Former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath thinks that top White House aide Stephen Miller is the puppet master behind the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms across California.
President Donald Trump announced to the media on Thursday that “changes are coming” to ensure farmers won't lose immigrant labor from their fields.
Trump told reporters they'd “have an order on that soon."
However, on Friday, Tom Homan, executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, told the press, “I have not seen any instruction, anything that changes in the near future."
It prompted MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace to wonder aloud if the president, as the commander-in-chief, issues a statement, do National Guard soldiers follow that or follow what others in the government are telling them.
"Who knows what it means? Because Trump is all over the map," said McGrath. "I mean, he's got his guys, Stephen Miller and these agents, doing these raids. And meanwhile, he's back in Washington, D.C., saying, 'Oh, don't deport the agricultural workers.' I mean, the reality is it's chaos."
The Washington Post reported Friday morning that conservative influencers begged Trump not to allow for farmworker protections.
"Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and an architect of his immigration policy, likewise voiced concerns Thursday about Trump’s comments," the Post reported, citing "a person with knowledge of the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about them publicly."
In a previous incident, Trump told a reporter that he won the case at the Supreme Court over the deportation of a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison without due process. When a TIME magazine reporter corrected him that he lost in court, Trump said, "That's not what my people told me." One editorial called it an "alarming confession."
McGrath said that from the military's perspective, it isn't something they should be involved in at all.
"The military should not be standing around. You see these pictures of ICE agents going after folks, and then you see these National Guardsmen and potentially Marines standing around them guarding the ICE agents. This is not what our military, our Marines, are trained for. It's very dangerous. You're taking them away from training for the real wars. And boy, we just — there's another one that just started last night in the Middle East. So we're taking them away from their real job, and it's really going to hurt our military in the long run. This politicization of our military — it's terrible."
See the clip of McGrath below or at the link here.
- YouTube youtu.be
