White House aide Miller targeted in backlash over family separations

President Donald Trump’s former speechwriter has been the architect of his most controversial policies but so far has faced few consequences.

By NANCY COOK 06/21/2018 07:09 PM EDT

Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, was noticeably absent from public view this week as the White House first vociferously defended and then caved on separating migrant children from their parents.

That wasn’t an accident. Among White House insiders, there is a sense that the president’s senior adviser for policy is a bad front man for the issue he’s most passionate about. Miller stayed entirely out of the spotlight during days of mounting political pressure, though behind the scenes he visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday night along with Trump to sell House Republicans on immigration legislation.

While other White House aides, like national security adviser John Bolton and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, are prized by Trump for their smooth defense of his policies on television, Miller is the opposite, valued as a source of ideas that the president believes appeal to his base. That includes not just the “zero-tolerance” immigration enforcement stance that triggered the family separations but the 2017 travel ban targeting visitors from predominantly Muslim countries, which generated a cascade of litigation for the young administration.

It’s hard to overstate Miller’s influence on the administration’s positions on immigration, according to interviews with a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House. Immediately after signing his executive order Wednesday suspending family separation at the border, Trump took his former campaign speechwriter-turned-immigration czar along for the ride on Air Force One to a rally in Minnesota.

But the backlash over the policy has opened cracks in Miller’s support network on Capitol Hill and among Republicans both inside and outside the White House, who have viewed the separation of migrant families as a huge political and policy misstep for the White House — and, for some, as a moral lapse.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/21/stephen-miller-family-separations-immigration-policy-664278