Stephen Miller’s deportation machine is failing — and he’s furious

The country, we were told, is awash with millions upon millions of undocumented criminals and straight-up crazy people, permitted by Democrats and their open borders to roam the land and terrorize the law-abiding white people they were meant to replace.

“There’s been almost 10 million people that have entered this country in the last three years,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told an interviewer during the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Consider that Joe Biden allowed approximately 20 million illegal aliens into our country,” Vice President J.D. Vance claimed more recently, jockeying for influence within the MAGA world and deciding that “20” sounded twice as bad as “10.”

“THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY … ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY,” President Donald Trump posted even more recently, dropping the liberal-coded “approximately” and adding a million souls to the sum because he can.

In reality, which still holds some influence in our aggressively-online world, there are about 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., total. And despite all-caps propaganda to the contrary, they as a class “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens,” according to a 2020 study; they even commit fewer crimes, on average, than fully legal immigrants — those who came here “the right way.”

“Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes,” according to the research, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That’s why Stephen Miller is so mad: an administration that wants nothing more than to parade millions of brown bodies onto military aircraft and out of the country — a MAGA team that promised its voters nothing less than “mass deportations now” — is having a tough time actually finding the hardened criminals the last folks supposedly let in. In April, the Trump administration deported more than 17,200 people; that’s up 29% from a year but it’s far below the pace necessary to meet the stated goal of one million deportees a year (and per NBC News, more than half of those now in ICE detention have no criminal record whatsoever).

Thus, that anger. In a May 28 piece, Axios reported that Miller, the president’s top aide, was livid at ICE officials, insisting that they are the reason why the desired spectacle is failing to materialize. “Miller demanded that field office directors and special agents in charge get arrest and deportation numbers up as much as possible,” the outlet reported, with the new target being 3,000 arrests a day, or about a million a year. “Miller's directive and tone had people leaving the meeting feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren't reached,” according to two sources who attended the meeting with Miller.

Before, when campaigning against the status quo, it was all so easy and obvious: Venezuelan gangs had taken over an entire apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, according to MAGA organs like Fox News, while marauding Haitians had conquered much of Ohio — and no one was doing anything about it! Start by rounding up the 400 billion illegals let in under Biden, the story went, and it will once again be safe to drive your big truck into Manhattan.

Since Jan. 20, however, even the Trump administration has been forced to concede, with its lack of mass arrests, that a micro-narco state was not, in fact, established in the city of Aurora, nor were the immigrants who took factory jobs in Ohio a public menace demanding immediate deportations (the administration has thus far settled for revoking Venezuelans’ and Haitians’ protected legal status). Put simply: There are fewer undocumented people in the U.S. than is claimed by people who are far more likely, statistically, to have felony convictions on their record.

What has happened, instead, is ICE agents appearing at immigration hearings, faces covered as if they were members of a paramilitary organization and not taxpayer-funded public servants, and making a big show of arresting the low-hanging fruit. Along with that, of course, has been a lot of lying, suggesting the ramp-up to “mass deportations soon” will likewise be conducted without shame.

“I watched a planeload of people unload at Gitmo that were pedophiles,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a February appearance on Fox News, back when the U.S. military base in Cuba was the go-to gulag for the Trump administration. But of the several hundred people sent to Guantánamo Bay, DHS could not identify a single such sex offender when pressed by Salon.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Noem likewise misled when she jetted in for a photo op at the El Salvador prison now being used to house immigrants removed from the United States (the publicly stated sentence, without charge or trial, is life imprisonment). “This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people,” Noem said, describing those sent there as the “worst of the worst.”

But the shirtless inmates who were assembled behind her for the occasion were not those sent there by the U.S., nor those who were the “worst of the worst.” An investigation by CBS News found that three-fourths of the 238 Venezuelans sent there have no criminal record — anywhere in the world. The New York Times likewise revealed that the Trump administration, realizing it had mistakenly included a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, on one of its rendition flights, immediately set to work on smearing him as a leader of a criminal gang, MS-13, despite the fact “that nobody seemed to know if it was true.”

The Trump administration’s failures, then, are no comfort. What we have seen so far — arresting mothers and fathers and slandering them as murderers and rapists — will ramp up with $150 billion in enforcement efforts, as federal agents, just trying to meet their arrest quotas, focus on the easy to grab and not the hard-to-find. But there will not and can never be victory: There will always be a need for an enemy, and for treachery, the Trump administration is certain to find Democrats, judges and activists to blame if mass deportations, now and forever, fail to make MAGA voters well and truly happy with their lives.

We can take solace, only, in that Stephen Miller can cause harm, but he will never truly fulfill his dull vision of a homogeneous, white America. And he will always be angry.