Bernie! by John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

"Bernie Sanders"," was appearing before a large and enthusiastic crowd in El Paso, Texas, which is one of the states that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3rd. After introducing his wife, Jane, as “the next First Lady of the United States,” Sanders called out some people in the crowd, including Jim Hightower, the veteran liberal activist, who served as the Texas commissioner of agriculture back in the nineteen-eighties. Like Sanders himself, Hightower is something of a legend in progressive circles, and the Vermont senator hailed him as a close friend of thirty years."campaign was holding a soccer tournament there that a friend of Parra’s had posted about on Snapchat. Under a bright morning sun, with Frenchman Mountain soaring in the background, some forty mostly Latino soccer aficionados gathered on one of the school’s fields. Many of the players had brought their parents, brothers, and sisters along, and spectators sat on the scorched grass beneath the branches of an ash tree. A Mexican woman in her sixties with an ice-cream cart and two taco vendors with a spread of *carnitas*, *asado*, and *pastor* would soon be selling food, as arranged by the campaign. Dozens of cobalt-blue Bernie signs, including one, which read, “*Unidos con Bernie*” fluttered on the field’s wire fence. Parra, who is nineteen, tall, and slender, spoke with conviction about his support for Sanders. He hoped to transfer to Colorado State University from the community college he was attending nearby, and said that the senator’s promise of making university tuition free resonated strongly with him. But something else had drawn him to the field that morning. “I see that he’s actually trying to look after the smaller communities, not just going after the big audience,” Parra said. “Doing something like this means a lot to people like us, because we don’t really get looked upon.”\n\nBefore the game, Jose La Luz, a Puerto Rican labor activist and Sanders surrogate, called on the players to crowd around him. La Luz has been urging Latinos across the country to support Sanders, and had flown in from Texas that morning. “*Buenos días*!” he said to the players. Half awake, many of them failed to reply. “I can’t hear you! *Buenos días*!” he insisted, prompting a louder response. La Luz is sixty-nine, with slicked-back hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore dark glasses, a blue linen jacket, and had a turquoise ring on each hand. His fervor, and the Mexican slang he wove into his Spanish remarks, prompted chuckles among the attendees. “We’ve gathered this morning because we’re going to see who scores the most goals for Tío Bernie,” La Luz said. He called for a show of hands to see how many players were old enough to vote. About a dozen raised their arms. “And who will you vote for?” he asked. “Bernie!” they exclaimed in unison. “For Tío Bernie,” he asserted. “Because he is *our* candidate.” After La Luz announced that a “very important” person was on his way, the crowd broke into whispers. Could it be Bernie? If not him, who? La Luz said that he wanted to make sure their guest would get a proper welcome. “I want us to receive him with a strong and warm Latin-American applause!” he said, gradually lifting his booming voice. “A strong and warm Mexican applause! A strong and warm Central American applause! Because we’re proud to be Latinos, and the Latino vote *will* decide this election!”\n\nThe players dispersed, and within minutes, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, walked onto the field. “O.K., let’s bring it in, bring it in,” La Luz said, in English this time. Parra and his friends approached the mayor, although none of them knew who he was. De Blasio smiled widely and joined the crowd in a raucous greeting. “*Se puede*?” La Luz asked. “*Si, se puede*!” they responded. The mayor kicked off his remarks in Spanish. “Thank you so much, everyone. It’s an honor to be here,” he said with a strong accent and a flicker of formality that seemed odd for the occasion. “Can I speak in English for a little bit?” The players nodded. Early voting had begun that weekend in Nevada, and the Sanders campaign had chosen Eldorado because it was within blocks of a polling location. De Blasio urged the players to go vote after the game. “You are, right now, the most important people in the United States of America. Because what is going to happen in Nevada, in these few days, could very well decide who is going to be the next President of the United States,” he said. “I came all the way from New York City to tell you this.” \n\nDe Blasio’s appearance before such a small crowd reflected the Sanders campaign’s methodical approach to attracting Latino voters. Days before the Iowa caucus, it tested the idea of holding a soccer tournament, in Des Moines. The campaign also targeted the four Spanish-language satellite caucuses that Democratic party officials had organized in the state for the first time. Sanders earned the support of four hundred and thirty out of the four hundred and eighty-three people who voted. He went on to win more than sixty per cent of the vote in the state’s predominantly Latino precincts. In Nevada, an Equis Research poll released this week found that Sanders had by far the highest net-favorability rating among Latino voters who are registered as Democrats. Sixty per cent rated Sanders positively, while Joe Biden was a distant second, at twenty per cent. Elizabeth Warren, who was at four per cent in an Equis poll in December, had surged to nineteen per cent. \n\nIn the weeks leading up to Saturday’s caucuses, many candidates have stepped up their courting efforts of Nevada’s Latinos, who make up an estimated twenty per cent of the state’s registered voters. There has been a sudden uptick in Spanish television ads, and contenders for the nomination have been meeting with multiple mobilization groups, including the Culinary Workers Union and Mi Familia Vota. Last week, [Pete Buttigieg]were tested on their knowledge of Latin American politics in interviews hosted by Telemundo. When they were asked if they could name the Mexican President, Steyer said, “I forget,” and Klobuchar offered a straight “No.” Only Buttigieg knew the answer. Yet, despite his adroitness and enviable Spanish skills, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, along with every other candidate, trails Sanders in polls of Latino voters. \n\nThe caucuses will be the most decisive test yet of Latino support for Sanders, who ran well behind Hillary Clinton among Latino voters in 2016\\. Chuck Rocha, a senior adviser to Sanders who also worked for the senator in 2016, said that Sanders has crafted an entirely new strategy to engage Latino voters in 2020. Last June, his campaign opened its first Nevada office in East Las Vegas, a largely Latino neighborhood. Sanders has since expanded his operation to include eleven offices statewide and has hired two hundred employees, of which seventy-six are Latino. Rocha said that the campaign’s events centered around soccer or tamales are a testament to its “cultural competency.” “Anybody who knows anything about the Latino community knows that there are a few things that really draw us together,” Rocha said. “Some of it is food, a lot of it is music, and a lot of it is our family.”\n\nSanders nonetheless faces challenges. The Culinary Workers Union, a majority-Latino group that represents, among others, casino cooks and housekeepers, declined to endorse a political candidate in the caucuses this year. Yet it has engaged in an active campaign against Sanders, spreading information among its fifty-seven thousand members, in Spanish and English, about how Sanders’s government-run health-care program could “end” their Culinary Health Fund. The Sanders campaign claims strong support among culinary workers, whom they have been courting for weeks, but it is unclear how this quarrel will ultimately play out in the caucuses. Like the other candidates, Sanders will need to convince Latino voters outside of the Culinary Union to show up to caucus for him. Equis Research estimates that sixty per cent of registered Latino voters in Nevada must be persuaded to vote. “The case has to be made among many Latinos for why voting is an actionable step, especially with the history of marginalization,” Mindy Romero, the director of the California Civic Engagement Project, said. “Otherwise people will wonder, ‘Why should I participate when I don’t even know if this politician is going to do something for me?’ ” \n\n\n-=-=-=-\n\n\nThe Sanders campaign’s East Las Vegas office is located between a hair salon and a women’s health clinic in a drab strip mall. Outside, dozens of volunteers mingled, ate tacos, and sipped Mexican hibiscus water. Inside, the walls were adorned with Mexican paper cutouts, including *papel picado* banners and colored paper fans, along with Bernie signs, Post-its, and hand-written placards, detailing the do’s and don’ts of canvassing. Campaign workers and field organizers arrived in groups and described the number of people they had reached and reported that voters had repeatedly expressed confusion about the caucus process. As a newly trained phone banker took a stab making his first calls, Rocha praised the operation. A self-described “third-generation Texas Mexican,” who wears cowboy hats and has a distinct Texas accent, Rocha spent decades as a union organizer before starting a political-consulting firm in Washington. “In most campaigns I’ve ever worked in, the Latino vote is an afterthought,” he said. “We have done things very differently.” \n\nRocha said that he drew important lessons from 2016\\. The Sanders campaign needed to invest not just heavily, but also early, in the Latino community. The campaign tries to avoid hierarchy and turf battles; it does not have a “Latino department.” Instead, Latinos fill positions that range from national political director to volunteers. A major difference this time is that Sanders is a household name. “We didn’t know the senator would have the longevity,” Rocha said. Other candidates in the race have taken note of Sanders’s strategy among Latinos, but have been unable to match his infrastructure in Nevada. The Latino Sanders supporters that I spoke to said that he saw them as more than a monolithic voting bloc—that he saw nuances in their concerns, which extend to issues other than immigration. They said they felt respected by his campaign, and praised it for not treating them as second-class citizens. This week’s Equis Research poll also showed that Sanders has a substantial lead in favorability among Latinos in states such as California, Texas, and Virginia. “For a long time, people have said that the answer to the Latino vote is to pay attention and show consistent interest,” Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, told me. “If the diagnosis is true, then there is a possibility that Sanders has gotten an answer here.”\n\nIn Iowa, where Latinos make up just six per cent of the population, the campaign invested over a million dollars in outreach efforts to them. It has tripled that spending in Nevada. For the past eight months, the campaign has been mailing Bernie flyers, both in English and Spanish, to voters’ homes. Bilingual campaign workers have knocked on thousands of doors. Last December, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, held a town hall, in Spanish, in Las Vegas, which proved to be a crowd-pleaser. The Sanders campaign’s first Spanish-language television ad, called “*Nuestro Futuro*,” aired earlier this year, and focussed on the candidate’s family story: his father’s arrival to the United States from Poland, with little money and no knowledge of English. “We know what the formula to win over the Latino vote is, but it does have to be sincere and sustained,” Mindy Romero said. “Sanders is talking about politics, but he’s also talking about equity, fairness, fighting for people. You don’t hear a lot of candidates saying that, very few are doing this kind of work among the community, and he’s also benefitting from that.” \n\n\n-=-=-=-\n\n\nA week ago, when early voting started in Nevada, Sanders held a rally at a public high-school in central Las Vegas. Make the Road, a grassroots Latino organization, which recently endorsed him, helped organize the event. As more than a thousand people poured into the school’s main hall, four mariachis made their way to the stage. The musicians, who were in their teens, wore matching sequin outfits and bashfully introduced themselves as “Clave 702\\.” After the quartet played several songs, organizers escorted members of Make the Road to the risers behind the stage. They waved dozens of campaign signs, inscribed with messages such as, “#Housing not Handcuffs,” “#Cancel the Debt,” and “Families Belong Together.” Chants of “*Se ve, se siente, Bernie presidente!”