WHEN STEPHEN MILLER CONVENED the government’s foremost experts on refugees in the Roosevelt Room one afternoon in March of 2017, not long after the president’s Oval Office tirade about not wanting to water down his travel ban, he brought a message directly from Trump.
“The president believes refugees cost too much,” Miller declared as he looked around the room at White House aides and career officials who had built their professional lives around resettling persecuted people in the United States. It came as no surprise to anyone seated around the table that Trump was taking aim at refugees. His travel ban had capped their admissions at 50,000—less than half the number Barack Obama set out to admit the previous year. But now, Miller told the group, he wanted economic data that justified rejecting refugees. The meeting in the Roosevelt Room had been called to seek input for a report mandated by the travel ban that would tally the long-term costs of the U.S. refugee program. But from the moment it got started, Miller made it clear that he and Trump had already reached their conclusions, and that everyone there was expected to follow suit.
Gathering data about the dangers and costs of immigration was something of a fetish for Miller, one he honed during his years on Capitol Hill, where a potent statistic or killer anecdote could change the tenor of an entire debate and sway blocs of votes. In late-night emails to journalists and fellow aides, Miller would circulate study after alarming study purporting to prove what in fact were dubious or sometimes downright false claims. As a congressional aide, he had repeatedly pushed the idea that migrants were too expensive and not worth the risk for the nation. Now, as an influential White House adviser, Miller made it his mission to inject data that supported those beliefs into official policy statements and records of decision making, in the hopes of bolstering his case for turning refugees away from American shores.
He had a strategic reason for doing so. Despite his brash claim that the travel ban rollout had gone precisely as planned, Miller had been chastened by the experience. Keeping it secret from the bureaucrats had meant cutting corners, which left the order vulnerable to legal challenges. This time, Miller, who was obsessed with wielding power effectively from the West Wing, wanted a paper trail that would provide a clear rationale for blocking refugees. “We need a process to implement all of this stuff,” Miller said. After months of being frustrated by the “deep state” bureaucrats who had tried to short-circuit the president’s policies, Miller seemed interested in embracing their process. But he also made clear that he meant to keep a tight rein on the results.
In the meeting, Miller laid out his argument. Refugees are disproportionately likely to be uneducated and to be dependent on public benefit programs like federal food aid, cash assistance, and Medicaid, he told the group. They are a drain on the country’s resources. Miller cited a 2015 report released by the hard-line Center for Immigration Studies, which argued for scaling back immigration. The group’s study estimated the costs of resettling a refugee from the Middle East—including welfare and educational costs—but ignored their contributions through taxes or other means. CIS claimed that it was 12 times more costly to admit a refugee to the United States than to help that same refugee in, or near, his or her own country. Miller wanted the State Department’s report to embrace those conclusions.
Larry Bartlett, the veteran career official who oversaw refugee admissions at the State Department, knew the study was flawed. Bartlett, a quietly intense man with a shock of fine white hair and beard to match, was a fierce defender of the refugee program who had spent ample time correcting misperceptions about it, and seemed eager to set the record straight for Miller. There’s another study out of Cleveland, Bartlett said, showing that refugees, over time, were actually positive economic contributors.
“That’s not what we’re going for,” Miller snapped. It’s not what Trump believes. We’re going to need to see a draft of your report before you release it so that we can make sure that we don’t embarrass the president, he said.
As he left the meeting, Miller briefly huddled with Domestic Policy Council aides and asked if anyone knew the name of the civil servant who had dared to challenge him. “Who was that guy?” Miller wanted to know, nodding toward Bartlett as he gathered his things to leave. “Oh, you mean Larry Bartlett?” somebody answered.
“He’s not with us,” Miller said ominously. They would have to keep an eye on him.
A career civil servant who had more than twenty-five years of experience in the field, Bartlett had won a Presidential Rank Award in 2015 for having directed efforts to resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees in the United States. But he arrived at the meeting a marked man. Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Bartlett was featured in an article on the conservative Breitbart website headlined, “Top 10 Holdover Obama Bureaucrats President Trump Can Fire or Remove Today.” At No. 9, Bartlett was referred to in the piece as “an active apologist for the refugee resettlement industry for many years.” That wasn’t far from the truth. For years, as part of his role at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Bartlett had traveled the country explaining the ins and outs of the refugee program and fielding questions from reporters, elected officials, and citizens about how it would impact American communities.
