BUCK: “Biden is Creating the Worst Illegal Immigrant Crisis Ever.” That’s the headline up at FoxNews.com opinion right now. I wrote it last night because I’m just furious about what’s happening here. We’ve been trying to update you about every step of this disaster as it is unfolding with the end of Title 42. But everything the Biden regime has done so far, it seems like they want the border to be wide open.
They want there to be massive, massive inflows of illegal immigrants into this country. Somebody who knows this issue backwards and forwards and was on the front lines of trying to secure the border during the Trump administration is Stephen Miller. He was a former senior adviser to President Trump in the White House, and he’s also the president of America First Legal. He joins us now. Stephen, great to have you back.
MILLER: Great to be here. Thank you.
BUCK: So, Stephen, I’ve been talking to my Border Patrol sources this week and checking in on the numbers as they stand so far as well as the projections from DHS. We’re staring at what feels like the immigration iceberg, so to speak, and the Biden administration is yelling, “Full speed ahead!” Pretended illegal immigration numbers a month away. What’s going on here?
MILLER: Well, I often tell people that I’ve run out of adjectives to describe how bad it already is. You know when Joe Biden came into office in January of 2021, we were already — within a few weeks of him taking the oath of office — in a full-blown border crisis. We all remember the images for that hot minute when the media was actually covering it and then they realized, “Holy crap.
“This is terrible for Biden’s poll numbers. We’re not gonna talk about it again for a year.” The situation since then has gotten unimaginably worse. We’ve gone from four or five thousand apprehensions a day to now 8,000 apprehensions a day. So we’ve doubled what was true, five-alarm fire crisis levels. That’s where we are now. So, it’s much worse than anything we’ve ever had before in American history because 2021 was the highest level since records have been kept.
That’s your starting point! Your baseline under Joe Biden is the worst year in American history. So how do you even describe where we are right now? Not in May, when Title 42 is gone, right now, today, when we are at 8,000 apprehensions a day plus 2,000 got-aways that we know of. By “know of,” I mean these are people Border Patrol sees escape or thee able to deduce the size of a group from footprints or from a fence cut or from drone surveillance, et cetera.
That’s 10,000. And then you have another group which is the unknown got-aways which — of course by definition — are unknown. So your daily numbers crossing exceed 10,000 a day right now. No nation in history has experienced any illegal immigration wave of that size ever. You can’t find any historical precedent for it.
You could scour the history books for your entire life. It’s now on top of that that they’re saying, “Okay. Now let’s get rid of Title 42,” and we’re gonna go from 10,000 to some unknowably larger number at which point in time, you could get any thesaurus in the world; there would be no adjective to describe how bad that is.
CLAY: Stephen, I appreciate you joining us. I’m reading Marco Rubio from this morning:
Okay. So let’s presume that this is true. Buck and I were discussing this yesterday, Stephen. What could possibly be the goal of the Biden administration in making this choice, given that their approval ratings are already total track, they’re staring at a red wave in the midterm elections? What is their game plan? What are they gaining by this, why are they doing it?
MILLER: Well, if you look at several positions of the Democratic Party, I would argue that this is the one that will have by far the most irreversible consequences for our country. If you look at their policies on crime as an example, if you look at their policies on critical race theory as an example, they’re all enormously unpopular with normal human beings, really, including in the Democratic Party too. So the question of course becomes, why?
I think the answer to that is that Democrats are interested and have always been interested in long-term structural power, and so they’re willing to sacrifice short-term pain for long-term gain. First of all, I think they’ve already written off Biden. I’m not the first person to say this. I don’t think they think he’s gonna be the nominee, and I don’t think that they think that if by some miracle he were to become the nominee, that he’ll be in the Oval Office five years from now.
So they’re playing the long game here and they know — look at California — that large scale, uninterrupted illegal immigration — and, by the way, nothing that we have today even compares to what was happening in eighties or nineties. It’s so much worse today, that it’s California times 10. But you look at California.
This is a state that went for Nixon, went for Eisenhower, went for Reagan, went from HW in ’88. Basically, one of the most conservative states in the whole country. Beautiful coastline, beautiful weather and wildly conservative, basically paradise. Now look at California. So they understand that they are setting the stage for long-term Democratic governance.
Once Title 42 goes, they’re going to streamline the process so that we won’t see 15, 20,000-person campsites, so to speak, or groupings by the border the way we did months ago. It’ll just be invisible, largely, because there will be so many people going in and immediately being led into the country with either a notice to appear or an alternative to detention policy, which just means essentially the honor system. Is that even possible? Can the bureaucracy do that and get away with it if the Biden regime says that’s what they want?