* and “*Sí se puede*,” echoed through the hall. After several other speakers, José Macías, a founding organizer of Make the Road, introduced “*el candidato* Bernie Sanders!” The senator stepped up to the stage, hugged Macías, thanked the speakers, stared around the room and said, “Brothers and sisters, this is what democracy looks like.” The crowd roared. Sanders called on the audience’s support to defeat a President “who is trying to divide our people up based on the color of their skin, or where they were born, or their religion, or their sexual orientation.” His movement, Sanders said, would prove victorious by doing the opposite: “bringing working people together.” After his speech, Sanders made his way to the street, to lead a march toward the closest polling station, which was less than a mile from the school. Swarmed by hundreds of people, he walked on, occasionally clapping. The crowd chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!”\n\nA few feet behind Sanders were Ezequiel and Ulises Romero, twins in their teens, who were waving a large Mexican flag. Ulises said that he found Sanders’s proposals for free college and universal health care most compelling. “I like he’s supporting marijuana, I’m straight on for that!” his brother said, smiling. Ezequiel explained that their father had immigrated from Veracruz, Mexico, three decades ago, and that he often worried about his mother’s health. “You never know, she’s always complaining!” he said. Luz Narváez, a retired teacher from Puerto Rico, who was walking ahead of the twins, told me that she was mostly concerned about her home town. “My Puerto Rico is in need,” she said. “Let’s hope Bernie will help us.” She said that Puerto Ricans were being humiliated by the [Trump]Administration. “We have the citizenship, but it’s barely worth anything,” she said, her eyes watering. “They always look down on us, they confuse us with others, and it doesn’t matter to them.” At the front of the crowd was Nelly Tobón, a woman in her thirties from Michoacán, Mexico, who was keeping an eye out for her five-year-old girls. They were scampering, letting their costume butterfly wings flow freely. “He’s the only one giving us a reason to unite,\" Tobón said. \n\nAfter voting, members of the crowd walked a few blocks to the Make the Road local headquarters. Folding tables and chairs filled the parking lot in front of the office, garlands hung from the light poles, and arrangements of paper *cempasúchil*, or Mexican marigolds, adorned each table. Several food stands served tamales, corn on the cob, esquites, tacos, frijoles, and red rice. Belem Orozco, a single mother in her twenties, told me that she was a volunteer with Make the Road who had travelled from Allentown, Pennsylvania, for the event. A *DACA*{: .small} recipient, Orozco was born in Mexico and had migrated north with her family in the early two thousands. “I think other candidates are dealing with us how they usually do, which is just tokens,” she said. “Bernie sees *us*. Especially with the current President right now, who is essentially dehumanizing us, he brings the human back in us.” She said that, as an undocumented person, she had dealt with uncertainty for her entire life. “I definitely want to see Bernie in office, because we believe that he will finally bring some peace of mind to immigrant folks like myself,” she said. “We’re not fighting *for* him, we’re fighting *with* him.”",In Las Vegas, after speaking at an event for the Latino community, Sanders led a march toward the closest polling station. “This is what democracy looks like!” the crowd chanted.","altText":"Bernie Sanders at a rally","credit":"Photograph by Alex Wong \u002F Getty","filename":"Taladrid-LatinoNevadans01.jpg","revision":6,"tags":[],"title":""}],"social":002F21\u002F5e501a0bfac1ea00089742f4_Taladrid-LatinoNevadans01.jpg","width":2560,"height":1713,"duration":null}},"caption":"In Las Vegas, after speaking at an event for the Latino community, Sanders led a march toward the closest polling station. “This is what democracy looks like!” the crowd chanted.","altText":"Bernie Sanders at a rally","credit":"Photograph by Alex Wong \u002F Getty","filename":"Taladrid-LatinoNevadans01.jpg","revision":6,"tags":[],"title":""}]},"promoDek":"After faring poorly with Latinos in 2016, Tío Bernie created an entirely new approach for 2020.","promoHed":"What Bernie Sanders Is Doing Differently to Win Over Latino Voters","pubDate":"2020-02-21T18:04:36.854Z","related":[{"id":"5e4db7ada8da4700085766a9","modelName":"article","collection":"articles","body":"+++interactive\n[#iframe: http:\u002F\u002FauOne afternoomber, half-dozen government officials sat at a conference table in the White House, waiting for the arrival of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to [Donald Trump]Miller had summoned officials from the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice to discuss a new Administration policy initiative: a series of agreements with the governments of Central America that would [force]sylum seekers to apply for protection in that region instead of in the United States. Miller, who had helped make the deals, wanted to know when their provisions could go into effect. Typically, everyone rises when top White House officials enter a room. But when Miller walked in, wearing a dark suit and an expression of wry resolve, everyone remained seated, their eyes cast down. “You go into meetings with Miller and try to get out with as little damage as possible,” a former Administration official told me. Miller has a habit of berating officials, especially lower-ranking ones, for an agency’s perceived failures. Chad Wolf, now the acting head of D.H.S., used to advise colleagues to placate Miller by picking one item from his long list of demands, and vowing to execute it. “It’s a war of attrition,” Wolf told them. “Maybe he forgets the rest for a while, and you buy yourself some time.”\n\nOne participant in the November meeting pointed out that El Salvador didn’t have a functioning asylum system. “They don’t need a system,” Miller interrupted. He began speaking over people, asking questions, then cutting off the answers.\n\nAs the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”\n\nMiller, who is thirty-four, with thinning hair and a sharp, narrow face, is an anomaly in Washington: an adviser with total authority over a single issue that has come to define an entire Administration. “We have never had a President who ran, and won, on immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “And he’s kept his promise on immigration.” Miller, who was a speechwriter during the campaign, is now Trump’s longest-serving senior aide. He is also an Internet meme, a public scourge, and a catch-all symbol of the racism and malice of the current government. In a cast of exceptionally polarizing officials, he has embraced the role of archvillain. Miller can be found shouting over interviewers on the weekend news shows or berating reporters in the White House briefing room; he has also vowed to quell a “[deep state](” conspiracy against Trump. When he’s not accusing journalists of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” or denying that the Statue of Liberty symbolizes America’s identity as a nation of immigrants, he is shaping policy and provoking the President’s most combative impulses.\n\n[Jeh Johnson](), who headed the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, told me, “D.H.S. was born of bipartisan parents in Congress, in the aftermath of 9\u002F11, when there was support for a large Cabinet-level department to consolidate control of all the different ways someone can enter this country.” D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with a fifty-billion-dollar budget and a staff of some two hundred thousand employees, spanning the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From its founding, in 2002, to the end of Obama’s Presidency, the department had five secretaries; under Trump, it has had five more. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized, and it has overwhelmed D.H.S.,” Johnson said.\n\n“The massive changes Miller engineered in border and immigration policy required that the policymaking process at D.H.S. be ignored,” Alan Bersin, a former senior department official, told me. “Who do you think has filled the vacuum?” Miller has cultivated lower-level officials in the department who answer directly to him, providing information, policy updates, and data, often behind the backs of their bosses. “At the beginning of 2017, none of us could have foreseen that he would wield this kind of power,” a former Trump Administration official told me. Of thirty current and former officials I interviewed, not one could recall a White House adviser as relentless as Miller, or as successful in imposing his will across agencies. These officials resented him as an upstart and mocked his affectations—his “arrogant monotonal voice” and tin-eared bombast—but few were comfortable going on the record, even after leaving the government. Miller is famously vindictive, and, as Trump runs for a second term, he is sure to grow only more powerful. “Miller doesn’t have to get Trump to believe everything he does,” one of the officials told me. “He just has to get Trump to say it all.”\n\nWhen Miller and I spoke by phone, it was off the record. Without an audience, he gave the same message at half the volume—a litany of talking points about all the ways in which the President had delivered on his campaign promises. Afterward, the White House sent me a quote for attribution: “It is the single greatest honor of my life to work for President Trump and to support his incredible agenda.”\n\nMiller’s obsession with restricting immigration and punishing immigrants has become the defining characteristic of the Trump White House, to the extent that campaigning and governing on the issue are no longer distinguishable. In the past three and a half years, the Trump Administration has dismantled immigration policies and precedents that took shape in the course of decades, using current laws to intensify enforcement against illegal immigration and pursuing new ones to reduce legal immigration. Trump has slashed the refugee program; virtually ended asylum at the southern border; and written a rule [denying]( green cards to families who might receive public benefits. Miller has choreographed these initiatives, convincing Trump that his political future depends on them—and on going even further. If Trump is not reëlected, Miller will never again have such power. A D.H.S. official told me, “Going into 2020, Miller is at a crossroads.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nThe radicalism of Miller’s views tends to obscure how much he has evolved as a tactician since he arrived in Washington. He grew up in Santa Monica, California, the son of Jewish Democrats, but, by the time he entered high school, he had become a strident conservative. “He was going to a very liberal, diverse school,” Megan Healey, one of his classmates, told me. “In a school where the nerds were considered cool, he was still the guy that nobody liked.” The terrorist attacks of 9\u002F11 took place when he was a junior, cementing his persona. “Anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he later [wrote]). “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.” At Duke, where he studied political science and wrote a column for the student newspaper, he became a familiar presence on conservative television and radio programs. His hostility toward immigrants formed part of his politics, but did not stand out. He opposed left-wing bias in the classroom, invited controversial speakers to campus, and organized “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” “America without her culture is like a body without a soul,” he wrote in one column. “Yet many of today’s youth see America as nothing but a meeting point for the cultures of other nations.” His most notable cause was to defend a group of white lacrosse players who had been falsely accused of raping a black woman who was stripping at a party. The editor of his column later [told](_The Atlantic_, “He picked the most contrarian of stances to articulate, wrote the most hyperbolic prose he could . . . then sat back and waited for people’s reactions.”