It often fell to Bartlett to answer the jeers and boos of attendees at public forums who wondered aloud whether they were putting themselves and their families at risk to accept refugees into their towns. “Do I get all the hard questions?” he quipped sarcastically at one such event in Twin Falls, Idaho, when asked whether communities were consulted before refugees were resettled there. Sitting on a stage in front of an audience of more than seven hundred people in an auditorium at the College of Southern Idaho, Bartlett tried desperately to counter the fears that many people had about refugees. “They’re not terrorists,” Bartlett said. “They are people fleeing terrorism.”
The challenge only got more difficult as the 2016 presidential race heated up. In the fall of 2015, Trump warned darkly that Syrian refugees could be a huge terrorist army in disguise. “They’re all men, and they’re all strong-looking guys,” Trump told a high school gymnasium full of voters in Keene, New Hampshire. “They could be ISIS—I don’t know,” Trump said, adding that he had heard 200,000 refugees could be headed for the United States. His number was wildly inflated, and his portrayal of the refugees was a lie; most were women and children. But that did not stop Trump from spinning his fear-soaked tale. “This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe. Or if they sent 50,000, or 80,000, or 100,000, we’ve got problems, and that could be possible. I don’t know that it is, but it could be possible.”
Trump went even further a month later in the wake of a shooting and foiled bomb attack in San Bernardino, California, carried out by a Pakistani American man and his Pakistani-born wife, both of whom had pledged allegiance to ISIS. The next day, Trump released his written statement calling for a Muslim ban, which he read for dramatic effect at a rally in South Carolina, referring to himself in the third person: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. We have no choice. We have no choice.”
Bartlett’s message about refugees could not have been more dissonant from Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric. He was an unapologetic cheerleader for the refugee program, which he argued was part of what made the nation exceptional. “The United States Refugee Admissions Program reflects the United States’ highest values and aspirations of compassion, generosity and leadership,” Bartlett testified at a Senate hearing the day after Trump had warned that Syrian refugees could be a Trojan horse for a terrorist onslaught. At the time, Obama was making an aggressive push to respond to the crush of people fleeing the brutal Syrian civil war by setting a goal of taking in as many as 10,000 Syrians and a total of 85,000 refugees in 2016—a 21 percent increase over the previous year. “With the continued support of Congress and the American people, refugee resettlement will remain a proud tradition for many years to come,” Bartlett said. It was Jeff Sessions, then still a senator, who presided over the hearing, flanked from behind by his two top aides—Miller on his left and Hamilton on his right. The young pair prompted Sessions with documents, scribbled notes, and occasionally a covert whisper as the senator grilled Bartlett and others with pointed questions about the economic costs and security risks of refugees.
“We must be cautious,” Sessions insisted, rattling off statistics compiled by Miller listing the high percentages of refugees who received food stamps, free health care, and cash assistance. “Once here with refugee status, those individuals can claim any job and collect any federal welfare benefit,” he warned. Over two hours, Bartlett and the other officials defended the refugee program, but it was clear that Sessions thought it was misguided. “We’re entitled to have our officials protect our interests, the people’s interests,” the senator said. His public remarks that day left little doubt about what he would do to the refugee program if he were ever in charge. And in private, Sessions had been even more direct, telling State Department officials that he was concerned that Muslim refugees would not fit into American society. During one briefing in the Capitol, Senator Sessions vented his concern about boosting the number of Syrian refugees. “We are a Christian nation,” he told Anne Richard, the top official for refugees at the State Department. “No, senator,” Richard answered. “The founders gave us religious freedom.” Sessions was unmoved, shaking his head gently. “I mean culturally,” he said, “and if you don’t understand that, then you’re not as smart as I think you are.”
In the Roosevelt Room eighteen months later, Bartlett was witnessing the worst-case scenario unfold. Now, the candidate who had called for banning Syrian refugees was a president who had the power to do so. The senator who had grilled him at a subcommittee hearing in public and privately warned against accepting Muslims was now the attorney general, with a seat at the table for deciding how many refugees to accept. And the staff aide in a back-row chair at a subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill was now a senior adviser to the president, running a meeting in the West Wing.
And Miller did not like being challenged by a bureaucrat.
