure undocumented immigrants to leave on their own.” As a result “Mr. Miller's influence has also extended beyond Washington."

Like many other figures in Trump’s orbit, Miller is widely considered to be extremely racist. Last month New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that by ending public education funding for undocumented children in red states, Trump is deliberately attempting to keep underprivileged racial minorities less educated than theirs. For this reason, Bouie argued that the administration's efforts to repeal civil rights protections and other legislation from that era must be understood in an explicitly white supremacist context.

“Both Miller and the MAGA right are engaged in the same kind of work as their political forebears,” Bouie wrote. “It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century. Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way.”

Miller is so influential, he is even believed to have been responsible for the Trump administration’s decision to reverse its previous withdrawal of political lawsuits against progressive law firms and lawyers. His America First Legal has also targeted law firms and corporations for diversity initiatives.