MILLER: It is possible, and it’s indeed the plan — and you’re very wise for mentioning it. So since the beginning of the Biden administration, their entire strategy for dealing with the mass migration that they invited has been to accelerate this entry, hence the secret flights that we’ve all seen covered on Fox News and elsewhere. So when they add bodies to the border, when they add more personnel to the border, when they add more facilities to the border, it’s not for the purpose of repatriation, you know, i.e., deportation.
It’s for the purpose of getting people here illegally and more quickly inside the country, and so you remember, again, going back to where we had these images early on of people overthrowing Border Patrol facilities. Their solution to that was not to get people back home, which would have made the whole problem go away in a few weeks.
Their solution was to line up more transportation, to get those people more quickly to their city of choice inside the United States. So that is going to be their sole and entire strategy for the tsunami of illegal immigration that is coming and building and growing. And to your point about asylum — this is especially insidious — we know that these are not asylum seekers. Everybody understands this.
These are overwhelmingly economic migrants. And then there’s also, of course, a portion of criminals, a portion of drug traffickers, a portion of sex traffickers, et cetera. But that’s your grouping. These are not people — with rare exceptions — that would meet any recognized definition of asylum. But if you change the regulations, which they’re doing, to make it easier for someone to get asylum and to allow them to get their benefits far more quickly, you’re minting new citizens at the border.
When you’re granted asylum — I don’t know if many people realize this — that doesn’t mean, “Oh, you get to live here.” No, no. Asylum is a six-year path to American citizenship. Once you’re granted asylum, you’re immediately eligible for all federal benefits in the country. Within a year of granting asylum, you’re eligible for United States green card which is basically full, permanent resident. Five years after that, you can become a United States citizen. So the goal here is to create an illegal alien-to-citizen pipeline.
CLAY: Stephen, you mentioned that you don’t think Biden will be the nominee and that some element before this is about the long game, not about any current political calculus, necessarily. Who’s the nominee for the Democratic Party, in your mind, if you had to place a bet right now in 2024?
MILLER: I don’t think that they know, which is part of the reason why they are so panicky right now. I don’t think that they know, because logic would say that it would have to be the vice president, Kamala Harris, who has arguably had the worst debut as the vice president since anyone has been keeping track of these things. She’s the only person who has somehow managed to be even less articulate than Joe Biden.
But if you were to say you go beyond Biden, you go beyond Harris, and you look more broadly, I could see a situation where they take a hard look, for example, at Gavin Newsom. Now, you and I, if we were advising somebody running against Gavin Newsom, we could come up with a list of 500 lines of attack. But I think for them, always the next place they would go is, “Okay, who are the governors of large, Democrat states?” But I don’t think they know who their nominee is going to be right now.
CLAY: Do you think Hillary might be the nominee?
MILLER: I think she would like to be, I’m sure. Whatever she may say publicly, in her heart I’m sure that she would like it, and there’s still obviously a pretty strong Clinton faction in the party. I don’t think that faction is strong enough to overcome the AOC wing of the party. I could be wrong. Obviously in Biden, they went with a throwback. It turned out that he’s the most radical leftist president in the history of this country. But I don’t know if they’ll be able to do another throwback candidate again.
BUCK: Do you think immigration, Stephen, could be an essential component of — as we’re calling it — the election reckoning that we hope happens in 2022 if the American people know about it? Is it high enough to the radar, does it get enough attention that this could be a critical piece of really delivering a stinging rebuke to the Democrat leftists?
That’s what gets you from a modest Republican majority to a historically large Republican majority, and here’s the other trip with this: The reason why Democrats have got in the away in the past with illegal immigration — of course, again, what’s happening now has no comparison in history — is because Republicans haven’t played the populist card against it.
So their hope is that they can keep their share of the vote amongst Latino voters and amongst other immigrant voting blocs while then continuing to have large-scale immigration and Republicans will sort of do the Paul Ryan, “Oh, we’re for this too. Illegal immigration is great!” If you actually go to minority communities and immigrant communities and you say, “Democrats are destroying your economic prospects.
“They’re destroying your schools. They’re destroying your health care, your safety. They’re putting drugs in your communities. They do not see you as equal citizens, but you’re pawns in their game,” you can make huge gains in those communities, and that’s when you’re in wipeout territory in the midterms.
BUCK: That’s where we need to be. Stephen Miller, everybody, America First Legal. He’s the president, formerly adviser to President Trump. Stephen, always appreciate your expertise on this, my friend. Thanks for being with us.
MILLER: Thank you. Talk soon.
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