Miller knew from his experience in Congress that Trump had the power to change course from Obama’s priorities with the stroke of a pen. Under federal law, the president must consult with Congress each fall about how many refugees could be admitted, setting the maximum for the coming year. Obama had used the power to set ambitious goals for refugee resettlement during his last two years in office, leaving behind a ceiling for 2017 of 110,000 refugees, an unprecedented high. Now, as an October deadline to set the 2018 refugee cap approached, Miller was determined to push the number to historically low levels that would starve the refugee resettlement program virtually out of existence. He told colleagues that if he had his way, there would be no refugees arriving in the United States at all on Trump’s watch. And he wasn’t the only powerful person in the White House who felt that way. At the end of July, Trump chose John Kelly to be his second chief of staff, replacing Reince Priebus. Kelly had reluctantly accepted, telling confidants that he had no choice but to accede to the president’s request that he come and straighten out what he had privately complained was a woefully dysfunctional White House. Before he left the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly had told Hamilton that he wanted to keep the refugee number very low for 2018. One day near the beginning of the deliberations, Miller and Bossert had crossed the driveway outside the West Wing to personally deliver the message to NSC and agency officials at their offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. There’s no daylight between the president and Kelly on refugee resettlement, they said. You guys do your work. We don’t need a lot of paper. But at the end of the day, there’s a big backlog of asylum seekers and people pouring across our southern border, so the refugee program does not have to be as large or robust as it has been in the past. The message was as clear as it was shocking to the subject-matter experts who heard it as a directive to inject bias into their work: We want a low number.
Miller had already seen to it that his argument about the costs of the refugee program were reflected in some of the administration’s official policy statements. Trump’s budget declared that first-generation immigrants cost the country nearly $147 billion more than they paid in taxes, and that refugees were a big part of the problem. “Each refugee admitted into the United States comes at the expense of helping a potentially greater number out of country,” the budget said. But Miller was irate to learn that the draft report he wanted about the cost of refugees said the opposite. At the Department of Health and Human Services, career officials had drawn up a fifty-five-page report entitled “The Fiscal Costs of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program at the Federal, State, and Local Levels, from 2005–2014.” It showed that the net economic impact of resettling refugees in the United States over a decade was overwhelmingly positive. “Overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the ten-year period, at $63 billion, meaning they contributed more in revenue than they cost in expenditures.” The study said that refugees had about the same fiscal impact as the rest of the U.S. population. In other words, the argument that Miller had been repeatedly making about the soaring costs of resettling refugees in the United States was invalid.
Miller was livid. This was the work of politically motivated, “deep state” bureaucrats and Obama administration holdovers who were pushing their own agenda and trying to hurt the president, he believed. He had his staff request a meeting to discuss the report. What were the assumptions made in the report? he wanted to know. They must be the wrong assumptions. This was not, he said, what the president had asked for, and not what he had put in his budget. He intervened and the HHS report was shelved. It was never forwarded to the White House and never surfaced again in discussions about the refugee program. Instead, HHS submitted another, much slimmer report. That three-page document detailed how much the department spent on refugees over a decade, and concluded that in an “average year,” the per-capita cost totaled $3,300, about $800 more than the per-person cost for the U.S. population. It made no mention of tax revenues or any other contribution made by refugees over their lifetimes.
Despite Miller’s best efforts, the refugee resettlement program had powerful advocates in the senior ranks of Trump’s national security team. At the Pentagon, Mattis was determined to keep the flow of refugees as robust as possible, seeing it as a national security imperative. It was one way to protect Iraqis, Afghans, and those in other countries who risked their lives to help the U.S. military carry out dangerous missions, acting as translators, security guards, engineers, and sometimes fighting alongside American soldiers. It was part of the military’s commitment to leave no individual behind, and a critical way of maintaining credibility with foreign partners in the region. If the U.S. turned its back on refugees, Mattis feared, it would be harder to establish good relationships in areas where the U.S. military was engaged. Mattis liked to tell the story of the time an Iraqi professor was taken into custody for planting an explosive device. During his interrogation, Mattis gave the man a cigarette and got him talking. Eventually, the Iraqi asked whether it would be possible to emigrate to the United States after he got out of prison. Mattis thought the story showed the power of America to inspire, even for those gripped by hatred. “Think about that,” Mattis once told cadets at Virginia Military Institute. “The hatred he felt was so much that he would go out and try to put a bomb in the road to kill us, but the example of America was so strong that if he could be sitting where you are today or have his son and daughter in that audience, he’d have given his eyes or teeth.” When it came to the refugee cap, Mattis wanted to keep the number at 50,000. The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed. Nikki Haley was on board, too, as was Rex Tillerson. Lowering the ceiling below 50,000, State argued, would make it harder for the United States to persuade other countries to take their fair share of refugees.
