Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

If Miller was impatient with the courts, he was incensed by the bureaucratic hierarchy. As with any federal department, DHS staff took orders from the senior leadership at each of its component agencies. Those agency officials, in turn, took their cues from the top DHS brass. To rewire the chain of command, Miller made what others began to describe as calls “deep in the building.” He would ring lower-level officials and give orders directly to them. Not only did he refuse to loop in their bosses; he also instructed the junior officials to shield their activities from the department’s leadership. When he found people he could trust, or bully, Miller would enlist them as informers. Every Friday, he convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, to discuss the ways in which federal bureaucrats were falling short of implementing Trump’s agenda. Eventually, career officials stopped attending, and Miller’s audience became the political appointees who were already aligned with him. Often, he harangued them anyway. Since Miller had inserted himself into DHS’s policymaking process, officials felt obliged to keep their work from him. At one point, to prevent Miller from discovering the details of a policy discussion, Nielsen’s replacement, Kevin McAleenan, held meetings in a classified security bunker, known as a SCIF, where cell phones were prohibited and strict rules of confidentiality were in effect. Convinced that a deep-state cabal was ...