\n\nAfter graduation, in 2008, he was offered a job as press secretary for [Michele Bachmann](), a Republican representative from Minnesota, who gained national attention after an undocumented immigrant near her district crashed her car into a school bus, killing four children. Miller pushed Bachmann to go on television. On Fox News, she described the tragedy as an example of “anarchy versus the rule of law,” and, in a later campaign stop, blamed immigrants for “bringing in diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence.” The following fall, after Bachmann was reëlected, Miller left his post, and took a communications job in the office of [Jeff Sessions](), of Alabama, then the Senate’s staunchest opponent of immigration.\n\nSessions and Miller approached immigration from different perspectives. During the nineties and early two-thousands, immigration had quadrupled in Alabama, and Sessions, a resolute populist, grew alarmed at the state’s increasingly foreign workforce. Miller’s concerns tended to be more cultural and inflammatory—he raised questions about the ability of Latin Americans to learn English and of Islam’s compatibility with American norms.\n\n+++inset-left\n[#cartoon: \u002Fcartoons\u002F5e4f3ebeb5e35900085168ae]||||||\n+++\n\nSessions introduced Miller to such think tanks as [NumbersUSA](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.nytimes.com\u002F2019\u002F08\u002F14\u002Fus\u002Fanti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html) and the Center for Immigration Studies, which produced data-laden reports on the societal costs of immigration. Soon Miller was attending weekly meetings at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative-policy institute, with a small group of congressional staff. “He’d arrive with these policy notions he’d just conjure up,” a participant told me. “He came across as super smart, but super right wing.” To most Republican staffers, he was known for his mass e-mails about immigration, full of links to articles from fringe Web sites. “I just started deleting them when I’d see his name,” a senior Republican staffer told me. “Everyone did.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\n[Mitt Romney](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fmitt-romney) ran for President, in 2012, on a platform that included a commitment to reducing illegal immigration. He argued that, if the federal government made life harder for undocumented immigrants by limiting their employment opportunities, large numbers would “self-deport.” After Romney lost, the Republican National Committee commissioned an emergency report on the future of the Party, in which pollsters and elected officials concluded that Republican candidates had moved too far right. The report [warned](https:\u002F\u002Fswampland.time.com\u002F2013\u002F03\u002F18\u002Fcommittee-to-the-save-the-gop-pass-comprehensive-immigration-reform-become-inclusive-to-gays-or-keep-losing\u002F#ixzz2NtPZeURT) that if the Party did not “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” its appeal would “continue to shrink to its core constituencies.” On the night of Obama’s second Inauguration, in January, 2013, his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose reluctance to tackle the issue of immigration—the “third rail of American politics,” he called it—was well known inside the Administration, told White House officials that now “even a blind person” could steer a comprehensive reform bill through Congress.\n\nIn the spring of 2013, a bipartisan group of senators known as the [Gang of Eight](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2013\u002F06\u002F24\u002Fgetting-to-maybe)—which included the Republicans [Marco Rubio](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fmarco-rubio), [John McCain](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fjohn-mccain), and [Lindsey Graham](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Flindsey-graham)—proposed a bill that would have made changes to the immigration system while creating a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people. The legislation was widely embraced in the Senate, but it was premised on a compromise that repulsed Sessions: legalization in exchange for increased border-security measures. Or, as he saw it, amnesty for nothing.\n\nAt meetings throughout the spring and summer of 2013, Republican staffers debated the terms of a possible bill. When Miller was allowed to sit in, he took notes and asked questions about esoteric provisions. Sessions was one of a half-dozen senators who weren’t expected to vote for a bill in any form; Miller was there to “take the information, punch it up, and make it into an attack,” according to a senior Republican Senate aide. “It was sending a signal to Senate Republicans to stay away from the bill, or to give them heartburn over it. And it was a kind of Bat-Signal to the House Republicans.”\n\n[Steve Bannon](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fsteve-bannon), then the head of Breitbart News, compared the work that Sessions and Miller were doing to stop the bill to “the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties,” and he began communicating regularly with Miller, who sent the Web site ideas and details for immigration stories. The far-right press characterized a provision introduced by Rubio to distribute cell phones in border areas, so that residents could report border crossings, as a measure to give “amnesty phones” to migrants; a pathway to citizenship would end in “benefits to line-jumping illegal aliens.” Miller took reporters’ calls late into the night, making himself indispensable to anyone covering the policy fight in Washington. “As a staffer, serving his boss, he was excellent,” Julia Preston, a former correspondent for the _Times_, told me. She spoke to Miller regularly. “This stuff is emotional for him.” In a conversation about H1-B visas, “he was talking so passionately that he actually wept.”\n\nOpponents of the bill began to feel more confident. “Miller played a pretty substantial role” in “bruising” the legislation, the senior Senate aide said. A [crisis](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2014\u002F07\u002F28\u002Fcrossing-borders) was developing at the southern border, where tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, as well as families from Central America, were arriving in search of asylum. The Obama Administration tried to downplay the situation, but the crisis coincided with the Republican primary campaigns, in which populist Tea Party members were challenging members of the G.O.P. establishment. On June 10th, the day before Republican staffers in the House were scheduled to present a version of the bill to the Party leadership, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, Eric Cantor, of Virginia, [lost](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fnews\u002Fjohn-cassidy\u002Fcantor-loses-and-washington-goes-ape) his primary to Dave Brat, an academic and a political neophyte, who had run to the right of Cantor on immigration. “That’s really when the bottom started falling out,” Cecilia Muñoz, who worked at the White House at the time, told me. The immigration bill had already passed the Senate, but the Speaker of the House, a Republican, never brought it to the floor for a vote.\n\nMiller “got a master’s degree in immigration policy during that process,” one of the Republican aides who worked with him at the time told me. “Before that, he didn’t have any policy experience at all. It was all communications. In 2013, he learned where all the bodies were buried.” Miller studied decades’ worth of immigration regulations, rules, and discretionary judgments, which were designed to guide and temper enforcement. He objected to the reluctance of establishment politicians to strictly interpret the existing laws. “He’d say, ‘It’s easy to simply execute the law as it’s written,’ ” a former colleague of his told me. “That’s actually when he would make his most impressive arguments. Fact-based, legal arguments. He used to say, ‘There’s a lot of bureaucratic procedure imposed on the law. Why do we need to concern ourselves with all the extra stuff?’ ”\n\nMiller pointed out the many loopholes in immigration laws, especially the widespread practice of “catch and release,” in which large numbers of migrants were allowed to remain in the U.S. while they waited for their cases to be heard by immigration judges. Sessions had proposed amendments to end the policy, but they failed to gain support among Republicans. “Miller’s response was ‘The laws need to change,’ ” the aide said. “He was unimpressed by the promises of more border-patrol agents, or a trillion dollars for a virtual wall. People were taking advantage of the laws, not just of a porous border.”\n\nIn January, 2015, when Republicans took control of the Senate, Miller and Sessions published a rebuttal to the Party’s 2012 postmortem, called “[Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority](http:\u002F\u002Fimages.politico.com\u002Fglobal\u002F2015\u002F01\u002F12\u002Fimmigration_primer_for_the_114th_congress.pdf).” They wrote, “On no issue is there a greater separation between the everyday citizen and the political elite than on the issue of immigration.”\n\nFive months later, Trump declared his candidacy, and, in January, 2016, Miller took a leave from Sessions’s office to join the campaign. Sessions, who considered Trump an ally on immigration, had doubts about his electability, but in February Bannon convinced him that Trump could win. Sessions became the first senator to endorse him. Bannon, who was advising Trump, had also persuaded Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s main handler, to promote Miller to the position of speechwriter. “You just can’t wing it. Immigration is too important,” he recalled saying. “You need policy people on this.”\n\nTrump’s candidacy felt more like a low-grade insurgency than like a professional operation. The campaign rallies, with their ecstatic crowds, emboldened Miller, who often served as a warmup act for Trump. Pacing the stage with a relaxed smile, he resembled an insult comic, leading chants of “Build the wall.” He’d flash a peace sign, and make way for Trump, who would recite a list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Then, growing sombre, he’d invite the parents of a victim onstage to offer his condolences.\n\nIn August, 2016, at a rally in Phoenix, Trump delivered a policy speech on immigration, written by Miller. It was typically raucous and aggressive, full of racist fearmongering, but it also contained a detailed blueprint. “Our immigration system is worse than anyone realizes,” Trump began. “Countless Americans who have died in recent years would be alive today if not for the open-border policies of this Administration.” A ten-point list of desired policies followed: among them were an “end to catch and release,” “zero tolerance for criminal aliens,” penalties for sanctuary cities, a vow to reverse Obama’s executive orders, and a “big-picture” vision for reforming the immigration system “to serve the best interests of America and its workers.” Miller told the Washington _Post_ that it was “as though everything that I felt at the deepest levels of my heart were now being expressed by a candidate for our nation’s highest office.”\n\nGovernment and congressional staffers who supported immigration restrictions were impressed by Trump’s speech. One official, who joined a group of immigration advisers to the campaign, told me, “I didn’t like the candidate very much, but he’s saying the right things about enforcing the law.” Members of the group went on to join the transition team and later staff the government. “Filling those immigration jobs in the Administration was the top obsession. It was a shock-and-awe thing,” the official said. “The fantasy was that there’d be a table full of executive orders that Trump would sign and then walk away. There would be thirty things happening on Day One, within an hour, and there wouldn’t be enough lawyers to handle all the litigation. They wouldn’t even know who to sue.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nAfter Trump won the election, “Miller didn’t even flirt with an agency or nomination position,” a White House official told me. “He wanted to know what White House adviser position had the most say on immigration.” He asked to head the Domestic Policy Council, an influential but amorphous group inside the White House. The position gave him proximity to the President and insulation from congressional scrutiny; he would issue, rather than implement, orders. “The rest of us have to testify before Congress. That’s a check. If you’re going to have your ass hauled before Congress, you’re not going to feel comfortable breaking the law,” a former top Administration official told me. “Miller will never have to testify for anything.”