A quiet but intense battle over the number began brewing inside the West Wing as aides at the National Security Council prepared a discussion paper laying out the basics of the refugee resettlement program, in which they noted that refugees were extremely well vetted—screened more thoroughly than any other immigrant or traveler to the United States. The early drafts of the paper included the government’s intelligence assessment that refugees posed no greater risk of terrorism than any other group and that resettling them in the United States had clear national security benefits. But soon, NSC officials began to notice a pattern. Anything positive they would say about refugees—including stating what they saw as the basic facts of the resettlement program—would be met with an objection: “We can’t say that.” Officials who were in charge of putting together options for Trump were exasperated and upset. “How do you make the case for a robust ceiling if you are not allowed to make any arguments in favor of it?” one distraught aide asked.
As it turned out, you couldn’t.
Andrew Veprek at DPC, working on Miller’s behalf, objected to many of the standard assertions about refugee resettlement that had been accepted for decades, calling them unsubstantiated. Who says that the United States has to take a leadership role in resettling refugees, so that other countries will follow suit? There’s no proof of that, he said. Take it out. Were refugees actually the best-vetted of any traveler into the United States? Veprek thought not; can’t say that. And when discussion documents referred to refugee resettlement as a “humanitarian program” and stated that 80 percent of those resettled were women and children, officials from the Domestic Policy Council crossed it out. Experts on the program from the NSC defended the passage. “It’s a fact,” one said. But Veprek and his colleagues scoffed. “It’s a heartstrings fact,” one responded. John Zadrozny, another Miller ally at the Domestic Policy Council, said the statistic sounded great, but it was misleading. “When you say women and children, children can be up to age eighteen, and they’re very capable of being terrorists,” Zadrozny said. Leaning across the table, he singled out Jennifer Arangio, a senior director at the NSC, and pointed at her, his voice rising. “And you used to know that, Jennifer!” Arangio was no bleeding-heart liberal; she was a national security expert with top secret clearance who had been a senior counsel on the House Homeland Security Committee, and she was fiercely loyal to Trump, having worked on his campaign as the director of women engagement and staffed his daughter Ivanka on the campaign trail. But lately, she had been resisting Miller’s efforts to slam the door shut on refugees, arguing that the changes he and his allies were advocating were unfounded and ill-advised, and worse yet, went way beyond what the president would want if he were presented with the relevant facts. Her reluctance enraged Miller’s DPC crew, who saw Arangio as a turncoat who was undermining Trump’s agenda.
“Yeah, I did used to think that the refugee program was vulnerable to terrorist infiltration,” Arangio answered. “But then I got here and made it my business to learn the facts about the program, and now I know that refugees are the most vetted category of any immigrant. You’d be crazy to come if you were a terrorist. This is the last way you would try to get into this country.” Nor was she going to stand for being portrayed as some sort of saboteur of Trump’s agenda. “Don’t tell me about the president’s agenda,” Arangio said, looking around the room. “I left my three kids in Washington to move up to Trump Tower and get the president elected, and I don’t recall seeing any of you there.”
Miller and his allies in the White House used legal arguments to prevent anything positive about refugees from being documented. Lawyers at the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department insisted that anything that promoted the benefits of refugees ran counter to what the government was arguing in its defense of the travel ban, which had been enjoined by federal judges as illegally motivated by racial animus—not national security considerations. There would be a “litigation risk” of saying anything positive about the refugee program, the lawyers advised the national security aides, so those points could not possibly be allowed to appear in discussion papers. “No, it’s just a fact—it’s not related to the litigation,” one NSC aide said when confronted about the issue during a phone call with a colleague in the counsel’s office. “At some point, we won’t be able to write anything in this discussion paper if everything comes under this litigation. We’d have to take out everything.” That seemed to be the point. As he did in the Senate, Sessions also weighed in at key moments to undercut the refugee program. At one pivotal meeting, as a representative of the National Counterterrorism Center was briefing about an interagency report that asserted there were essentially no known instances of terrorists having infiltrated refugee flows since the September 11, 2001, attacks, Rachel Brand, a top Justice Department official, interrupted the presentation. The attorney general has read that report, she said, and he doesn’t agree with its findings.
