The Political Price of Cruelty

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/stephen-millers-family-separation-policy-is-already-backfiring.html

The Political Price of Cruelty
Stephen Miller thought separating migrant families would provoke Democrats and bolster Trump. The backlash will be painful for his boss and his party.
By Jamelle Bouie
June 18, 20186:24 PM


Stephen Miller has always liked to provoke. Before he was a White House adviser, Miller was a teenage provocateur devoting his time and talents to “trolling” his ideological foes. He brought that same ethos to the Trump administration, delighting in the outrage accompanying his travel ban and his push against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, indifferent to the human cost of his favored policies.

The trouble for Miller—and the White House—is that amoral trolling is not good politics. The outrage to Miller’s policies does not dissipate like the anger around his college newspaper columns; it becomes critical fuel for action and opposition. The response to the travel ban—mass protests and organized legal action—helped crystallize early opposition to the administration, dealing it a major political blow and ending whatever “honeymoon” it enjoyed with the public. The DACA crisis spawned by Miller has split conservatives in Congress and could cost some moderate Republicans their seats come November. Trump’s new “zero tolerance” approach to border crossings—in which immigration agents separate parents from their children and treat asylum-seekers as criminals— may win Miller some plaudits from conservative pundits, but it too is a fundamentally rotten policy that is likely to backfire on the administration.

The “zero-tolerance” policy, crafted by Miller, is meant to provoke; to send the administration’s opponents into a spiral of anger and outrage. By that measure, it has been a success. The policy has sparked protests across the country and vocal condemnation from a variety of civil groups and religious figures, including Franklin Graham, a prominent Trump supporter. “It’s disgraceful, and it’s terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit,” he said.

Images from the border—of young children in pens, of panicked parents desperate to see their sons and daughters—have only heightened that opposition. One former shelter worker recounted “prison-like” conditions as well as “children running away, screaming, throwing furniture and attempting suicide,” while the Associated Press reported on an “old warehouse” where hundreds of children wait in “cages.” These stories underscore the incredible cruelty of this project, driven less by the demands of the law—the decision to charge all border-crossers with “illegal entry” and subject them to a criminal process is discretionary—and more by President Trump’s stated aim of reducing immigration to the United States from “shithole countries.”

Democrats have gone on the attack, blasting the administration and highlighting the conditions of migrant children at detention centers across the country. “What the administration is doing is, they’re using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mortar to build their wall,” said Rep. Adam Schiff on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s an effort to extort a bill to their liking in the Congress.” At a Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas, former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro—who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama—joined protesters in condemning family separation. “It amounts essentially to state-sponsored child abuse that is traumatizing young children by taking them away from their parents, not letting them know when they’re going to see their parents again, keeping them in conditions that we wouldn’t want any of our children in,” he said.

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Stephen Miller may have successfully trolled his opposition, but like the attempted “Muslim ban,” his weapon of choice is a moral travesty and a political disaster in the making. Instead of bolstering his boss, it may weigh him down with another crisis, jeopardizing his party’s hold on Congress and the administration’s ability to operate with impunity.