“I don’t care what the hell happens in this world,” Miller said earlier this month on a podcast with Charlie Kirk. “If President Trump gets reelected, the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”
Behind the scenes, Trump has worked overtime to make immigration a focal point of the upcoming general election. He has strong-armed Republican lawmakers into refusing bipartisan border deals to avoid giving President Joe Biden a win on the issue. He has stoked the flames of a standoff between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the federal government over lengths of concertina wire erected by the state that have prevented federal border agents from doing their job along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border. And so far, his angling has been successful—as of a January poll conducted by Harvard CAPS-Harris, immigration now ranks as the top issue for U.S. voters, with 35 percent of respondents listing it as the primary concern.
“Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state,” Genevieve Nadeau, a former Department of Homeland Security lawyer, said in a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy. “He’s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.”