Even as Miller inserted unfounded claims about the dangers and costs of refugees, administration officials who had long experience with the program pushed back. They repeatedly removed the assertions from the documents to ensure that the presidential record would be accurate. At one point, Chris Munn, who handled national security vetting and screening issues at the NSC, interrupted a meeting on the matter to try to pull Miller back. “I just want to remind everyone that this is the presidential record. It’s not a matter of campaign rhetoric. Everything that is put in this paper has to be based in fact.” Munn, a large and commanding man who had a decade of experience at the Defense Department in intelligence and watch-listing, would routinely brush aside Miller’s assertions, saying things like, “That’s just not true, and we can’t put that in the presidential record.” But it became a sort of macabre game: Miller would insert his talking points into the discussion paper, the staff would remove them, and the cycle would keep repeating itself.
One day in September, a junior aide in the Border and Transportation Security Directorate at NSC was surprised to receive a telephone call from Air Force One. It was Miller, enraged. “You let IOA commandeer this paper!” Miller said, using the acronym for International Organizations and Alliances, the office where Garry Hall and Arangio worked. He was angry that his edits had been stricken.
Miller refused to give up. Mattis and Haley were a lost cause. But Tillerson was another matter. He had initially endorsed a limit of 50,000. But in mid-September, the secretary of state was part of the entourage, including Miller, that traveled to the United Nations General Assembly in New York for several intense days of huddling privately with the president. By the time they returned, Tillerson had moved a little in Miller’s direction. Under pressure from the White House, the secretary of state now said he wanted a maximum of 45,000 refugees. For Miller, it was progress. But Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of homeland security, who had replaced Kelly when Trump picked him to be White House chief of staff, was the big unknown. Career DHS officials had assumed Duke would support a level of 50,000 refugees—in line with the limit set earlier in the year by the travel ban. But ahead of a National Security Council meeting to discuss the subject, she had yet to weigh in.
Hamilton, who was Duke’s senior counselor, saw an opportunity to push his boss to a much lower number. He told staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which screens refugees, to prepare a variety of projections for how many they could process, from the current level on down to zero. If the bureaucrats concluded that they didn’t have the resources to process 50,000 refugees, Hamilton reasoned, it wouldn’t make sense to set the cap that high. The request made Barbara Strack, the head of the Refugee Affairs Division at USCIS, nervous. The very fact that there was discussion of a ceiling below 50,000 was alarming, she thought. In her mind, the United States should set an ambitious goal for admitting refugees and try to reach it. Strack’s office completed a series of projections of how many refugees they could process. At the high end, her staff estimated they could handle about 40,000 in the coming year, maybe a few more.
Hamilton looked at the USCIS analysis and decided the real capability was at the low end of Strack’s projections—somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000. On the Friday night before a scheduled Tuesday meeting at the White House to discuss the number, Hamilton informed the NSC that the Department of Homeland Security was prepared to recommend a maximum refugee cap of just 26,000—a dramatically low number that would represent a huge victory for Miller. NSC aides were taken aback. Arangio told Hamilton that there were important foreign policy objectives in play and humanitarian reasons to keep the number as high as possible. “I don’t know who you’re listening to,” Hamilton told her. “But that’s not what the president thinks.” Maybe so, she answered, but that’s probably because he’s unaware of the humanitarian and foreign policy arguments that the Defense and State Departments are trying to make. Hamilton asked that the White House hold off on formally including the 26,000 number in final discussion documents for the meeting. The request was an odd one, but Hamilton had a good reason for being cagey: Duke had neither seen nor signed off on it.
When Duke found out that Hamilton had told the White House that DHS supported such a paltry figure, she was annoyed. And once she was briefed, she objected to the lower number. If Homeland Security officials had projected that they had the capacity to screen about 40,000 refugees in the coming year, she told Hamilton, that was the number the department should propose. Miller was not pleased. When the group finally met to make a decision that Tuesday, the president’s top officials unanimously backed a minor trim rather than endorsing the massive cut to the refugee program Miller had envisioned. They split the difference, placing the cap at 45,000. Even more frustrating for Miller, his attempts to justify deep cuts by arguing that refugees were a threat to the country and a sap on the economy had fallen flat, leaving the decision to be based strictly on how much capacity the government had to resettle refugees.
That did not stop Miller from drafting a press release asserting that security was the chief reason for curbing the program and resurrecting his debunked arguments for shutting out refugees. “President Donald J. Trump has established the annual cap for refugees coming into the United States at a level that upholds the safety of the American people,” Miller’s release said. “Some refugees who have been admitted to the United States have posed threats to national security and public safety,” it added, citing statistics about the numbers of refugees who had been investigated, arrested, or convicted on terrorism-related charges. The draft press release also resurrected the cost argument, asserting that “refugee resettlement increases financial strain on Americans,” and quoting the CIS claim that a dozen times as many refugees could be helped in or near their own countries as in the United States.
