No. of Recommendations: 6
Some sources paint separating families as a Steve Miller deliberate action, but until I get a good sound reputable source that gives the details backed by solid support I'm not going that route.-------------------
A story in
The Atlantic in 2022 reported on the origins of the family separation policy extensively. Separation for the purpose of cruelty to "send a message" to potential members of the next wave was
ABSOLUTELY the core purpose of the policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/...Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.(snip...)
Many of these officials now insist that there had been no way to foresee all that would go wrong. But this is not true. The policy’s worst outcomes were all anticipated, and repeated internal and external warnings were ignored. Indeed, the records show that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated.(snip...)
It is easy to pin culpability for family separations on the anti-immigration officials for which the Trump administration is known. But these separations were also endorsed and enabled by dozens of members of the government’s middle and upper management: Cabinet secretaries, commissioners, chiefs, and deputies who, for various reasons, didn’t voice concern even when they should have seen catastrophe looming; who trusted “the system” to stop the worst from happening; who reasoned that it would not be strategic to speak up in an administration where being labeled a RINO or a “squish”—nicknames for those deemed insufficiently conservative—could end their career; who assumed that someone else, in some other department, must be on top of the problem; who were so many layers of abstraction away from the reality of screaming children being pulled out of their parent’s arms that they could hide from the human consequences of what they were doing.The nutshell version?
The family separation policy has roots back to the Bush Administration after 9/11/2001 when border security became viewed as a terroristic threat and the need to appear tough on national security made cracking down on illegal immigration politically advantageous. The idea of purposely making the immigration process so onerous and unpleasant few would want to try it traces to a a Border Patrol official from Texas in 2005. Operation Streamline instituted a practice of prosecuting EVERY border crossing, flooding insufficiently staffed courts with cases and creating huge backlogs. This mindset continued through the Obama Administration. And these problems predated the more recent MASSIVE floods of asylum seekers attempting to flee recent economic meltdowns in places like Venezuela.
THE IDEA of family separation as an intentional incentive to stem illegal immigration actually traces to Tom Holman, the executive director within ICE responsible for removal and enforcement in the Obama Administration. He proposed the idea but it was rejected by his boss. THE IMPLEMENTATION of family separation only came to fruition within the Trump Administration because Trump's abysmal transition effort succeeded at chasing away any moderate establishment Republicans from seeking leadership roles anywhere in the Trump Administration, leaving Trump's team only "C-players" at best to choose from who had virtually no significant experience in the subject matter of their department and questionable personal ethics.
Stephen Miller led the team during the transition that formulated many of the policies Trump intended to launch from Day One and did so by having participants sign NDAs and work without any outside legal counsel. He made it clear long-time career officials who stuck around hoping to use "process" to slow down the worst of the incoming policies would be identified and chased out. The idea of separation seemed to come back around March 2017 and John Kelly publicly came out and attempted to stop it. However, Miller and his team worked around Kelly directly with DHS officials and despite a second effort by Kelly to halt the effort after becoming Chief of Staff, Miller had succeeded at getting a one-off trial started between Border Patrol and DOJ in El Paso that started the ball rolling.
So yea, it can be accurately stated that Stephen Miller is THE single person most responsible for implementing intentional cruelty to women and children as a strategic policy of the United States of America.
WTH
