Is Stephen Miller failing?

True, Miller has amassed unprecedented power for a deputy White House chief of staff. He exerts extraordinary influence over an unusually large swath of the government, from immigration to criminal justice to even the military’s operations on American soil. Much of what defines public life in the Trump era—masked kidnappings on U.S. streets, standoffs between ICE goons and protesters, military patrols in U.S. cities—has been authored by Miller. His ever-present unctuous smirk suggests he’s visibly relishing the violent hatreds all this has unleashed.

Yet now that we’re one year into President Trump’s second term, it’s clear that in important ways, Miller is falling short of his most elaborate authoritarian designs. The deportations are lagging far behind his hopes. He has not persuaded Trump to deploy the dictatorial power he pines to see. And he has unleashed a cultural moment in defense of immigrants that is more powerful than anything he anticipated.

Miller swaggered into Trump’s second term bursting with hubris, but that bubble deflated quickly. Last spring, only a few months into the new term, he was already privately shrieking at top ICE officials over lackluster deportations, angrily demanding the arrests of 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day.

Nine months later, Miller is still two-thirds short of that goal: Arrests are currently averaging around 1,100 daily. Yes, that’s a lot of people, and tragically, large percentages of them are people with no criminal records. A lot of immigrants whose only crime was to illegally enter the country in search of a better life are suffering terribly right now, which surely pleases Miller greatly.

But Miller’s dream of 3,000 daily arrests remains that—a dream. And that’s a very good thing, because the number is essential to a larger goal. Miller hopes to deport one million people a year, and the current rate won’t come close to that. While ICE is still adding personnel, and deportations may increase, many experts expect Trump and Miller to fall far short of their one-million-per-year goal over his entire term.

“It’s clear that they have not achieved the shock-and-awe campaign of mass deportations that they wanted, and they are still running into quite a lot of obstacles,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told me. After Trump’s term, Reichlin-Melnick continued, “there will still be millions of people here who are undocumented. Miller will not be able to deport even the majority of undocumented immigrants in four years.”

That probably won’t put all that big a dent in the overall undocumented population, which hit around 14 million in 2023, though it’s probably lower now. So one can still hope a future Democratic president and Congress can create a path for longtime non-criminal undocumented residents to get right with the law.

Then there are Miller’s other goals. He has stated plainly that he wants to functionally end due process for migrants entirely. He also appears to envision Trump assuming the authority to simply decree that undocumented immigrants are criminal gang members—or terrorists, or members of a hostile invading army—all by presidential fiat. He wants Trump to assume an unreviewable, quasi-unlimited power to remove people regardless of what any court says.

Miller has done extensive damage to the rule of law, and he and Trump have consigned some migrants to a netherworld beyond the law entirely. But broadly speaking, the courts have continued to function. Trump has not assumed the unchecked authorities Miller wants him to. Miller’s biggest test case for getting Trump to exert such unconstrained powers—that of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—has thus far failed.

On another front, Miller has been cagey about whether he wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to ramp up military repression in U.S. cities. He almost certainly does. But as of now, Trump hasn’t done that.

Finally, a glance at this administration’s messaging—the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed has become a white nationalist sewer pit—makes it clear that Miller is trying to pull off a hegemonic shift. Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism. Miller wants Americans to see immigrants from the “Third World” as a threat to American wellbeing at an existential, civilizational level.

But that hasn’t happened, either. His tactics have triggered a sustained cultural backlash in defense of the specific migrants in Trump-Miller’s crosshairs and of immigration more broadly as a positive good for the country. Miller has helped drive Trump’s approval on immigration—once a “good” issue for him—into the toilet. The public is rejecting their vision.

Miller is already causing immense human suffering, of course. He has snuffed out many pathways to entry for people fleeing global horrors and has revamped the refugee system to prioritize white people. His project may get a lot farther than many of us can bear.

But it remains possible to envision a different ultimate outcome. In it, Miller’s mass deportations mostly fall short, the government mostly follows court rulings, civil society’s resistance holds, and the public backlash to Miller’s masked storm troopers only grows. A future administration can then channel that popular energy into real reform oriented around immigration as a positive good, realigning our legal, humanitarian and enforcement apparatus with what’s genuinely in the national interest.

And in that scenario, Miller’s true fever dream—for an ethnically reengineered, authoritarian America whose people have sleepwalked into embracing ethnonationalism as the foundation of American identity—will have utterly failed to come to pass.