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Pressure is growing on key White House senior adviser Stephen Miller over the killing of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by border patrol agents in Minneapolis and its politically divisive aftermath.
Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy, finds himself in the rare position of being contradicted and excluded from crucial decisions by the US president.
About three and a half hours after the tragedy on Saturday, Miller used social media to describe Pretti, 37, as a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents”. On Tuesday, when asked if he believes Pretti was an assassin, Trump said: “No.”
The president had held a two-hour meeting with homeland security secretary Kristi Noem in the Oval Office on Monday evening at Noem’s request. Miller was conspicuously absent.
Meanwhile, the Axios news site, citing four unnamed sources, reported that Miller was responsible for the Department of Homeland Security’s baseless claim that Pretti intended to “massacre” officers, parroted by Noem. “Stephen heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” one of the sources said.
But on Tuesday, in a statement to CNN, Miller admitted that the border patrol agents “may not have been following” proper protocol before the fatal shooting of Pretti – a rare reversal by a man known for typically reinforcing and intensifying his positions.
On this occasion not even the Trump administration could create its own version of reality. Multiple phone videos made by witnesses exposed its false narrative and prompted an outcry from the public, business leaders and even some Republicans, forcing the president into a partial climbdown on Monday.
He decided to pull border patrol commander Greg Bovino out of Minneapolis and send in border czar Tom Homan, who has been critical of Miller’s approach, to “recalibrate tactics” and improve cooperation with state and local officials. The president also held cordial phone calls with Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.
That raised a question mark over Noem’s future. More than 160 Democrats in the House of Representatives have signed on to an effort to impeach her. Asked on Tuesday whether the homeland security secretary would step down, Trump insisted that she would not. “I think she’s doing a very good job,” he said. “The border is totally secure.”
But arguably the true culprit of the Minneapolis debacle is Miller, who is officially the White House deputy chief of staff but has been likened by some to Trump’s prime minister. Axios reported: “His reach, sources say, includes effective oversight of Noem, despite her cabinet-level seniority. ‘Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,’ Noem is said to have told one interlocutor.”
Last May, for example, Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that he wanted 3,000 immigration arrests a day – a nearly tenfold increase on the previous year. His abuses of power have discredited Trump’s deportation policy, argues Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
“Stephen Miller is the architect,” Jacobs said. “He’s the guy who has been haranguing ICE to get tougher and deliver more numbers, bring people in and we’ll sort them out as to whether you got the right people later. The recklessness, the brutality, the lack of legal process – all of that has its roots with Stephen Miller.
“So the fact that he was locked out of the White House meeting is a strong message to Washington that the president does not approve of this process and that there has to be a change. I do not expect Stephen Miller to be fired because Donald Trump supports the policy, just not how it was done.”
Miller, 40, has proved a master at converting Trump’s impulses into policy. He has been so central to the Make America Great Again project, and so ostentatious in his loyalty, that there seems little chance of him losing his job. But Minneapolis was a rare misstep in which he got ahead of his boss and, some observers believe, he will now take a back seat until the storm passes.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “He’ll have much less of a public role in the foreseeable future. It’s clear that Trump personally does not like the PR aspect of what’s been going on, and he’s sensitive to that and always has been, and he knows from both his instinct and from what the data is telling him, that Miller and Noem did not do themselves any favours with how they immediately came out to address the killing.”
Olsen does not believe that Miller is in danger of becoming the fall guy, however. “Miller’s been with him for quite some time. Trump has no problem getting rid of non-performing subordinates but one suspects that Miller in many ways is performing and he is not going to toss him over the side lightly.”
Miller performs where it matters for Trump: on television. He is a pugnacious defender of the president, given to colourful language that characterises Democrats as a “domestic extremist organisation” and America leading a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”. His wife, Katie Miller, is striving to carve a niche as a Maga podcaster.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Stephen Miller is too dominant in Trump’s mental schema about what the Maga base wants to truly be cut out of a loop. I don’t think there’s a world where Stephen Miller doesn’t retain his authority and his power with Trump.”
Wilson, a veteran political strategist who has worked on Republican campaigns, added: “Strategically he may step back a half step, but this is not a world where Stephen Miller is going to give up power. He’s worked too hard to get to where he is.
“The problem with Stephen Miller is that evil is resilient. He doesn’t feel any shame. He doesn’t think that this is a bad thing. He’s convinced that other people have embarrassed him but not that he’s running a vast assault on the constitutional liberties of Americans.”