\n\nImmigration restrictionists have had a foothold in Congress for decades, but they haven’t had access to the White House in a century. Even among the ideologues, Miller’s approach was distinct. In his view, the more controversial the Administration’s immigration policies were, the more easily it could divide and conquer the electorate. He had scared Republican House leaders in 2013 by caricaturing Democrats and moderate Republicans as advocates for “open borders”; now he aimed to send the same message from the White House. One of the measures contemplated by the President’s immigration-advisory group was an order to block travellers from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. The group had been preparing the ban so that it would survive legal challenges, but Miller intervened. “Miller has two impulses that he’s warring with,” another senior Republican aide told me. “One is to be the bomb-thrower he always was. The other is to try to secure victories for the President.” In the days leading up to Trump’s Inauguration, Miller and a close associate named Gene Hamilton, another former Sessions staffer in his mid-thirties, drafted an executive order called “[Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.whitehouse.gov\u002Fpresidential-actions\u002Fexecutive-order-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states-2\u002F)”—the travel ban.\n\nWhen Trump signed it, none of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which was in charge of enforcing the ban, had been notified in advance. Travellers with valid visas were suddenly trapped at American airports, unable to enter the country; refugees who, after years of waiting, had been vetted and approved for entry were turned back. Thousands of protesters and civil-rights attorneys began congregating at airports across the country, and Senators Graham and McCain issued a statement saying that “we should not turn our backs on those refugees who . . . pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors.” [Jared Kushner](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fjared-kushner), the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was enraged. The next day, when the President’s senior staff assembled in the Situation Room, Miller told John Kelly, the head of D.H.S.; Tom Bossert, the President’s homeland-security adviser; and officials from the State Department, “This is the new world order. You need to get on board,” according to an account in “[Border Wars](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.amazon.com\u002FBorder-Wars-Inside-Assault-Immigration\u002Fdp\u002F1982117397),” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear.\n\nThe ban was immediately challenged in federal court; it took eighteen months, and three versions of the order, before it passed legal muster. Instead of censuring Miller, Trump blamed the courts and lawyers at the Justice Department, including Sessions, who was now his Attorney General, for “watering down” the order.\n\n-=-=-=\n\nMiller wasn’t so much channelling Trump as overtaking him. Inside the White House, he was known as a “walking encyclopedia” on immigration, and the President’s political advisers, who acknowledged that campaigning on the issue had been the key to Trump’s victory in 2016, deferred to him as an expert. Those with reservations—like [Rex Tillerson](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2017\u002F10\u002F16\u002Frex-tillerson-at-the-breaking-point), the Secretary of State, and [H. R. McMaster](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2018\u002F04\u002F30\u002Fmcmaster-and-commander), the national-security adviser—had other responsibilities. Miller could outmaneuver them if he used the right interagency channels. He sent e-mail sparingly and avoided calling officials directly to issue orders, relaying his messages through intermediaries.\n\nSince Trump could rarely comprehend the full substance of his own Administration’s agenda on immigration, it fell to Miller to define what victory looked like. One of the President’s favorite routines, according to someone close to both of them, is to play the good cop to Miller’s bad cop: “He’ll smile and say, ‘Well, that sounds O.K. to me but, Stephen, I know you’d never go for it.’ ”\n\nMiller invoked the President constantly, especially when he encountered resistance from other officials. One of them told me, “Someone would say to him, ‘Stephen, what you’re trying to do is not possible.’ And his response would be ‘It is possible. I spoke to the President an hour ago, and he said it had to be done.’ ” (Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesperson, told me, “The policies Stephen works on are not his own but, instead, a faithful and vigilant implementation of the agenda Donald Trump brilliantly laid out.”)\n\n+++inset-left\n[#cartoon: \u002Fcartoons\u002F5e4f3ebf39082c000879ac54]||||||\n+++\n\nFor the first seven months of his Presidency, Trump vacillated about cancelling Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a highly popular program that Obama had instituted through executive action. *DACA*{: .small} protected from deportation some seven hundred thousand people who had come to the U.S. as children. Trump had campaigned against it, then reversed himself. Miller was viscerally hostile to *DACA*{: .small}. In an e-mail to a Breitbart editor, he said that expanding the “foreign-born share” of the U.S. workforce was an instance of “immigration” being used “to replace existing demographics.” In September, 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White House advisers, Trump agreed to cancel *DACA*{: .small}, setting a six-month deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution. The fight that ensued led to a brief government shutdown. Republicans refused to grant any form of “amnesty” unless they could get something significant in return, but, given Trump’s inconsistency on *DACA*{: .small}, the Party leadership couldn’t gauge what he wanted from the negotiations.\n\nMostly, Trump cared about building a wall along the southern border. For Miller, the main goal of negotiations was to reduce the number of legal immigrants, which was not something that Congress had previously been willing to contemplate. But, with *DACA*{: .small} recipients as a bargaining chip, the circumstances were different. “Miller knew the window was closing, that his only chance to force his agenda was if *DACA*{: .small} kids were on the line,” a Republican aide who worked closely with Miller told me.\n\nOn January 11, 2018, Trump summoned Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, from South Carolina, to the White House so that they could explain the terms of a bipartisan deal they’d reached. It would offer a path to citizenship for *DACA*{: .small} recipients in exchange for increased border security and enforcement measures. The President told the senators that he was ready to back their plan. But, two hours later, when they entered the Oval Office, they found that they were not alone. Miller had invited a group of far-right Republicans—including [Tom Cotton](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2017\u002F11\u002F13\u002Fis-tom-cotton-the-future-of-trumpism) and [David Perdue](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fnews\u002Fdaily-comment\u002Ftom-cotton-david-perdue-and-the-trap-of-lying-for-donald-trump), the sponsors of a bill to cut legal immigration in half—to join them. The “fix is in,” Durbin told an aide. When Graham brought up Haitian immigrants, while explaining an aspect of the agreement, Trump asked, “Why would we want all these people from shithole countries?” He now refused to endorse the deal he had supported that morning.\n\nIn the weeks that followed, whenever Trump responded positively to an overture by Democrats, Miller interceded. “Whoever has access to the President last—that’s what sticks,” a White House official told me. “Miller always made sure he was that person.” Graham said, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nThe images first began appearing on Fox News in early April, 2018: a thousand migrants from Honduras, most of them travelling with their families, massing at the border between Guatemala and Mexico before heading north toward the United States. Trump regularly updated his Twitter feed as the group advanced into southern Mexico, more than a thousand miles from the U.S. He renewed calls for a border wall, attacked Mexico for failing to do more, and excoriated Democrats for “ridiculous liberal laws like catch and release.” In the first year of his Presidency, border crossings were down, owing in part to what analysts called “the Trump Effect,” as migrants and smugglers paused to consider whether Trump’s actions toward migrants would match his rhetoric. But by May, 2018, there were roughly fifty thousand apprehensions a month at the border, double the number when he took office. Though the increase was largely due to instability in Central America, the White House blamed [Kirstjen Nielsen](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fkirstjen-nielsen), who had taken over D.H.S. the previous December, after John Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff. At a Cabinet meeting, on May 9th, Kelly focussed the discussion on immigration policy. By then, the President was calling Nielsen five times a day to complain. At the meeting, he berated her for half an hour. “How is this still happening?” Trump demanded. “Why don’t you have solutions?”\n\nMiller had ideas of his own. In 2013, during the unaccompanied-minors crisis, an official at *ICE*{: .small} had suggested separating parents and children once they reached the border, in the hope of deterring other families from travelling north. The White House had dismissed the proposal as inhumane, but Miller took it up again. “He was obsessed with the idea of consequences,” a top D.H.S. official who worked with Miller at the time told me. “He’d always say to us, ‘They are breaking the law, and the only way we’ll change that is if there’s a consequence.’ ” The consequences were specific. The official said, “Miller made clear to us that, if you start to treat children badly enough, you’ll be able to convince other parents to stop trying to come with theirs.” Miller had already led a meeting at the White House to pressure D.O.J. officials to prosecute border crossers as criminals. (Doing so was the basis for separating families: while parents faced criminal charges, their children were treated as unaccompanied minors.) In April, he and Hamilton wrote a Presidential memorandum directing agencies to end catch and release; they also composed a letter, signed by Attorney General Sessions, articulating a policy, called zero tolerance, for prosecuting all adults who were arrested by D.H.S. for illegal entry.\n\nSessions announced the new policy at a gathering of law-enforcement officials in Arizona, saying that if parents were caught “smuggling” their children into the country they’d be separated from them and treated as criminals. The head of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, and the head of *ICE*{: .small}, Tom Homan, signed off on zero tolerance, as did Nielsen. Miller, however, forced the policy into action before D.H.S. was ready to implement it. When border agents began separating families, the Administration hadn’t yet made plans to reunite them, a direct result of “the pressure he brought to bear,” a top D.H.S. official said. By late June, more than twenty-five hundred children, including a hundred and two under the age of five, had been separated from their parents, many of whom didn’t know where the government had taken them. In an *ICE*{: .small} detention center in El Paso, groups of separated mothers secretly exchanged information in the cafeteria to compile lists of their missing children and smuggle out requests to local lawyers for help.\n\nHundreds of parents were deported without their children. From Central America, they called intermittently functioning U.S. hotlines, set up by the Department of Health and Human Services, in an effort to locate them.