President Donald Trump's longtime hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller is "prepared for war" over mass deportations, Heather Digby Parton wrote for Salon on Monday — and nothing will deter him from his vision.
The explosion of removals of immigrants from America based on the 1789 Alien Enemies Act, often to an infamous, unaccountable megaprison in El Salvador and with virtually no due process, if any, is rooted largely in his longtime vision, she wrote.
Miller understood, from the moment he came in, she continued, that the courts would put up a fight against the plan, having created Trump's original Muslim travel ban that was rejected by the federal judiciary until it was revised to be slightly less discriminatory.
"He understood that the president was going to have to be both aggressive and provocative. Trump's team needed to assert presidential authority with total confidence, and ensure that the Supreme Court understood they would have to issue the final word on what the law says and how it will be enforced," she wrote.
So far, the battle is only getting started.
"Trump's apparatchiks have not blatantly defied the courts, but they're working them around the edges. Miller is the most vociferous in claiming that the plain words of a Supreme Court order mean the opposite of what they actually say, which is a highly disorienting thing to hear from a presidential adviser," she added.
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That was put most clearly on the display amid the fight over the illegal Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation, which the administration is still refusing to rectify and which Miller falsely claimed was vindicated by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling against it.
Indeed, Miller has new plans, wrote Parton, including the declaration of habeas corpus suspension for migrants, yet another power that has been completely untested for what Miller wants to do with it.
It's possible that ultimately the Supreme Court could give up the fight and just declare all this is legal for the administration to do, she concluded, but it's also clear that Miller is steeling himself for a showdown. He is prepared to "keep raising the stakes, no matter what the courts do to stop him," she said.
"Who knows what other cards he has left to play? He's ready to fight a long war," wrote Digby Parton.