Latest news with #StephenMiller
Los Angeles Times
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: You can support Trump and still see ICE has gone too far
To the editor: I have been a card-carrying Republican for 51 years. I am very supportive of the Trump administration and believe many of his hardball changes have long been needed. I have also supported, wholeheartedly, the efforts to close the borders and to deport 'the worst of the worst' criminals to wherever they came from. I believe this is a bold and necessary move to regain law and order in our country. However, the domestic sweeping up of law-abiding immigrants to meet quotas is closer to fascism ('Trump says he wants to deport 'the worst of the worst.' Government data tell another story,' July 13). White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has crossed the line, and our government is allowing it. Our humanity as a nation is being compromised. The old adage that evil triumphs when good men do nothing applies today. I do not believe MS-13 members are hanging around Home Depot and such, nor are they our gardeners, housecleaners or caregivers. Of the people that have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, around 70% of them have no criminal convictions. Some were in the process of trying to get green cards or are married to citizens. They are not the worst of the worst. They are pawns of deportation quotas. I believe that we must implement a system that allows noncriminal undocumented immigrants, especially those with families, to get green cards, pay taxes and remain in our country. Gangs, cartels, terrorists and criminals be damned. Send them home or wherever. But we must be diligent to sort out those who defile our country and those who are assets. Donna Block, Santa Monica .. To the editor: It seems to me that people who are being picked up in these ICE raids at farms, Home Depots, restaurants and more are, in fact, productive, contribute to society and have a work ethic. If, in the course of their day, they make any purchases at a store, they are literally paying (sales) taxes to the government. Many even pay income taxes. Having seen some videos of people being picked up off the street, I'm horrified that many of these ICE officials don't act like trained federal agents, but appear to be more akin to vigilantes. These abductions seem to be based more on skin color than level of danger to society. If it were possible to drive around in trucks and pick up 'murderers' and 'rapists' by the hundreds, don't you think the police would be doing that? Rod Reynolds, Silver Lake
Vox
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Vox
The Trump administration's fundamental misunderstanding about deportations
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. People attend a rally and march on July 11, 2025, in Oxnard, California. The rally and march came a day after around 200 people were detained by federal officers during a raid at a cannabis farm in nearby Trump administration has offered little consolation to American businesses worried about losing undocumented workers to deportations. US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did offer them one solution last week: to replace immigrant farmworkers with Americans who are now required to work in order to access Medicaid benefits, under the recently signed Republican spending bill. 'When you think about it, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program,' she said Tuesday in a news conference. 'So, no amnesty under any circumstances, mass deportations continue, but in a strategic and intentional way, as we move our workforce towards more automation and towards a 100 percent American workforce.' Unfortunately for the industries targeted in escalating immigration raids — at farms, construction sites, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses — that is not a serious proposal. Agricultural and hospitality industry leaders are pushing back and raising concerns about how deportations could lead to labor shortages. Though President Donald Trump has appeared publicly sympathetic to those concerns, it's become clear that business interests aren't driving his policy. Rather, it's immigration hardliners, led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who are. Republicans have handed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional $75 billion, and the agency is more well-resourced than ever as the administration aims for 3,000 immigration arrests per day and 1 million deportations in a single year. 'I have complete faith that Secretary Noem and Stephen Miller and everyone else in the administration is 100 percent committed to this agenda,' said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The conflict between those hardliners and the affected industries reveals a key fiction at the center of Trump's immigration policy: that masses of immigrant workers are taking away jobs from Americans who are willing and able to fill them. They aren't. But that hasn't stopped the administration from ramping up ICE raids that don't just endanger immigrants and the businesses that rely on them. They're also imperiling job opportunities and the affordability of goods and services available to all Americans. Trump's mixed messages about deportations Following the ICE raids in Los Angeles that spurred mass protests in early June, some business leaders started becoming more vocal about their fears that worksite immigration raids could upend their companies. 