Emails Show Stephen Miller Led Efforts to Expel Migrants at Border Under Title 42
Former White House adviser Stephen Miller spearheaded the Trump administration’s 2020 effort to expel undocumented migrants at the border under the guise of fighting the pandemic, emails obtained by American Oversight suggest.
Former White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller spearheaded the Trump administration’s 2020 effort to expel undocumented migrants at the border under the guise of fighting the pandemic, emails obtained by American Oversight suggest.
In the days leading up to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s March 2020 order announcing that undocumented migrants at the southern border would be turned away without a chance to make a case for asylum, Miller led meetings about the policy with a small, senior circle of interagency officials. Known for his anti-immigration views and high level of influence as a senior adviser to then-President Donald Trump, Miller was widely presumed to have pushed for this policy. The emails obtained by American Oversight are the first recorded evidence of his direct coordination of efforts to produce the order, often referred to as the Title 42 order.
On March 17, Brian Stimson, then the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, sent an email to multiple federal officials, writing, “I just participated in a call chaired by Stephen Miller on the 265 [interim final rule] and CDC Order.” The original invitation for the call was titled “Covid-19 Emergency Border Planning” and included prominent policy officials and members of Miller’s inner circle, including Department of Homeland Security lawyer Chad Mizelle, Justice Department lawyer Gene Hamilton, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Wetmore, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official John Zadrozny, among other top officials.
The next day, Stimson emailed top HHS officials, including CDC Director Robert Redfield, asking for feedback on the draft order. He noted that “Miller has scheduled another meeting at 4:30pm” and “we need to get a draft CDC Order … [redacted] … before the meeting.”
On March 20, the day the CDC order was announced, Stimson wrote to Miller and other top officials, alerting the group to the order’s imminent publication on the CDC website. The email was sent to Hamilton, Mizelle, Deputy Counsel to the President Patrick Philbin, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s Steve Engel, and DHS lawyer Ian Brekke, all of whom helped move Miller’s policy through the approval process. Hamilton thanked Stimson “for all your work on this” and Philbin praised his “yeoman’s work.” Stimson replied, “Appreciate the kind words and team effort throughout the week from all quarters to get this across the line.”
The CDC order invoked a section of Title 42 of federal law that allows the surgeon general to prohibit “the introduction of persons” to the country if there is danger of transmitting a contagious disease. The measure effectively allowed the government to expel migrants before giving them a chance to make their case for asylum, which many legal experts argued violated due process and U.S. immigration law.
While the Trump administration argued that processing migrants would be too much of a risk, human rights advocates accused the government of using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass restrictive immigration measures that would have little impact on reducing the spread of coronavirus. During his time in government — including for years before the Covid-19 pandemic — Miller repeatedly tried to invoke the purported threat of disease to limit immigration, a narrative with decades of xenophobic history.
Recent reports suggest that the Biden administration is leaning toward ending the program after facing intense backlash from advocates and lawmakers for continuing the policy over the past year. The administration has exempted unaccompanied minors from the policy. Additionally, earlier this month a federal court ruled that the government may not use Title 42 to send migrant families back to countries where they are in danger of being persecuted, writing in the ruling that “it’s far from clear that the CDC’s order serves any purpose.”
American Oversight received these documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking communications between Stephen Miller and HHS and CDC officials regarding immigration restrictions during the pandemic. We are continuing to investigate Stephen Miller’s influence on immigration policy and throughout the Trump administration.