White House adviser Stephen Miller Stephen MillerSpecial counsel investigating DeVos for potential Hatch Act violation: report Trump confirms another White House staffer tested positive for COVID-19 Biden pick creates furor, underscoring bitterness over Obama immigration policy MORE aggressively lobbied U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) to produce new restrictions on green cards and slammed top officials for not producing the rules sooner.

Emails obtained by Politico reveal Miller hammered former USCIS Director Francis Cissna, who was asked to resign from the agency earlier this year, over the supposedly slow pace of the agency's work on the public charge rule, which would bar legal immigrants who have taken various government aid, including food stamps, from applying for green cards.

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"Francis — The timeline on public charge is unacceptable," the White House aide wrote in one email obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by Politico. "The public charge reg has been in the works for a year and a half. This is time we don't have. I don't care what you need to do to finish it on time. You run an agency of 20,000 people."

"It's an embarrassment that we've been here for 18 months and USCIS hasn’t published a single major [regulation]," he lamented in another.

The proposal, which was announced in late September, was met with criticism from Democrats and activists who argued the rule would dissuade people who need government benefits from using them.

Cissna argued last year before his dismissal that the proposed rule applied to a very specific set of benefits and urged legal immigrants not to rush to unsubscribe from various programs.

“There should not be a mad rush to unsubscribe from all benefits. That is unwarranted, I think,” Cissna said in October during a speech at Georgetown University Law Center. "People should look carefully at the proposed rule to see exactly, truly what we're looking at when we're making that assessment.”