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in June. On July 4, he said he would put farmers 'in charge' of immigration enforcement when it came to their own businesses, but warned that if they did not do a 'good job, we'll throw [undocumented workers] out of the country.' The Logoff The email you need to stay informed about Trump — without letting the news take over your life. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In practice, however, it's not clear that the Trump administration has retreated on immigration raids since then. Bier said that he has not put any stock into Trump's overtures to industry leaders on deportations. 'I said when he first made a statement to this effect that he was not going to change anything about ICE's operations,' he said. The fundamental misunderstanding behind Trump's immigration raids Immigration hardliners in the Trump administration are operating under the assumption that businesses affected by raids can just hire Americans instead of undocumented immigrants. In reality, many of those immigrants work jobs that no Americans want — even during times of high unemployment and especially when it comes to low-paid, back-breaking positions in agriculture. 'The idea that there are millions of people waiting around who are willing and able to do this type of farm labor is misguided,' said Tara Watson, director of the Center of Economic Security and Opportunity and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Bier said some of the best evidence of that is a study of the North Carolina agricultural industry in 2011. Researchers found that, of the nearly half a million unemployed North Carolinians at the time, only 268 native-born Americans applied for 6,500 farm job openings despite the fact that employers were required to publicly advertise the positions. Over 90 percent of those applicants were hired, but most did not show up for their first day of work or quit within a month. Only seven completed the entire growing season. Medicaid recipients in particular are even less likely to fill agricultural job openings than Americans overall, despite Rollins's suggestion to the contrary. For one, there aren't actually many Medicaid recipients who don't already have a job and are able to work at all, let alone able to work a physically demanding job in agriculture. A Brookings study found that out of the roughly 71.3 million recipients of Medicaid, only 300,000 people did not qualify for exemptions to the new work requirements and were not working because they didn't want to. 'There's a reason why they're on Medicaid, and that's because they're kids, they're elderly, or they're disabled, or they already have a job that just doesn't provide them with the kind of health insurance that they need,' said Ben Zipperer, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Medicaid recipients are also predominantly located in urban areas and aren't likely to relocate for a low-paid job in agriculture. They are very unlikely to swoop in and save farms hard-hit by immigration raids. The fact that the administration is pushing that fantasy shows that its theory of how its immigration policies will affect businesses and the broader economy is misguided. The economic cost of immigration raids Mass deportations of farm workers alone could deal the US a significant blow. It would likely slash domestic agricultural production, driving up food prices for most Americans. Watson said that farms would find it almost impossible to hire people to do labor that cannot be automated, forcing some to move their production abroad. The US might have to start importing certain crops at a higher price depending on the outcome of Trump's tariff negotiations. He has already slapped a 17 percent tariff on Mexican tomatoes. 'If the labor supply for farms is greatly restricted, then farms will produce less, and that will be passed on to consumers as higher prices,' Bier, of the Cato Institute, said. Beyond agriculture, Trump's immigration raids could actually cause the overall job supply to shrink, rather than creating openings that Americans would readily fill. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that, if Trump meets his goal of deporting 1 million immigrants every year of his second term, it would eliminate the jobs of 3.3 million immigrants and 2.6 million US-born workers by the time he leaves office. The job supply in construction would be particularly hard-hit, falling almost 19 percent overall. That's because immigrants typically have jobs that complement those worked by Americans, filling job openings that the latter will not, and because immigrants also create jobs as business owners and consumers of American goods and services. For that reason, deporting immigrant workers who have no criminal record as part of Trump's 'America First' agenda is 'just building on a myth that immigrants in the US are 'taking American jobs,'' Watson said. 'There's been a huge amount of economics literature suggesting that that's not the case, and that, in fact, immigrants end up generating more jobs for US-born people,' she said.
