The resonance of President Donald Trump’s ideas among Republican voters is likely to embolden Stephen Miller and his like-minded hawks. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo White House Trump’s immigration push is Stephen Miller’s dream come true The president's October fixation on border security has rejuvenated an immigration agenda pushed by the White House aide and his allies across the administration.

Even if Republicans suffer losses on Tuesday, the midterm election campaign will have been a bonanza for immigration hard-liners inside the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump’s fixation on border security in the closing weeks of the campaign has given a tight-knit group of senior staffers from the White House and several departments the chance to put Trump on the record, yet again, on immigration policies he touted aggressively in 2016 but which had faded amid the mayhem of his early presidency.


Just within the past week, Trump has deployed thousands of troops to the border, floated potential executive action to block a caravan of Central American migrants from entering the country, and proposed the idea of ending automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. On Wednesday, he told reporters that the administration may send 10,000 to 15,000 additional military personnel to the border.

All the while, White House aides and Republican strategists have expressed glee about the way images of the caravan have stoked the conservative base, especially in states like Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota and Iowa, said one Republican strategist. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed that illegal immigration ranked the highest nationally among Republican voters, at 75 percent, as the biggest problem the country faces.

One Republican close to the White House quipped that the past month has been a dream come true for senior adviser Stephen Miller, in which he sees an opportunity and hopes to make the most of it.

Even if Democrats win seats in Congress next week as expected, the resonance of Trump’s ideas among Republican voters is likely to embolden Miller and his like-minded hawks, who populate the departments of Justice, Labor, Homeland Security and even State.

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Their agenda items for the coming weeks and months include changes to the asylum program; tweaks to work permits for spouses of guest workers; increased funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the DHS; and regulatory changes out of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for facilitating legal immigration, said another Republican close to the White House.

And even if Trump’s recent immigration proposals are more about campaign politics than actual policy — some top Republicans have scoffed at the idea that he could end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship through an executive order — the message gets out either way, hawkish immigration experts said.

“This is an issue that Americans are concerned about, and voters will probably be excited to see Trump take this on,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said of Trump’s birthright citizenship proposal. “Whether they think he can win, people want something attempted. They want some opportunity to wrestle with this for real — not just bar stool arguments, or ideas from a term paper.”

Immigration also gives Trump a natural political foil — in the form of foreigners — which he can use to incite fear among voters to drive them to the polls and use to put opponents on the defensive. On Wednesday, Trump scolded House Speaker Paul Ryan on Twitter after Ryan dismissed his birthright gambit as unconstitutional.

“Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, some he knows nothing about! Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!” Trump wrote.

By midafternoon Wednesday, Trump had tweeted 11 times — many of them on the subject of immigration, and several specifically on the subject of birthright citizenship.

Constitutional scholars on both left and right, and former administration officials, have denounced the idea. But while Trump White House aides and their Republican allies acknowledge that any moves to tweak the 14th Amendment would face immediate and significant court challenges, many still want to start the process — hopeful for a favorable ruling from a Supreme Court freshly tilted to the right after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s recent confirmation.

Trump called such a change to the 14th Amendment “much less complex than people think,” as he departed the White House on Wednesday for a rally in Florida.

Many of the immigration proposals Trump is now touting are not new. They date back to the presidential transition, during which they were championed by a group of staffers, led by Miller, that also included Gene Hamilton, a former aide to then-Sen. and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions who now works for the Justice Department, and John Walk, Sessions’ son-in-law, who works in the White House counsel’s office.

After Trump’s inauguration, the group convened roughly once a week to discuss tightening and enforcing immigration policies — including an early-2017 executive order that imposed strict new limits on foreign entry into the U.S., widely known as the “travel ban.” But once Gen. John Kelly arrived at the White House as chief of staff, he expanded the circle of people inside the immigration meetings to include more agency personnel and members of the National Security Council for discussions on agenda items like deciding the country’s annual cap on refugee admissions.

Miller still remains the president’s most influential adviser on immigration, much the way Peter Navarro has maintained the president’s attention on trade, said one former administration official.

One White House aide said the White House counsel’s office has been involved in discussions about any executive order ending birthright citizenship. But the official would not say whether specific lawyers had reviewed it or whether a draft proposal of such an executive order exists.

The White House’s top attorney, Don McGahn, departed the administration this fall, while his replacement, Pat Cipollone, is still undergoing his background security check. That has left the White House counsel’s office without a dedicated top attorney to vet Trump’s immigration proposals. (The lawyer overseeing the Russia investigation for the White House, Emmet Flood, is currently doing double duty in overseeing both the counsel’s office and the response to the special investigation.)

Even if the recent proposals on immigration are mostly about winning closely contended Senate races next week, they have built political support and momentum for Trump’s post-midterm agenda on the subject.

“People [in the White House] see the caravan issue in a similar light as Kavanaugh,” said one former administration official, referring to the pitched battle over the Supreme Court justice’s confirmation. “They see it as a unifying thing to drive some sort of outcome — whether that results in a political negotiation, or whether it just serves to unify people behind the president.”