\n\nMiller forcefully defended family separation, telling the _Times_ that voters would support the White House [“90-10.”](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.nytimes.com\u002F2018\u002F06\u002F18\u002Fus\u002Fpolitics\u002Fimmigration-children-sessions-miller.html) In fact, the public was outraged, especially after a recording of small children [crying](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.propublica.org\u002Farticle\u002Fchildren-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy) for their parents at a Texas detention center was leaked to ProPublica. A Border Patrol agent could be heard saying derisively, “Here we have an orchestra.” The policy dominated television news, and Ivanka and Melania Trump lobbied the President to end it. Some inside the Administration thought that the policy was justified, but that its execution had been poor. Several officials blamed Miller. “How many things have fallen because of bad messaging?” a D.H.S. agency head said to me. “Isn’t Miller supposed to be the master of messaging?” On June 18th, officials at the White House decided to explain the Administration’s position to the public in a press conference. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the President’s chief spokesperson, pressured Nielsen to deliver the briefing, as a means of shielding the White House from blame. Nielsen’s advisers were uniformly opposed. “She would become the face of the policy,” one of them told me. But, according to an official who was present for the conversation, Sanders told Nielsen, “The President is getting killed on this, and it’s your department. How are you not going to go out there?”\n\nAt the press conference, Nielsen alternated between denying that the government had created a policy to separate children from their parents and defending zero tolerance as a necessary measure for enforcing immigration laws. Forty-eight hours later, Trump ended the separation policy, blaming Nielsen for his political defeat. “I have no idea how Miller managed to escape this one,” the official told me. “He knows just how and when to disappear.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nAs Trump has consolidated his control over the Republican Party, it is easy to see Miller as an embodiment of the rightward turn of conservative politics. But, in the past year, he has made enemies among people at D.H.S. who shared his goals of tightening enforcement and revamping the legal-immigration system yet were alarmed by his contempt for policy channels and his disregard for the law. As one of them told me, Miller was conducting “a kind of permanent political campaign.” Miller tried to enlist officials to bolster the President’s claims about immigrant crime. David Lapan, a retired colonel who worked for John Kelly at D.H.S., told me, “He’d say, ‘You need to work harder to show how bad immigrants are. Highlight stories on criminal immigrants getting charged after being released.’ ”\n\nOn Fridays, Miller convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Office Building, next to the White House, to discuss the ways in which federal bureaucrats were falling short of implementing Trump’s agenda. Eventually, career officials stopped attending, and Miller’s audience became the political appointees who were already aligned with him. He harangued them, too. At one meeting, displeased with an *ICE*{: .small} official who had once worked at the Center for Immigration Studies, he told him, “I’ll send you right back to writing blog posts for C.I.S.”\n\nAfter Trump ended the family-separation policy, he was forced to make another concession. More families were fleeing Central America and travelling to the U.S., owing in part to the cycle of restrictive measures being adopted, then refashioned and sometimes abandoned after court challenges and political setbacks. When border policy changes in frequent and conspicuous ways, news tends to spread through Central America. “Trump made for the perfect sales pitch for smugglers: Come now, before it’s too late!” James Nealon, a former senior D.H.S. official, told me. The department ran out of detention space, and had to resume the catch-and-release policy.\n\nAccording to a D.H.S. official who worked closely with Miller, as “the problems got more complex, and as the frustrations mounted,” his behavior became erratic. At meetings, he would ask for data that were irrelevant to the discussion, then launch into a monologue. Another D.H.S. official said, “You didn’t know which Stephen you were going to get. He could be very articulate, then he’d be quoting Breitbart in a diatribe. It was all over the place.” His policy ideas were often impracticable or unrelated to the issue under discussion. He wanted the department to house all migrants at Guantánamo Bay, and the F.B.I. to conduct immigration arrests. One official told me, “It got tedious. None of it would solve the problem we had. And, at the end of the operations he was pushing, the question would just be: Are you going to have something meaningful and sustainable that isn’t just a sharp elbow?”\n\nDepartment officials felt that they knew how to manage the border crisis. They needed more resources, to house families and children, and other agencies needed to absorb the overflow. But, the official said, Miller “had unreasonable expectations about how fast the bureaucracy could write rules to fix the biggest problems we had. His default position was that there was a bunch of bureaucrats in the bowels of *ICE*{: .small} or Citizenship and Immigration Services who didn’t want this to happen.”\n\nBecause Miller had inserted himself into D.H.S.’s policymaking process, officials felt obliged to shield their work from him. At one point, to keep Miller from discovering the details of a policy discussion, the head of D.H.S. held meetings in a classified security bunker, known as a *SCIF*{: .small}, where cell phones are prohibited and strict rules of confidentiality are in effect. Convinced that a cabal of deep-state actors was trying to thwart Trump’s agenda, Miller had effectively forced officials to go underground in their own agencies. Steve Bannon told me, “Stephen’s experience has deepened his belief in the deep state, that they’re all going to leak in an attempt to stop his policy efforts.”\n\nIncreasingly, Miller lashed out at high-level D.H.S. officials, even those who favored many of the same policies. A frequent target was Francis Cissna, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services since 2017, who had worked to reshape the immigration system in ways that were often too technical to capture mainstream attention. Cissna had been an immigration lawyer in the government for more than a decade; when he got married, his wedding cake was decorated with an edible version of the Immigration and Nationality Act. “He’s an immigration nerd,” Barbara Strack, a former colleague, told me. Cissna was a hero to members of the restrictionist movement: deeply knowledgeable, he framed his actions as a commitment to the rule of law.\n\nFor months, Cissna had been working on the Administration’s most significant attempt to overhaul the legal-immigration system: the “public-charge rule,” which would allow the government to block millions of people—disproportionately, immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia—from getting green cards based on their income. It typically takes two years to fully implement a rule, but Miller wanted it done more quickly. He already resented Cissna for what he called the “asylum fraud crisis” at the border, since Cissna’s agency was in charge of handling asylum applications. After he hectored Cissna on one interagency phone call, with dozens of officials listening in, Cissna told him to stand down.\n\n“I won’t stand down,” Miller shouted. “I won’t stand down. I won’t stand down.”\n\nOn another occasion, during a meeting in the White House Situation Room, Miller lambasted Ronald Vitiello, the head of *ICE*{: .small}, who had worked in immigration enforcement for more than three decades, for not single-handedly rewriting federal rules on the detention of children. “You ought to be working on this regulation all day, every day,” Miller told him. “It should be the first thought you have when you wake up. And it should be the last thought you have before you go to bed.”\n\n+++inset-left\n[#cartoon: \u002Fcartoons\u002F5e4f4c6d39082c000879aca0]||||||\n+++\n\nCissna, Vitiello, and others were exasperated by Miller’s lack of interest in setting sound policies. “We’d say, ‘Well, the law says this and that, you’d need to make changes,’ ” an official told me. “Then we’d get the phone call again, and the proposal would be slightly different. We’d say, ‘You still can’t do that.’ They’d come back to us again. Finally, sure, it was lawful, but it was also stupid.” Officials came to think that Miller was territorial; he wanted to be the only immigration expert in the room at all times, and he was willing to undermine like-minded people who might impede his access to the President. One of them told me, “He’s not a true believer. If he were, he’d want to get the agenda done right.”\n\nIn April, Miller initiated a purge of D.H.S. It began with the firing of Nielsen, then continued with the ouster of Vitiello, Cissna, the head of Customs and Border Protection, and the department’s top lawyer. Restrictionist groups like the Center for Immigration Studies protested Cissna’s departure. Chuck Grassley, who had worked with Cissna on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the President was “pulling the rug out from the very people that are trying to help him accomplish his goal.” But with Nielsen and the other officials gone, Miller was able to move loyalists into the top positions. One of them was Matthew Albence, the new head of *ICE*{: .small}, who, in congressional testimony from 2018, compared family-detention facilities to “summer camp.” A senior D.H.S. official said, “Now there are no breaks in the chain of command.”\n\nDisgruntled department veterans saw many of Miller’s actions as policy miscues and legal errors, but they were more likely signs of Miller’s success. So was the political deadlock on immigration, which the White House was deliberately exacerbating. [Michael Chertoff](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2001\u002F11\u002F05\u002Fcrackdown), who led D.H.S. under George W. Bush, told me, “The only two arguments you hear now are ‘Don’t enforce the law at all,’ or ‘Be draconian.’ ” Miller has exploited calls by left-wing Democrats to abolish *ICE*{: .small} and to decriminalize border crossings. On the whole, public outrage has dissipated, and the federal courts, which are increasingly populated by Trump appointees, are starting to uphold the Administration’s policies. The U.S. is resettling the fewest number of refugees in its history; there are more than fifty-five thousand asylum seekers stuck in Mexico under a policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols; and the Central American asylum deals—known as safe third-country agreements—are expanding. A former senior official told me, “Without Miller, Nielsen would still be secretary. There would be no safe third-country agreements, no M.P.P. He pushed and pushed. He simply works harder than everyone else.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nLast October, the President’s fourth head of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, who filled the position left by Nielsen, announced his resignation, six months into the job. “What I don’t have control over is the tone, the message, the public face and approach of the department in an increasingly polarized time,” he [told](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.washingtonpost.com\u002Fimmigration\u002Facting-homeland-security-chief-frustrated-and-isolated--even-as-he-delivers-what-trump-wants-at-the-border\u002F2019\u002F10\u002F01\u002Fb62e740c-e3ad-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html) the Washington _Post_. White House officials initially distrusted McAleenan, who was a career official and had served during the Obama Administration. Yet the President soon came to depend on McAleenan’s experience: after he took charge of the department, the number of immigrants apprehended at the southern border dropped by close to sixty per cent. He was also the lead negotiator of the Central American asylum deals. When McAleenan tendered his resignation, Miller initially refused to accept it.\n\nIn late fall, as Trump’s impeachment hearings began, Miller tried to limit his own public exposure. “He was getting a little too much steady attention, so he knew he had to hang back,” a top Administration official told me. Miller has survived the upheavals in Trump’s inner circle by representing himself as a member of the supporting cast. This strategy was reinforced by the demise of Steve Bannon, who, a few months before being fired, in August, 2017, appeared on the cover of _Time_, next to the headline “*[The Great Manipulator](https:\u002F\u002Ftime.com\u002Fmagazine\u002Fus\u002F4657637\u002Ffebruary-13th-2017-vol-189-no-5-u-s\u002F)*{: .small}.” Sessions was forced out in November, 2018, after having recused himself from the Russia probe. Trump continued to mock him, often in front of Miller. According to someone who witnessed the exchanges, Miller never spoke up to defend his mentor. He was “part of the family now,” a White House official told me.