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Immigration arrests of mostly noncriminals accelerated in Southern California in June
Federal agents continued to arrest mostly immigrants with no criminal convictions in sweeps that roiled Southern California over the last month, according to new data released Tuesday. From June 1 and June 26, Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show 2,031 were arrested in a seven-county area. About 68% of those had no criminal convictions and an additional 57% had never been charged with a crime. Nearly half of those arrested in June were Mexican nationals. Most were men, with a median age of 39. Separately, a survey of 330 Mexicans in local detention centers, conducted by the Mexican Consulate between June 6 and July 6, found that half had lived in the U.S. for at least a decade, more than a third for more than 20 years, and nearly a third had American-born children. The new information sheds light on the people caught up in the government's crackdown. The arrest data come from the Deportation Data Project, a group of lawyers and academics that received the information as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. It shows a continuing trend highlighted in earlier figures analyzed by The Times: aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles have largely pulled in immigrants without a criminal record. 'Trump and Stephen Miller don't care about removing the 'worst first' — they only care about arresting whoever they can to complete their massive arrest quotas,' said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokeswoman for California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 'All they care about is mass chaos and mass detentions, instilling fear statewide, detaining and deporting children and families, terrifying people into submission and giving up their rights, all while threatening the very fabric of our society.' California has been battling the Trump administration as it has zeroed in on Los Angeles, a Democratic bastion, as ground zero for its mass deportation campaign. Federal agents launched the sweeps June 6, drawing protesters and angry crowds, prompting President Trump to call in the National Guard and U.S. Marines. Legal challenges have hampered the efforts. On Friday, in a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups against the Trump administration, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of President Biden, temporarily blocked federal agents in much of Southern California from using racial profiling to carry out immigration arrests. Since she issued her ruling, the indiscriminate raids at Home Depots and car washes have stopped. The order is being challenged by U.S. Justice Department attorneys who are appealing the lawsuit and asking for an immediate pause of the order. And Department of Homeland Security officials have said they will not back down. 'Still hard at work catching criminal illegal aliens in #LosAngeles. We're not leaving until our mission is accomplished,' U.S. Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino wrote Tuesday on X. Bovino, based near the U.S.-Mexican border in Imperial County, has played a prominent role in the raids across Southern California. He and others in the administration have pushed back on the idea that agents are going after noncriminals. 'You think only noncriminal illegal aliens are hanging out at day laborer spots? Absolutely not true,' he posted on July 8, highlighting a Guatemalan man he said was picked up with an outstanding warrant in his home country for sexual aggression. But as the raids and demonstrations have died down, on Tuesday, Trump released about half of the National Guard troops deployed in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the average daily arrest rate in the U.S. was 1,139 for June 1-10, down to 990 for June 11-27. Nationwide, 27,500 people were arrested during those four weeks, and it is unclear from the data how many have been deported. But the immigrants picked up off the streets in Southern California were even less likely to be criminals than those turned over to ICE by state or local authorities. Of those arrested on the street, about 75% had no criminal convictions and 62% had no convictions or pending charges.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Young GOPer Behind 'Alligator Alcatraz' Is the Dark Future of MAGA
The other day, Stephen Miller went on Fox News and offered a plea that got surprisingly little attention given its highly toxic and unnerving implications. Miller urged politicians in GOP-run states to build their own versions of 'Alligator Alcatraz,' the state-run immigration detention facility that officials just opened in the Florida Everglades. 'We want every governor of a red state, and if you are watching tonight: pick up the phone, call DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state,' Miller said, in a reference to the Department of Homeland Security. Critically, Miller added, such states could then work with the federal government by supplying much-needed detention beds, helping President Trump 'get the illegals out.' Keep all that in mind as we introduce you to one James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, the attorney general of Florida and a longtime ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, is widely described in the state as the brains behind 'Alligator Alcatraz.' Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics, sums him up this way: 'In Uthmeier, DeSantis found his own Stephen Miller.' Uthmeier is indeed a homegrown Florida version of Miller: Only 37 years old, he brings great precociousness to the jailing of migrants. Like Miller, he is obscure and little-known relative to the influence he's amassing. Also like Miller, he is fluent in MAGA's reliance on the spectacle of inhumanity and barbarism. 