Transcript: Stephen Miller Rages at Low Arrests—and Wrecks a MAGA Scam

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Stephen Miller has been privately raging at ICE officials, demanding that they send their agents out to arrest as many day laborers and construction workers as possible—all to get those deportation numbers way, way up. We’ve all seen the impact all this is having on immigrants and Americans. It’s a horror. But behind all of this, something else is happening. The Atlantic reports an important piece that morale at ICE is actually plummeting. And tellingly, a key reason for it is precisely that ICE is now going after low-level people rather than serious criminals. That’s a striking indictment of Trump-Miller priorities. It’s also a very clear sign of just how dark and ugly ICE’s law enforcement agenda has gotten and how off the rails it all is. Today we’re talking about all this with one of our favorite observers on this issue: Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us. We’re going to get into all the hidden implications of this news. Todd, thanks for coming on.

Todd Schulte: Thanks for having me. I’m a longtime listener, first-time participant.

Sargent: Great. Glad to hear someone’s listening. So this new report in The Atlantic by Nick Miroff, who’s an experienced immigration reporter, is really remarkable. Let’s start with what it says about Stephen Miller. He and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem met with senior ICE officials in May, [during which] Miller and Noem berated the officials, insisting that ICE now has to hit quotas of 3,000 arrests per day. Critically, the piece reports that the officials grew uncomfortable at that, and Miller then steamrolled anyone who resisted according to the piece. Todd, for these people, it’s only about getting as many immigrants out of the country as possible. Your thoughts on this?

Schulte: Yeah. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that for your average voter, they may not have known what to expect on immigration policy. The president said a lot of things the first time he ran. There were a lot of really awful policies he put in place, but the promises to deport as many people as possible—thankfully, thanks to a lot of work people on the ground did—didn’t happen. This time around, you have seen over the past six months—just to be very clear—an unprecedented layering of tools and policies designed to inflict as much chaos and harm on immigrant communities as possible. And at the front of that is an effort to strip away status from millions of people, subject millions and millions of people to immigration enforcement, with that goal to maximize the number of people who—I want to be clear—would be arrested but also are going through their lives fearing that they themselves or their family members could be subjected to arrest at any time.

Sargent: Trump has now on two occasions admitted forthrightly.… Well, maybe forthrightly isn’t the word for anything Trump says, but he did admit—maybe accidentally—that his mass deportations are hurting the economy. He said they’re hurting farmers. He said straight out that these deportations are taking away good workers from employers and that Americans are not rushing in to fill the jobs. It’s the most amazing indictment of Trump’s policies I’ve heard in a while.