NSC officials who had worked on the process were furious when they saw it. “We fought day after day to get the stuff out, but what was the point of it, if at the end of the day, this is what they go out and tell the American public—that we’re keeping you safe from these horrible refugees?” one of them told a coworker. They tried marking up Miller’s press release and sending it back to him with the offending passages stricken. They had just spent three months pushing back against what they considered misinformation on the refugee resettlement program only to see it now being used as a justification to the American public for why the number was so low.
Miller’s original version had referenced the San Bernardino shooting attack, which NSC aides had to point out had been carried out not by refugees, but by a U.S. citizen and his wife, who had entered the United States on a visa. The release said that refugees in some states had been a threat to national security, and contained an alarming—and false—statistic that refugees were 30 times more likely to be involved in domestic terrorism than the general population. Those lines came out of the news release, but the rest of it went out largely as Miller wanted, hailing Trump’s “America First Refugee Program.” And while the number of refugees had landed substantially higher than he had hoped, Miller took steps to ensure that his efforts to dismantle the program would not be undercut by career officials again. It started with a change at the State Department.
In the weeks after Trump announced his decision on the refugee ceiling, the word came from the White House through Christine Ciccone, Tillerson’s deputy chief of staff: Larry Bartlett, the State Department official who had dared to mention a study that ran counter to Miller’s view, had to go. Simon Henshaw, the top diplomat for refugees, tried to intervene, apologizing on Bartlett’s behalf for whatever he might have done to draw the wrath of the West Wing. But Ciccone said the decision had been made. Bartlett was abruptly removed from the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the State Department and assigned to a job in the office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests, sitting next to low-level civil servants entering keywords into a computer. He went to Puerto Rico for several weeks to assist in the federal response to Hurricane Maria, and later took a temporary assignment in Ankara, Turkey, with the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, assisting with the response to the crisis in Syria. At his farewell party at Tonic, a pub near the State Department filled with wooden tables and adorned with exposed brick, colleagues and refugee advocates wept, not just because they were sorry to see Bartlett go, but because his departure seemed to say so much about the dangers of standing up for refugees in an administration determined to shun them.
Bartlett’s exit seemed to be the end of an era of refugee resettlement in the United States, and it wasn’t clear what would come next. But within months, two senior House Democrats, Eliot Engel of New York and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, asked the State Department’s inspector general to look into whether Bartlett’s unceremonious dismissal had been politically motivated. They said agency whistle-blowers had provided “credible allegations that the State Department has required high-level career civil servants, with distinguished records serving administrations of both parties, to move to performing tasks outside of their area of substantive expertise.”
Elaine Duke remained in Miller’s crosshairs. In October, as she flew back from a G7 ministerial meeting in Italy, Duke received an in-flight call from Miller, who berated her over what he characterized as lax security screening for refugees, saying she had not been doing her job as laid out in the president’s executive order. He insisted that Duke should permanently shut off refugee flows from eleven countries the administration had identified as high-risk, and was especially insistent about banning people from Somalia. Trump had complained loudly as a candidate about the large numbers of Somali refugees who had settled in the United States, and the threats he claimed that they posed, and had raged at Duke during a briefing at his Bedminster golf club several weeks earlier, asking why he could not ban refugees from “fucking Somalia.” Both he and Miller seemed to have a particular dislike for Somalia, often citing it or its nationals when they spoke of the potential dangers of refugees and other immigrants. But Duke refused to do what Miller was asking. She was all for stepping up vetting of refugees from countries that presented elevated security risks, she said, but we’re not going to say that we’re just shutting it down. No way.
In a call with homeland security adviser Tom Bossert shortly afterward, the two commiserated about Miller. Bossert sympathized, he told Duke. Miller’s tendency to insert himself into low-level NSC debates was counterproductive and demonstrated his inexperience in the policymaking process, he told her. But he wasn’t malicious, Bossert said. “I don’t think Stephen is a bad person—I did at first—I just think he’s an immature person,” he told Duke. “But he got exalted into this position.” Besides, Bossert said, Miller was only doing what Trump wanted him to.
The impulse to block refugees was coming from the very top of the White House, from a president who had campaigned on keeping them out of the country. There was little that anyone could do to stand in the way.