'You don't need to invest that much in the perimeter,' Uthmeier said of 'Alligator Alcatraz' in a slick video he recently narrated about the complex, which featured heavy-metal guitar riffs right out of a combat-cosplay video game. 'People get out, there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.' Any migrant who dares escape just might get devoured alive by an animal—one animal eating another. Dehumanization is so thrilling! The real-world 'Alligator Alcatraz' is already gaining notoriety for its very real cruelties. After Democratic lawmakers visited over the weekend, they sharply denounced the scenes they'd witnessed of migrants packed into cages under inhumane conditions. Meanwhile, detainees and family members have sounded alarms about worm-infested food and blistering heat. And the Miami Herald reports that an unnervingly large percentage of the detainees lack criminal convictions. But Uthmeier is getting feted on Fox News and other right wing media for this new experiment in spite of such notorieties—or perhaps because of them. There's good reason to think more red state politicians will seek to create their own versions of 'Alligator Alcatraz' or get in on this action in other ways—and that more young Republican politicians will see it as a path to MAGA renown and glory. For one thing, the money is now there. Buried in the big budget bill that Trump recently signed is a little-noticed provision that immigration advocates increasingly fear could fund more complexes like this one. It makes $3.5 billion available to 'eligible states' and their agencies for numerous immigration-related purposes, including the 'temporary detention of aliens.' When Miller told GOP politicians to follow Uthmeier by collaborating with federal officials to develop new versions of 'Alligator Alcatraz,' he was probably talking about this slush fund. State officials can try to tap into it for building out such facilities. 'For Republican states across the country that want to copy the 'Alligator Alcatraz' model, this bill will give them that money,' immigration analyst Austin Kocher tells me. What's more, red state politicians are paying attention. Fox News contacted numerous gubernatorial offices to ask if they intend to take up Miller's invitation. The responses were positive, with many eagerly touting plans for detention complexes. While it's unclear if these will resemble 'Alligator Alcatraz,' the underlying impulse is clear: Many red states want to expand state-run detention efforts. And again: The money is there. This is a bad development. 'Alligator Alcatraz' should not be the model for the future of migrant detention in much of the United States. Here's why. The facility is funded and operated by the state of Florida, but the state can use it to detain undocumented people under a federal program that allows ICE to authorize local law enforcement to carry out immigration crackdowns. That puts 'Alligator Alcatraz' in a gray area: Local law enforcement agencies are using it to carry out Trump's immigration detention agenda even as ICE does not run the facility. Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center, who specializes in criminal justice, points to a toxic combination built into the idea of more versions of this arrangement. ICE detention is subject to federal oversight. But huge influxes of federal money for migrant detention—as in Trump's new bill—could create new incentives for states to ramp up their own detention efforts. Yet because 'Alligator Alcatraz' is a new experiment, she says, it's unclear what sort of federal oversight future imitation efforts would receive, even if they get some federal money. 'What will access to counsel look like for detainees?' Eisen asks. 'What will access to family members look like? It's difficult to imagine state-run facilities where conditions and due process are prioritized.' Illustrating the point, when a reporter recently asked ICE for comment on what's going on inside 'Alligator Alcatraz,' ICE said, well, it isn't their facility. In other words, the federal government is not responsible for what happens inside those walls—even as Miller and Trump call on other states to build more of them. Which brings us back to Uthmeier and the future of MAGA. It's easy to see Uthmeier and his 'Alligator Alcatraz' becoming a model for other young Republicans seeking a route into MAGA celebrity. Consider his career trajectory: It's fairly conventional establishment-Republican stuff. A native of Destin, a small beach city in the deep red Florida panhandle, he earned a law degree from Georgetown and then worked for the Commerce Department in the first Trump administration—and then for the ultra-establishment D.C. law firm Jones Day. Uthmeier has also made appearances at the conservative Federalist Society, which is as establishment-conservative as it gets. He joined DeSantis's first administration as a senior legal adviser, and then got appointed as attorney general when the slot was vacated by the appointment of former AG Ashley Moody to now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio's Senate seat. All in all, it's in some ways a conventional path to GOP success. In fact, Uthmeier actually has a track record of criticizing Trump in the past on things like Covid-19 and abortion. But JD Vance survived such heresies, and now, in the party that Trump remade, Uthmeier apparently recognizes that 'Alligator Alcatraz' is his big ticket. It's a reminder that in today's GOP, the MAGA and older-line Republican establishments are bleeding into one another—and that getting attached to such an idea is