Stephen Miller's Worst Week Ever
Trump's deputy chief of staff increasingly finds himself layered-over and isolated in the West Wing after a deepening losing streak of overpromising and underdelivering to the president.
WASHINGTON — The promise was always the same. Say it loud enough, say it often enough, say it on Fox News and Newsmax and Truth Social until the words become gospel — and the man in the Oval Office will believe it, too.
Stephen Miller has been saying it for years. End birthright citizenship “one way or another,” or “this country doesn’t have a future.” Clear out the undocumented workers, and American workers get their jobs back. Win the Supreme Court nine to zero, “convincingly and categorically,” because the law is so clear it practically decides itself.
On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to uphold birthright citizenship, leaving Stephen Miller looking like a loser who completely miscalculated. A West Wing source tells Migrant Insider that “everyone is making fun of Miller,” whose grip on the immigration portfolio has slipped after repeatedly failing to deliver on his batshit promises to a president who has grown bored of Miller, his increasingly isolated deputy chief of staff.
Miller Overpromised, Then Underdelivered (Again)
Chief Justice John Roberts — a conservative appointed by George W. Bush, joined by two of Trump’s own picks — called citizenship “the right to have rights” and wrote that “the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.’” The court held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment — and that Trump’s Day One executive order, the one Miller built, is unconstitutional.
Miller called the ruling “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.” That is the response of a man who told the president this was a layup.
The Architecture of a Promise
To understand what happened Tuesday, you have to understand what Miller has been saying — not once, not occasionally, but consistently and loudly, in terms designed to leave no room for doubt.
“There should be a 9–0 ruling in a functioning democracy,” he told Fox News, just days before the ruling landed. He called birthright citizenship “the biggest, costliest scam in financial history” and “an atrocity flatly and flagrantly incompatible with any concept of nationhood.” He told Newsmax in June 2025 that the administration would “prevail and prevail completely, because the question is so clear legally.”
The question was not so clear. The ruling was not nine to zero. Two of Trump’s own appointees joined the majority.
Roberts was direct about why: “Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order — ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter.”
Trump attended oral arguments in April — the first sitting president in modern history to do so — because Miller had convinced him this was worth the investment, that sitting in those marble chambers was outweighed by the certainty of the win. He reportedly suspected he might lose anyway. Miller had walked him into a fight he was not going to win. It is now the second of Trump’s marquee second-term initiatives the Court has struck down, after the tariffs fell in February. Both bear Miller’s fingerprints.
The Jobs That Disappeared
The birthright ruling is not the only promise the data just finished burying.
For years, Miller’s mass deportation argument rested on a second pillar: clear out the undocumented workers, and American workers get their jobs back. Wages rise. The blue-collar men who voted for Trump in 2024 feel it in their paychecks.
In May, Migrant Insider reported on the first comprehensive, causal national study of the labor market effects of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Its finding: there is no evidence that heightened ICE activity has produced job gains for U.S.-born workers. None. Not in agriculture, not in construction, not in manufacturing, not anywhere. What the enforcement surge actually produced is a chilling effect so severe it is contracting entire industries.
In high-enforcement areas, likely undocumented workers who were not arrested, not deported — simply frightened — reduced their employment by four percent. Among men, the drop was five percent, with two fewer hours worked per week. And for every six undocumented male workers who stopped showing up, one U.S.-born man with a high school degree or less lost his job, too.
Think of it this way: ICE raids a neighborhood. The men actually arrested are gone. But six other workers on the same crew stop showing up — not because they were caught, but because going to work now feels like walking into a trap. The laborer disappears. The foreman, the framer, the whole crew slows down. The employer doesn’t raise wages to find American replacements. The industry just gets smaller.
The researchers can rule out employment increases for U.S.-born workers of more than 0.1 percentage points. There is no wage increase. There is no flood of American workers taking the freed-up jobs. Miller had promised jobs. The peer review came back. The jobs just disappeared.
The Trooper Nobody on Team Miller Picked
The Court wasn’t the only surprise this week. Three separate sources told the Daily Beast’s PunchUp that Miller was “blindsided” by Trump’s pick to run ICE: Richard “Lance” Schroyer, an Oklahoma highway patrolman with no immigration enforcement record, who now sits atop a $78 billion budget and 32,000 employees. He isn’t Miller’s pick. He isn’t even Tom Homan’s pick. He is Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s old security-detail buddy — the kind of man who gets invited in for dinner.
“He may be getting boxed out,” one ICE veteran told PunchUp. A White House official insisted Miller had been “aware” and “very supportive.” Insiders don’t typically use the word blindsided to describe a man who was in the room.