\n\nBy the end of November, Miller was back in the news, though not by choice. The Southern Poverty Law Center acquired and published [hundreds of e-mails](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.splcenter.org\u002Fstephen-miller-breitbart-emails) that Miller had exchanged, between 2015 and 2016, with editors at Breitbart. They included links to articles on the white-supremacist Web site *VDare*{: .small}, as well as an enthusiastic reference to “The Camp of Saints,” a racist French novel about the ravages of immigration. In one e-mail, Miller approvingly forwarded an article arguing that the U.S. should deport immigrants on trains “to scare out the people who want to undo our country.” In Congress, there were calls for his resignation, but only from Democrats.\n\nThe e-mail scandal barely registered at the White House, where Miller faced a greater challenge. At Trump’s behest, Jared Kushner—who was already responsible for negotiating peace in the Middle East, overhauling international trade agreements, and leading the President’s reëlection campaign—has added immigration to his portfolio. “Stephen understands that Kushner is the real power,” a former White House official said. “He would never cross Kushner.”\n\n“When Kushner came in to work on this, he told people that they were too close to the issue, that he had the distance from it that was needed,” a senior Republican aide told me. A number of people Kushner consulted on the Hill recommended that he start by trying smaller deals, such as one on *DACA*{: .small}. “I’m doing this big or I’m not doing it at all,” he responded. In May, from a dais in the White House Rose Garden, Trump announced the broad contours of Kushner’s “merit-based” immigration plan, in which applicants would be evaluated based not on family ties, as in the current system, but on a combination of factors, including language skills, education, and employment prospects. (Sitting in the front row was Lindsey Graham, who was now one of Trump’s strongest allies.) In 2013, when Miller was first engaged in immigration policy, he and Sessions talked about moving to a merit-based system, and “it was laughed about,” one of the former Republican aides told me. “It wasn’t just a fringe position. It was a politically impossible position.” Now the proposal represents the White House’s “moderate” pitch, though it is still unlikely to get through Congress.\n\nA six-hundred-page bill that details Kushner’s plan has been circulating in Washington. It would not directly lower the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country each year, but, so far, Miller has coöperated with Kushner, writing the parts of it that address asylum and family detention. “Jared is the most powerful White House adviser, but he’s very busy,” a person who has worked closely with both Miller and Kushner told me. “Miller is focussed on one thing. He and Kushner make situational alliances. They both think the President needs the other, and they each believe in the other’s absolute loyalty to Trump. In all my time around them, I have never heard either one of them say a negative word about the other, and that’s not true of anyone else.”\n\n-=-=-=\n\nRecently, the number of migrants intercepted at the border has dropped significantly—from a hundred and forty-four thousand, in May, 2019, to thirty-six thousand, last month. Asylum seekers stuck in Mexico have given up on reaching the U.S. America’s legal and moral standing may not survive the Administration’s immigration policies, but Trump has succeeded in realizing one of his most infamous tweets: “Our country is full.”\n\nWith the border virtually sealed, Miller is turning his attention inward. D.H.S. has begun sending armed agents from Border Patrol *SWAT*{: .small} teams to New York, Chicago, and other so-called sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement has limited its coöperation with *ICE*{: .small}. “There’s no one left at D.H.S. to say ‘No’ to Miller anymore,” a senior department official told me. Another official was present at a meeting in which Miller advocated allowing *ICE*{: .small} officers to pull children out of school.\n\nThis summer, months before the election, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Administration can cancel *DACA*{: .small}. “Everything—everything!—hinges on that decision,” a former senior D.H.S. official told me. If the Supreme Court ends *DACA*{: .small}, then “Miller will be in ecstasy. He’ll finally have the leverage over the Democratic Congress that he’s been dying to have this entire time. He’ll say, ‘Well, you’re all worried we’re going to deport them. What will you agree to?’ ” The official continued, “It’ll be the summer of a huge campaign, and Miller will be in his glory.” ♦\n\nAn earlier version of this story misstated the name of the Immigration and Nationality Act.",,"hierarchy":[],"name":"Jeff Sessions","parent":null,"photos":{},"root":[],"slug":"jeff-sessions"}],"sections":[{"id":"590a18798b51cf59fc42477f","modelName":"category","collection":"categories","contributors":{},"hierarchy":[],"name":"Profiles","parent":null,"photos":{},"root":[],"slug":"profiles"}]},"channel":"Magazine","contentSource":"magazine","contributors":{"author":[{"id":"590a0738fba4e90c8d8d92ff","modelName":"contributor","collection":"contributors","bio":"Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at *The New Yorker*. He won a 2017 National Award for Education Reporting for “[American Studies](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Fmagazine\u002F2017\u002F05\u002F22\u002Fan-underground-college-for-undocumented-immigrants),” a story about an underground school for undocumented immigrants. He has been a finalist three times for a Livingston Award, and is the recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award as well as the 2018 Immigration Journalism Prize from the French-American Foundation. His writing and reporting have also appeared in the New York *Times*, *The Atlantic*, *The Atavist*, *Oxford American*, and *The Nation*.","8.jpg","width":1901,"height":2560,"duration":null}},"caption":"Miller’s obsession with restricting immigration and punishing immigrants has come to define Trump’s Administration.","altText":"Stephen Miller","credit":"Illustration by Barry Blitt","filename":"200302_r35898.jpg","revision":16,"tags":[],"title":"200302_r35898"}]},"promoDek":"Donald Trump’s senior adviser has been the true driving force behind this Administration’s racist agenda. How far will he go?","promoHed":"How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession","pubDate":"2020-02-21T11:00:00.000Z","related":[],"rubric":"","seoDescription":"Jonathan Blitzer reports on Donald Trump’s senior adviser, who has been the true driving force behind this Administration’s racist agenda. ","seoTitle":"How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession","socialDescription":"Donald Trump’s senior adviser has been the true driving force behind this Administration’s racist agenda. How far will he go?","socialTitle":"How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession","subChannel":"Profiles","tags":["_page_numbers:44-53","_xmlfilename:200302fa_fact_blitzer","_stackname:2100_dept_blitzer_200302","Stephen Miller","Immigration","Donald Trump","Family Separation","Immigrants","Department of Homeland Security","Jeff Sessions"],"template":"standard","url":"magazine\u002F2020\u002F03\u002F02\u002Fhow-stephen-miller-manipulates-donald-trump-to-further-his-immigration-obsession","videos":{},"magazineStartPage":44},{"id":"5e4ea264c385e000089fe274","modelName":"article","collection":"articles","body":"-=-=-=-\n\nHarry Reid was rarely accused of being charismatic in his public life. But he told people what he thought. He called George W. Bush a “loser,” Clarence Thomas an “embarrassment,” and Alan Greenspan a “hack.” He was first elected to represent Nevada in the Senate in 1986, and he became the top Democrat in the chamber eighteen years later, at a harrowing moment for his party. In 2004, Democrats not only failed to prevent Bush’s reëlection but lost seats in the House and in the Senate. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital,” Bush said at the time. “And now I intend to spend it.” Reid helped beat back Bush’s attempts to privatize Social Security, and then led Senate Democrats through the election of [Barack Obama](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fbarack-obama) and the passage of the most consequential series of liberal laws enacted in half a century: the Affordable Care Act, the economic stimulus, the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, the auto bailout. He opted not to seek reëlection in 2016, after suffering a freak gym accident, and left Washington just as [Donald Trump](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.newyorker.com\u002Ftag\u002Fdonald-trump) arrived. In 2018, he was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. \n\nReid grew up in the boom-and-bust town of Searchlight, Nevada, well after the bust occurred. His father was a miner, and his family’s home was built out of creosote-soaked railroad ties. “We had a little tree in our yard for a while,” Reid wrote in his memoir, from 2008\\. “It died.” In 1977, he was appointed head of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a job that no one wanted. As the story goes, he spent the next four years tangling with Mafia wise guys. During an F.B.I. sting that he helped arrange, in 1978, he famously yelled at a businessman, “You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me!” Then he tried to choke the man.\n\nThe Nevada caucuses, on Saturday, will be the third contest of the 2020 Presidential nomination race. On Wednesday, I joined a parade of journalists who came in for an audience with Reid, in the office he keeps in the well-appointed bowels of the Bellagio hotel and casino, in Las Vegas. Seated behind his desk, he wore a black fedora and a pinstripe suit. If the outfit was a wink at the mobsters he helped push out of Vegas, he didn’t say. When I extended my hand in greeting, he offered a clenched fist. We fist bumped. During an hour-long conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we spoke about the election, the Democratic Party, the Senate, impeachment, and U.F.O.s. Reid is eighty and uses a wheelchair, but he still answers questions nimbly, in his gravelly, deadpan voice. “I don’t know what my notoriety was, but I had a good time working my caucus,” he said, of his time in the Senate. “I think we got a lot of things done.” \n\n__There are two ways that Democrats seem to talk about Donald Trump. One way is as a historically weak opponent, whose behavior turns off large numbers of voters, whose party is coming off big losses in a midterm election. The other way is as a very strong incumbent, overseeing a growing economy, raising huge sums of money, and willing to do anything to stay in power. Which of those views do you subscribe to?__ \n\nI think it’s a mixture. I believe that Trump is not doomed to lose. I think that he could win. I hope he doesn’t. I don’t think he will. But we cannot take it for granted. And that’s why you have to have a campaign that’s based upon more than just how bad Trump is. It has to be a campaign that relates to what people care about. Young people care about climate. Everybody cares about health care, which has been so damaged by the Republicans whacking Obamacare every chance they get. So we have to talk about issues that are important to people in America, not how bad Trump is.\n\n__You filled out your early-voting caucus card uncommitted. Why?__ \n\nSince we got an early caucus out here, I have never taken a position in a primary. Never. Not when Obama was there—my dear friend. Not when Hillary was there. I’ve never gotten involved. I don’t intend to.\n\n__You’re responsible for Nevada going third in our current primary system—__ \n\nShould be first, but here’s where we are. \n\n__Well, I’m wondering if you think the current system is working. Is this the best way for the Democrats to pick a nominee?