In 1980, the year that Congress passed the Refugee Act, the U.S. accepted more than two hundred thousand refugees. The law created a robust program for accepting people who had been displaced by war and strife, and made refugee policy a new tool of American foreign policy, improving the country’s standing with foreign allies and helping the military and intelligence communities find partners in conflict zones. Since then, the mandated refugee “cap” set by the President has fluctuated; during the Obama Administration, it averaged seventy-six thousand, and, in 2017, Obama raised the cap to a hundred and ten thousand to allow in more Syrians fleeing civil war. Then came Donald Trump. In January, he signed an executive order temporarily freezing the refugee program, barring all Syrians, and slashing the number of refugees allowed into the country for the remainder of the year. Late last month, the White House announced that next year’s cap would be forty-five thousand, a record low. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Vice-President, and the Office of Management and Budget had wanted the number to be higher. But they had all been forced to compete with one influential White House official: Stephen Miller, the thirty-two-year-old former aide to Jeff Sessions who has become Trump’s top immigration adviser.
I recently spoke to four Administration officials involved in the refugee-cap process to try to understand how Miller was able to outmaneuver an array of powerful factions in the federal bureaucracy. Each official described Miller as a savvy operator who understands how to insert himself into the policy-creation process. They also described him as the beneficiary of a dysfunctional and understaffed Administration. Miller hadn’t completely gotten his way on the refugee cap, they told me; he wanted it to be lower. The forty-five-thousand figure—which past Administrations would have considered impractically low—amounted to a kind of compromise.
Miller, who has gone from the political fringe to the White House on the strength of his reputation as an anti-immigration ideas man, joined the Trump campaign early. He is close to both the President and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and has had a direct hand in several of the Administration’s most significant immigration decisions, including the travel bans and the cancellation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “He’s been thoughtful and low-key about overtaking the policy-making process,” one White House official told me. “That’s the reason he survived.”
The chain of events that led to the announcement of the new refugee cap began on June 5th, when Miller met with officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and a policy group called the Homeland Security Council. Every summer, the State Department and the N.S.C. lead a series of discussions to decide the next year’s cap. Officials weigh dozens of different considerations, solicit input from the various stakeholder agencies, and ultimately bring a number to the President for his approval. The process is technical and exacting, a months-long slog through meetings, position papers, and constant recalibrations. Miller’s presence at the June 5th meeting itself was unusual: he heads the Domestic Policy Council, a body staffed by political appointees, which had never before played a role in refugee policy.
“We know how this used to go in the past,” he told the officials in the room. “But we also know that the President views this as a homeland-security issue.” Everyone understood the significance of Miller’s words. “Miller basically made clear that it was not going to be looked at from the typical lens of foreign policy,” a second White House official told me. “It was a domestic-policy issue, an immigration issue. The Department of Homeland Security was going to get involved.”
Miller introduced the officials to Gene Hamilton, another former aide to Sessions, whom the Administration had installed at D.H.S. This year, Miller and Hamilton explained, D.H.S.—not the State Department—would present the refugee-cap number to the President. Hamilton would be Miller’s key ally in the process. “They were in direct and constant contact,” the second White House official told me. “If there was ever a question you had for Hamilton, he’d say, ‘Hold on,’ and call Miller.” According to the first White House official, “It was clear that there was some precooked plan here.”
Miller’s presence was felt immediately. Records of the June 5th meeting, known as a “summary of conclusions,” were kept from circulating. Stakeholder agencies—including the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Department, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, and the Office of Management and Budget—were left out of subsequent meetings. These meetings are an “art form” and “highly scripted,” one of the officials told me. “This was highly unusual. They were convening people without anyone knowing what the subject of the meeting was.” (The White House claims that Miller did not coördinate these meetings.) After one meeting, in August, N.S.C. and State Department officials expressed concern that representatives from the Department of Defense, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the F.B.I. were still missing from the discussions. Hamilton responded, “What the hell does D.O.D. have to say about this?”
When evidence emerged that didn’t suit Miller’s aims, he squelched it. In March, the White House had asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study the costs of refugee resettlement. The department returned with a study, in July, showing that the revenue generated by refugees in the form of local, state, and federal taxes exceeded the costs of resettling them by sixty-three billion dollars. According to the Times, Miller suppressed the study and demanded that H.H.S. recalculate the numbers. Two of the White House officials told me they’d heard that Miller had given H.H.S. strict instructions at the outset. “The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President,” he had told people at the agency. (The White House denied that Miller was involved with the H.H.S. report.)