a path to national MAGA stardom. Put another way, in the cutthroat world of the MAGA attention economy, association with things like 'Alligator Alcatraz' can carry enormous weight. It's hard for people who don't swim in MAGA's rancid information currents to grasp, but when Trump recently toured the facility with DeSantis, it was a huge MAGA propaganda coup for the Florida governor (yes, he apparently still harbors national ambitions). Indeed, one person who very much noticed this was apparently Uthmeier himself. According to one Florida operative in touch with Uthmeier's staff, there's considerable sensitivity in his inner circle over who is getting credit for 'Alligator Alcatraz,' with some worrying that Uthmeier isn't reaping enough of it. Uthmeier needn't worry, however. When Trump toured the facility, he said of Uthmeier: 'That guy's got a future.' In this, the MAGA God King himself gave a big boost to Uthmeier's 2026 electoral bid to keep his appointed AG role, which will be a platform for even higher ambitions. And if more barbarities emerge from 'Alligator Alcatraz,' as they surely will, his MAGA future will only get that much brighter.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Stephen Miller says Americans will live better lives without immigrants. He's blowing smoke
Stephen Miller, the front man for Donald Trump's deportation campaign against immigrants, took to the airwaves the other day to explain why native-born Americans will just love living in a world cleansed of undocumented workers. 'What would Los Angeles look like without illegal aliens?' he asked on Fox News. 'Here's what it would look like: You would be able to see a doctor in the emergency room right away, no wait time, no problems. Your kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with. Classrooms would be half the size. Students who have special needs would get all the attention that they needed. ... There would be no fentanyl, there would be no drug deaths.' Etc., etc. No one can dispute that the world Miller described on Fox would be a paradise on Earth. No waiting at the ER? School districts flush with cash? No drug deaths? But that doesn't obscure that pretty much every word Miller uttered was fiction. The gist of Miller's spiel — in fact, the worldview that he has been espousing for years — is that 'illegal aliens' are responsible for all those ills, and exclusively responsible. It's nothing but a Trumpian fantasy. Let's take a look, starting with overcrowding at the ER. The issue has been the focus of numerous studies and surveys. Overwhelmingly, they conclude that undocumented immigration is irrelevant to ER overcrowding. In fact, immigrants generally and undocumented immigrants in particular are less likely to get their healthcare at the emergency room than native-born Americans. In California, according to a 2014 study from UCLA, 'one in five U.S.-born adults visits the ER annually, compared with roughly one in 10 undocumented adults — approximately half the rate of U.S.-born residents.' Among the reasons, explained Nadereh Pourat, the study's lead author and director of research at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, was fear of being asked to provide documents. The result is that undocumented individuals avoid seeking any healthcare until they become critically ill. The UCLA study found that undocumented immigrants' average number of doctor visits per year was lower than for other cohorts: 2.3 for children and 1.7 for adults, compared with 2.8 doctor visits for U.S.-born children and 3.2 for adults. ER overcrowding is an issue of long standing in the U.S., but it's not the result of an influx of undocumented immigrants. It's due to a confluence of other factors, including the tendency of even insured patients to use the ER as a primary care center, presenting with complicated or chronic ailments for which ER medicine is not well-suited. While caseloads at emergency departments have surged, their capacities are shrinking. According to a 2007 report by the National Academy of Sciences, from 1993 to 2003 the U.S. population grew by 12%, hospital admissions by 13% and ER visits by 26%. 'Not only is [emergency department] volume increasing, but patients coming to the ED are older and sicker and require more complex and time-consuming workups and treatments,' the report observed. 'During this same period, the United States experienced a net loss of 703 hospitals, 198,000 hospital beds, and 425 hospital EDs, mainly in response to cost-cutting measures.' President Trump's immigration policies during his first term suppressed the use of public healthcare facilities by undocumented immigrants and their families. The key policy was the administration's tightening of the 'public charge' rule, which applies to those seeking admission to the United States or hoping to upgrade their immigration status. The rule, which has been part of U.S. immigration policy for more than a century, allowed immigration authorities to deny entry — or deny citizenship applications of green card holders — to anyone judged to become a recipient of public assistance such as welfare (today known chiefly as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) or other cash assistance programs. Until Trump, healthcare programs such as Medicaid, nutrition programs such as food stamps, and subsidized housing programs weren't part of the public charge test. Even before Trump implemented the change but after a draft version leaked out, clinics serving immigrant communities across California and nationwide detected a marked drop off in patients. A clinic on the edge of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that had been serving 12,000 patients, I reported in 2018, saw monthly