__ \n\nI think that the present system is not good—with the debacle we had an Iowa. And the vote we had in New Hampshire. Those are not the two places we should start. Because those two states do not represent America. They’re states that are white. We should have the early vote be a state like Nevada that is diverse, that is a state where organized labor is strong, a state where we have other things that other people can relate to. For example, tourism. We are the No. 1 place in the country for tourism. But in every state in the union, one of the top economic drivers is tourism. So Nevada is a really good place to start.\n\n__Does the fact that Iowa and New Hampshire are so white explain why the Democrats are now down to an all-white group of candidates?__ \n\nWell, I don’t think you can blame it on Kamala Harris being dumb or having a terrible campaign. Same with Cory Booker. His mom lives in Nevada, his dad died here. I think that those two states just really make it difficult for a person of color to get traction. They could here.\n\n__Does the prospect of a drawn out race in the primary trouble you?__ \n\nNo. I think competition is good, whether it’s in a soccer match or in a campaign. I think it’s important that we have some competition.\n\n__You’ve criticized Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as unpassable. But you’ve also criticized Congress for being dysfunctional. Why should Democrats be limited in what they propose based on what could work in a dysfunctional environment?__ \n\nBecause I think we have a situation where Democrats could take control of the Senate. I think that’s not a stretch. I think we’re gonna win in Colorado, win in Arizona, we’re gonna win New Hampshire. I think we have a real shot in North Carolina. I think that Doug Jones is going to surprise people in Alabama. So I think we can retake the Senate. And in spite of what the Republicans have done to it, with a little bit of good luck, we can take away some of the damage they’ve done.\n\n__But with Medicare for All, specifically, if passage were assured, would you think it was a good idea?__ \n\nMedicare for All—take, for example, here in Nevada. The very large, powerful, sixty-thousand-member Culinary Union came out saying not only no, but *hell* no. They don’t like it. Medicare for All takes away a lot of insurance plans that people bargained for and have had for a long, long time. Medicare for All—I’ve spoken out against it in the past, I’m speaking on it again. I’m not going to live in some hypothetical world where we have no problems getting things passed. It’s a lousy way to approach health care.\n\n__One argument that Bernie Sanders makes is that, if he’s elected, he will compel Congress to act on his agenda by deploying his supporters in the home districts and states of lawmakers. Do you think that kind of pressure strategy that Sanders is talking about—would that work on senators?__ \n\nWell, it may have happened in the past, I just don’t know when. The President can take an issue and deal with one issue. But to think you can change the whole direction of the Party by having grassroots strength? I just don’t think it’s possible. \n\n__You said you think that the chances are good for Democrats to take back the Senate. Does the nominee at the top of the ticket change that outlook?__ \n\nI think anyone that gets the nomination, people will focus on, can that person beat Trump, and the answer is yes. Any poll you can find, you can have any of the Presidential Democrat wannabes, they all beat Trump. \n\n__But do they help down the ticket?__ \n\nWe hear this every Presidential election cycle. At least every one I’ve been involved in for these many decades. “The party is moving too far to the left. It’s just terrible. What are we going to do about it?” Well, when the primaries are over, the candidate moves back to the middle. That’s how it works out. \n\n__Hillary Clinton was recently quoted saying that no one in the Senate likes Bernie Sanders. Is that true?__ \n\nI don’t know why Hillary said that. I always try to agree with Hillary, but I always kind of liked Bernie. He wasn’t treated well in the House. When he came to the Senate, I went out of my way to make sure he felt comfortable. And I think he did. I gave him good committee assignments. So I like Bernie. He never caused me any trouble.\n\n__Why do you think Republican senators are so afraid of Donald Trump?__ \n\nI think that Republican senators, with the exception of Mitt Romney, are more concerned about being reëlected than doing the right thing. I can’t imagine that they can stand by while this man, this amoral man, does such awful things. Such a bully. They’re just going along with the crowd. They don’t want to upset him. I mean, for me, it’s hard to comprehend how being a senator is more important than doing the right thing.\n\n__After the 2016 election, when Romney was angling to be Trump’s Secretary of State, you said that you had lost all respect for him. Just a couple of weeks ago, he was the lone Republican to vote for impeachment. What did you make of that?__ \n\nWell, I think that his vote will go down in history. He’s the only person to have voted to impeach a President of his own party. So I have to admire that. I sent a message, to get word to Mitt that I was very proud of his vote. \n\n__Does it surprise you how much of an ally Mitch McConnell has become to Donald Trump?__ \n\nWell, Mitch goes where he feels the power is and what will help him. He’s made the calculated decision that this is a good thing for him. He doesn’t want Trump coming to Kentucky during his reëlection race. He has a good opponent this time. He doesn’t want Trump coming there, saying bad things about him. He’s just trying to save himself.\n\n__When George W. Bush was President, you said you were concerned about him trampling norms, pulling America back from the world, and dividing the country, which are all things that Democrats now say about Donald Trump. How would you compare the two of them?__ \n\nThere isn’t a day that goes by—well, I guess there are a few, but not many—that I don’t look back and say, “Boy, I wish Bush were here now.” I just think that the norm that has been set by Donald Trump is so bad that a President like George W. Bush looks real good to me today. He was a patriot. I disagreed with him. But he was somebody you could talk to, joke with, had a good personality. So, I wish for Bush today. Or his father. \n\n__Ellen DeGeneres angered a lot of Democrats when she sat with George Bush in a box at a football game.__ \n\nI think going to a ball game with George Bush would be a lot of fun. He’s owned a baseball team. He loves sports. Has a good sense of humor. I used to give him a hard time about his little Scottish terrier, Barney. I said to him, “Barney, he’s fat.” I came to a meeting in the Oval Office, and I said, “Where’s Barney?” He said, “He’s on the treadmill, he’s trying to lose a little weight.” So, I like George Bush.\n\n__How do you think Nancy Pelosi handled impeachment?__ \n\nI served with Tip O’Neill when I was in the House. I’m a student of Speakers of the House. And I believe without any question that, when the history books are written, Nancy Pelosi will be deemed the best Speaker of the House in history. She’s doing a remarkably good job. She’s got Trump afraid of her. I think that she has just been remarkably sound.\n\n__What are your thoughts on the Squad?__ \n\nThey serve a purpose. There’s nothing wrong with having—you can call it a caucus, call it whatever you want—some people that are trying to do something a little bit different. There’s nothing wrong with that. I try to follow their tweets, and other things they do. Statements they make. Good! It’s good for the party to have a little competition.\n\n__Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said that, in Europe, she and Joe Biden would not even be in the same party. Is the Democratic Party big enough for the two factions that are now fighting for control of it?__ \n\nBut, you see, we’re not in Europe, we’re here in America. Totally different mindset. Different rules and regulations. They have the parliamentary system. We don’t.\n\n__You got rid of some aspects of the filibuster. You kept others. Now, you’re in favor of doing away with it entirely. Talk me through what changed your mind.__ \n\nO.K., let’s go back and find out why I changed the rules. Now, the rules had been changed many times prior to my changing them. But Obama was President. We had over a hundred judges that Republicans wouldn’t let us confirm. We had the D.C. Circuit, the second most important court in the country—four or five vacancies there. Cabinet and sub-Cabinet that we couldn’t get confirmed. For the first time in the history of the country, they filibustered the Secretary of Defense. They could not attack organized labor directly, so they did it indirectly: they went after the National Labor Relations Board. They stopped them from meeting a quorum. So I had no choice. And that’s why we changed those rules. We got our judges. We got cabinet spots filled. We saved the National Labor Relations Board, and did other good things. We did it because it was good for the country, and I have no regret whatsoever. \n\n__Some people say that the moves you made opened the door to McConnell doing away with all judicial filibusters. Others say, well, McConnell was going to do it anyway so you should have just gone all the way and done what you wanted.__ \n\nWell, I can’t control what McConnell has done to mess up the Senate. But what I did was the right thing to do for the country. And McConnell made a decision—and the Republicans who support him, along with Trump—to make the Senate a nonentity. That had nothing to do with what I did.\n\n__You’ve written that, without getting rid of the filibuster, the prospect of addressing climate change through legislation is really slim.__ \n\nThe number one issue facing America, facing the world today, is climate. And no one feels that more strongly than young people. And with the Senate the way it is now, nothing’s going to happen. And that’s bad.\n\n__You don’t like the Green New Deal. Can you sketch out what you think the legislative path forward should be?__ \n\nIt’s simple. We just need to focus on fossil fuel. And we’ve done a pretty good job in Nevada and a few other places on coal. But we have to do a better job on fossil fuel, and then make sure we continue doing good things for renewable energy. Renewable tax credits extended into the future. We were able to get ten years with tax credits for solar, but they’re going to fade away pretty soon. And that’s not good.\n\n__Did the excitement that the Green New Deal was able to generate surprise you?__ \n\nI’m not surprised at all. It sounds good, until you look at what they’re doing. Same with Medicare for All. Sounds great until you put a pencil in it and see what it does to everybody around the country. So we have to do something about climate. But the Green New Deal is not the answer. \n\n__You talked a few minutes ago about the Culinary Union’s response to the Medicare for All proposal. Obviously, they’re proud of the benefits that they provide to their members. At the same time, they declined to endorse a candidate. What do you make of how they balanced their interests?__ \n\nWell, D. Taylor, who is the lead person in that union, he is not a neophyte. [Taylor, a former secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, is now the president of the Culinary Union’s parent union, UNITE HERE.] He understands politics very, very well. The Culinary was the first in Nevada to speak out in any way adverse to Bernie. We in Nevada, especially southern Nevada, where eighty per cent of the people live, we listen pretty closely to what the Culinary says. They’ve done a wonderful job of organizing for their workers, but in the process they have also done a good job of placating the massive hotels we have, so they have a pretty good partnership. We haven’t had, in some time, a major strike. And so we—I think it’s fair to say—appreciate what’s gone on between labor and management in the hotel industry here in Nevada.\n\n__Michael Bloomberg has spent a couple hundred million dollars on his campaign already. What do you make of billionaires self-financing?__ \n\nI am an opponent—underline, underscore, exclamation mark—of Citizens United. I think it was one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever made. But we’re stuck with it. Now, what Tom Steyer and Bloomberg are doing is within the law. They’re not doing anything dishonest. They have a right to do what they’re doing. I think that money plays too big of a part in elections. That’s why I’m so opposed to Citizens United. But we have to get the American people to rise up and be more of a supportive force on that issue than they have been.