“He shut down the U.S. government’s democratic approach to decision-making,” a State Department official told me. “He suppressed evidence that was important to consider in determining a refugee number that would be beneficial to our national-security interest. We’re not talking about reports written by outside groups. We’re talking about evidence being generated from within the federal bureaucracy, documents generated from within the government.” Miller and his team at the Domestic Policy Council heavily edited several discussion papers outlining policy considerations, according to one of the White House officials. Statistics were cherry-picked. “We’d get them back from D.P.C., and they were eighty-five-per-cent different,” the official said, referring to papers generated by the N.S.C. staff. “D.P.C. would just sit down and write their own paper. They put in a lot of spurious statistics. Things like: refugees are thirty times more likely than the general population to commit a terrorist act.” According to the official, many of the statistics Miller’s team favored came from the Center for Immigration Studies, an influential anti-immigration think tank. (The White House denied that Miller had a role in editing policy papers.) When officials pushed back against these kinds of changes, Miller would point to the backlog of asylum cases at D.H.S. and argue that the refugee program was unsustainable. All four officials believed this argument was disingenuous. “This was a manipulation to get the result he wanted,” one White House official told me. “He basically just had a political agenda: to limit the number of foreign nationals who come into our country.”
I asked the officials how Miller, with his limited experience in the executive branch, had become such a formidable bureaucrat so quickly. “Look at who the senior advisers to the President were and are—Bannon, Kushner—Miller’s the only one with prior government experience,” the State Department official told me. “He knows something about government, and it turns out to be useful. He saw how the sausage was made. And he’s smart enough to make his own sausage.” The chaos of the Trump Administration helped. “The White House remains in utter disarray,” the official said. “If you don’t have an established set of procedures in place, it’s very easy to create your own process.”
The leaders of the two agencies whose roles Miller was minimizing—the N.S.C. and the State Department—showed little interest in fighting back. H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, wasn’t paying much attention—one of the officials described him to me as “frustratingly M.I.A.” At the State Department, the disconnect between leadership and staff was even worse. “We don’t have a secretary for all intents and purposes,” the State Department official said, in reference to Rex Tillerson. “Normally, you tell your superiors if you have a problem, and they go to the White House. No one is defending the State Department.”
In early September, officials at the State Department and N.S.C. were told that the Department of Homeland Security was ready to propose to the President that next year’s refugee cap be between fifteen thousand and twenty-six thousand people. Officials at the other government agencies involved in the process balked. “If we go below fifty thousand, we won’t satisfy the optics that the program was designed to generate, and that functionally hurts national security,” one White House official told me. “We look scared.” Miller and Hamilton weren’t swayed by the arguments, but when Elaine Duke, the interim Secretary of Homeland Security and Hamilton’s boss, insisted that the number couldn’t be lower than forty thousand, they were forced to retreat. (The White House disputed this account.)
Putting up a modest resistance, the State Department proposed a cap of fifty thousand. “People felt beleaguered and betrayed,” the official there told me. Trump’s original travel ban, in February, had set fifty thousand as a provisional cap for the current fiscal year. “It was seen as a politically safe number to use absent help from the Secretary.” Several other agencies—including, notably, the Office of the Vice-President—formally registered support for the State Department’s number. But in making the discussion about the range between forty thousand and fifty thousand, Miller had already succeeded in shifting the debate. “By the time we talked about splitting the difference, we were already two-thirds lower than where we were previously,” the State Department official told me. “We’d gone from a hundred and ten thousand”—which President Obama had set for the current year—“to around forty thousand, with no evidence to support the decision. It was purely political. The process has never been this corrupt.”
In mid-September, Tillerson lowered the State Department’s desired number from fifty thousand to forty-five thousand. The State Department official said the Secretary’s staff was surprised. “He undercut his deputy,” the official said. “He undercut the recommendation of the staff. He broke with every other federal agency except D.H.S.” The other agencies had all previously said they would back the State Department, so forty-five thousand was the only number that went to the President. “The President would never know that almost all of his Cabinet wanted a higher number,” one of the White House officials told me.
One of the White House officials I spoke to described the process as a harbinger of how immigration issues will be handled in the future. “The Domestic Policy Council is going to influence other processes that involve immigration,” the official said. “It’s going to get worse and worse.” Miller was expanding his influence. “He’s figured out early on that, just being at the D.P.C., he’s not going to be able to make key decisions unless he co-opts the N.S.C.,” the official went on. “He needs the security element attached to it. He’s worked to get himself in traditional N.S.C. decisions so that he can say, ‘This isn’t just me. We ran this by the N.S.C.’ It started with one or two issues. But it’s becoming anything that has to do with refugees, vetting, immigration, or security. Because he’s an assistant to the President, what person is going to say to him, ‘No, you can’t sit in on my meeting.’ The reason Stephen Miller is so dangerous? He’s clearly got a vision. He knows about narrative, about messaging. He’s figuring this out.”