patient enrollments fall by about one-third after Trump's 2016 election, and an additional 25% after the leak. President Biden rescinded the Trump rule within weeks of taking office. Undocumented immigrants are sure to be less likely to access public healthcare services, such as those available at emergency rooms, as a result of Trump's rescinding 'sensitive location' restrictions on immigration agents that had been in effect at least since 2011. That policy barred almost all immigration enforcement actions at schools, places of worship, funerals and weddings, public marches or rallies, and hospitals. Trump rescinded the policy on inauguration day in January. The goal was for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents 'to make substantial efforts to avoid unnecessarily alarming local communities,' agency officials stated. Today, as public shows of force and public raids by ICE have demonstrated, instilling alarm in local communities appears to be the goal. The change in the sensitive locations policy has prompted hospital and ER managers to establish formal procedures for staff confronted with the arrival of immigration agents. A model policy drafted by the Emergency Medicine Residents Assn. says staff should request identification and a warrant or other document attesting to the need for the presence of agents. It urges staff to determine whether the agents are enforcing a judicial warrant (signed by a judge) or administrative warrant (issued by ICE). The latter doesn't grant agents access to private hospital areas such as patient rooms or operating areas. What about school funding? Is Miller right to assert that mass deportations will free up a torrent of funding and cutting class sizes in half? He doesn't know what he's talking about. Most school funding in California and most other places is based on attendance. In California, the number of immigrant children in the schools was 189,634 last year. The total K-12 population was 5,837,700, making the immigrant student body 3.25% of the total. Not half. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the estimated 30,000 children from immigrant families amounted to about 7.35% of last year's enrollment of 408,083. Also not half. With the deportation of immigrant children, the schools would lose whatever federal funding was attached to their attendance. Schools nationwide receive enhanced federal funding for English learners and other immigrants. That money, presumably, would disappear if the pupils go. What Miller failed to mention on Fox is the possible impact of the Trump administration's determination to shutter the Department of Education, placing billions of dollars of federal funding at risk. California receives more than $16 billion a year in federal aid to K-12 schools through that agency. Disabled students are at heightened risk of being deprived of resources if the agency is dismantled. Then there's fentanyl. The Trump administration's claim that undocumented immigrants are major players in this crisis appears to be just another example of its scapegoating of immigrants. The vast majority of fentanyl-related criminal convictions — nearly 90% — are of U.S. citizens. The rest included both legally present and undocumented immigrants. (The statistics comes from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.) In other words, deport every immigrant in the United States, and you still won't have made a dent in fentanyl trafficking, much less eliminate all drug deaths. What are we to make of Miller's spiel about L.A.? At one level, it's echt Miller: The portrayal of the city as a putative hellscape, larded with accusations of complicity between the city leadership and illegal immigrants — 'the leaders in Los Angeles have formed an alliance with the cartels and criminal aliens,' he said, with zero pushback from his Fox News interlocutor. At another level, it's a malevolent expression of white privilege. In Miller's ideology, the only obstacles to the return to a drug-free world of frictionless healthcare and abundantly financed education are immigrants. This ideology depends on the notion that immigrants are raiding the public purse by sponging on public services. The fact is that most undocumented immigrants aren't eligible for most such services. They can't enroll in Medicare, receive premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, or collect Social Security or Medicare benefits (though typically they submit falsified Social Security numbers to employers, so payments for the program are deducted from their paychecks). A 2013 study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that low-income immigrants use public benefits for which they're eligible, such as food stamps, 'at a lower rate than native-born low-income residents.' If there's an impulse underlying the anti-immigrant project directed by Miller other than racism, it's hard to detect. Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who last week blocked federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in Los Angeles, ruled that during their 'roving patrols' in Los Angeles, ICE agents detained individuals principally because of their race, that they were overheard speaking Spanish or accented English, that they were doing work associated with undocumented immigrants, or were in locations frequented by undocumented immigrants seeking day work. Miller goes down the same road as ICE — indeed, by all accounts, he's the motivating spirit behind the L.A. raids. Because he can't justify the raids, he has ginned up a fantasy of immigrants disrupting our healthcare and school programs, and the corollary fantasy that evicting them all will produce an Earthly paradise for the rest of us. Does anybody really believe that?