\n\n__Do you think legislation, in terms of campaign-finance reform, is feasible?__ \n\nI could give you some theoretical answer, but the fact is: McConnell, his No. 1 issue is campaign finance. And as long as the Republicans have the majority in the Senate, we’re in trouble. And even if we have the majority, we’re still in trouble, because he would filibuster the hell out of things. So that’s why I talked about—maybe the filibuster isn’t the way to go in the future.\n\n__Obviously, Bloomberg is in a unique position because of the money he has. But he joined this race really late, and yet he’s been able to attract significant support. I wonder if that suggests that maybe our campaigns are too long?__ \n\nAmen, brother. The campaigns are too long. Money-raising goes on the entire election cycle. Two years they’re all raising money. They start raising it before the election cycle comes. I think we should try to figure out some way to shorten elections. It’s theoretical at this time, but I think it’s really important for our country.\n\n__You [encouraged](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.vox.com\u002Fpolicy-and-politics\u002F2017\u002F3\u002F14\u002F14912946\u002Fharry-reid-elizabeth-warren-president-2020) Elizabeth Warren to run for President. At times, she’s looked like a front-runner. But now things look really hard for her. I’m wondering if you have a theory of what happened.__ \n\nWe have a really good bunch of candidates running for President who are Democrats. Any one of them would be a good President. Everybody thought that Amy Klobuchar was all through—that’s what people wrote a month or two ago. Now they’re saying, well she’s done well in the debates, and now she’s being considered as one of the front-runners. So it’s way too early to count Elizabeth Warren out or anyone else. \n\n__You hinted at the answer to this, but, would you support Bernie Sanders if he’s the nominee?__ \n\nYes. \n\n__And what would you say to Democrats who are saying that they wouldn’t be able to support him if he’s the nominee?__ \n\nWell, I would say to them, You want Trump?\n\n__The Atlantic* has [reported](https:\u002F\u002Fwww.theatlantic.com\u002Fpolitics\u002Farchive\u002F2020\u002F02\u002Fsanders-obama-primary-challenge\u002F606709\u002F) that, in the summer of 2011, you had a conversation with Sanders to warn him against mounting a primary campaign against Obama.__ \n\nYeah, I’ve seen that story floating around, but here’s the deal. I’m pretty sure I’m right. Bernie, at that time, was running for reëlection. Bernie is a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. Why would he even consider a primary when he’s running for reëlection? I don’t accept that.\n\n__So you didn’t have that conversation?__ \n\nI don’t accept that. No. During a time when he was running for reëlection, primarying Obama would have been the dumbest thing he could think of doing.\n\n__But is “I don’t accept that” a “We didn’t have that conversation”?__ \n\nNo. \n\n__You were known as someone who was more liberal in terms of government programs than on social issues. You opposed gay marriage, abortion, gun control. Those are issues that the Democratic Party now more or less agrees upon. And the fights are all about spending and government programs. Does that surprise you?__ \n\nLet me answer your question this way. I think the trait of somebody that’s a successful politician, a successful senator, is somebody that is not locked into the past. I believe that my shift on gay marriage was critical. I think that my progression on guns was extremely important. I came out very publicly, as my Senate career went on, saying there are too many guns in our society. On abortion, I came out so strongly, the strongest support I had in my final election was from Planned Parenthood. So anybody that is locked into a position and never changes, that isn’t who I was, and I’m proud of the fact that I changed. \n\n__Where did that change come from?__ \n\nI would hope that some of the changes that I had in my own calculation were helpful in changing the national discussion on this. Take, for example, gay marriage. I knew that when I came out in support of it, I surprised everybody. But I think, as a result of that, I picked up other senators, who said, If Reid can do it, I can do it. I’m glad I did it. People learn. I can remember, a few days after, I had a whole bunch of clergy—I did a phone call with them. They said, “How did you do that?” And I said, Let’s think about that. I lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, before I went to Washington, on a cul-de-sac. I can remember, across the street from me, there were a couple of guys—we called them the bachelors. They kept their yard great. “How are you?” that kind of thing. I said, as I look back, I bet those two guys were gay. And if those two guys were married, what the hell difference would it make to me or my family? So I progressed on that, and a number of other issues, and I’m glad I did. \n\n__Does it surprise you, how much Obama’s legacy has been an open topic of debate among Democrats__?\n\nI didn’t know it was. As far as I’m concerned, he was a man of high standards. He’ll go down in history as one of our very good Presidents, and he was scandal-less. Foreign policy—the history books will write about what an important part of history his Presidency brought about in the world. He is well respected around the world, even today. And there are no two more popular people in America today, and perhaps the world, than Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.\n\n__You’re right, most Democrats remember Obama as a good President. Do you think in some ways that the memory of him, and the fact that Hillary Clinton was expected to succeed him and then didn’t, is part of the difficulty that the Party is having in choosing who its leader should be now?__ \n\nYou know, we hear a lot about empowering women, but in Nevada just the opposite has happened. Women have empowered us. In Nevada, a majority of the legislature—assembly and Senate—are women. Majority of our supreme court is women. I think that Hillary got a bad situation. I think that we were not ready for a woman yet. And I think that’s too bad. She would have been a good President. \n\n__Sanders and Warren had an argument about a conversation that took place between them concerning the prospects of a woman President. What did you make of that debate?__ \n\nYeah, I heard about that. I don’t know where the truth was. I came to the Senate when we had one woman, Barbara Mikulski. She and I came in together. And I watched things change. We got senators, more senators, more senators, more senators. And the senate became a better place. I think the country would be in a better situation with a woman as President. It would be good for us to have a woman President.\n\n__I can’t let this opportunity go by without asking about U.F.O.s. You set millions aside to study them when you were in the Senate, and I’m wondering if you can tell me why the U.S. government should be looking out for them.__ \n\nHere’s where I got started with this. A friend of mine here in Nevada, a businessman, he said, “I got a letter I want you to look at.” He was very secretive. He sent it with a courier to my office. And I looked it over, read it. The letter was from somebody at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a PhD physicist. And so, after reading the letter, I agreed to meet with the guy. He didn’t want to come to my office. I wasn’t going to go to his. So I met him at my home.\n\nAnd here’s basically what he told me. He said, “I am a scientist. I am an expert in rockets. I know where they started. I know where they are now. And I know where they’re going to be ten and twenty years from now.” But, he said, “There are a lot of things going on in the world that I don’t understand. And we should do something about it.” And so I started looking at all this stuff. My staff was involved in it. And I came to the conclusion that we didn’t have a couple of goofballs saying they saw something in the sky. Thousands of people reported things in the air that they didn’t understand. For example, I asked John Glenn, a long time ago. He said, “I don’t know, there’s probably something to that.” \n\nNow, when I got the money to do this, I called in the two people that controlled the defense budget: Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens, a Democrat and a Republican. I said, “You guys, I’ve got some information. I want to check to find out if there’s substance to all these unidentified flying objects.” Stevens cut me off. He said, “Whatever you want, you get it from me.” He said, “When I was flying airplanes in World War Two, I had an occasion where there was something off my left wing. I would go up, down, it was still there. I did everything I could to get rid of it. Low on fuel, I had to go back and land. Got down to ground control, I said, “What was that on my wing?” They said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “So you can do whatever you want to do, we need to take a look at this.”\n\nSo, for the twenty-two million dollars that we spent, we gained a lot of information. We found that there were a lot of things unknown about what these things are. Now, I don’t know what they are. I don’t know, O.K.? I have no idea. But I do know we should continue studying. I’m glad we spent that money—we should continue doing that. To better understand. Because, a number of, we can even say a lot of, the people who claim they see something, they write it off. But we’ve had missile bases that closed because they looked up and there were things flying around there. If they wanted to set off a missile, they couldn’t—their communications were shut off. We had our Navy off the coast of San Diego, where there’s something out on the water, and they’re trying to figure out what it is, and their communications are dead. Now, I don’t know what this is all about, O.K.? But I do know that the military now—and I think it’s a step in the right direction—are asking their pilots and their ships to report these occurrences. In the past, they couldn’t do it. They would hurt their chance for promotions. So I have no regrets. The taxpayers money we spent on this is money well spent. My only hope is we continue to look at this. \n\n__Nevada is a place that has changed tremendously in your lifetime. How has the state dealt with that change?__ \n\nI saw firsthand how Nevada has changed. We had—and I’m an expert on this—mob influences in our gaming industry. They placed a bomb on my car. I know all about the changes that have taken place in Nevada. Is there any mob influence in Nevada anymore? Probably not, but never say never, because the commodity we have is cash. We’ve seen great changes come to Nevada. One is corporate gaming, which makes it easier to control. These massive corporations that have moved in. They’re much easier to control. We have an economy that is the envy of the rest of the country. We’re the fastest growing state. That’s happened before. We were doing the same when we had the big economic crash. We’ve got a two-billion-dollar football stadium. We got a new hotel that’s several billion dollars. On and on with all the good things. We have—our vote will be one half minority. Our ballots we distribute in Spanish, English, and Tagalog.\n\n__You were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago, and a lot of Americans struggle with balancing the demands of politics with the other demands of life. I’m wondering if you could just say how you’ve approached that the last two years.__ \n\nWell, I’ve had some health issues. I had a couple of back surgeries. So, you know, I’m not running marathons anymore. I’m dealing with cancer. But I do say to everyone that has cancer: It’s not the end of the world. There are tremendous improvements being made on understanding cancer. I’ve seen it during my travails with cancer. And, you know, cancer is insidious. You know, I had a scan last Thursday and on Friday. They were both clean. But I’m still doing chemotherapy. It makes me sick for a few days. I’m very fortunate in the physicians I have. They believe that the human body can help fight off this disease. I want everyone to know that I’ve got cancer, but it’s not the end of the world. I continue to try to work and want everyone to know that if you have cancer don’t throw in the towel. I’m not fatalistic about it. I think that I’ve always had a tremendous interest in politics and my cancer diagnosis doesn’t change that. I’m just glad I’m able to do as much as I do."