Direct orders from Stephen Miller ignited the Los Angeles protests, leading to the precarious, highly militarized situation the city is currently facing.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Miller, frustrated with ICE’s failure to meet their lofty deportation quota, held an intense meeting at ICE headquarters last month and bet his agents that they could go to places like Home Depot or 7-Eleven and start arresting people.
“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking the audience directly. Officers were repeatedly told to do “what they needed to do” to make arrests.
ICE followed suit, flooding Los Angeles’s Westlake neighborhood with agents, accosting immigrants at their jobs and setting off resistance from community members, which then in turn led to federal agents deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades on American citizens. Miller, who is from Santa Monica, has long been obsessed with Los Angeles as a symbol of everything he hates: multicultural, multilingual, vibrant.
Los Angeles is only the beginning of this immigration crackdown, and Miller’s aggressive, by any means necessary tactics will only continue to be met with community protest, which in turn will lead to more Marines and National Guardsmen in the street (and without rules of civilian engagement at the time of this writing). This cycle is exactly what Miller and the administration want, as they continue to use the response to their extrajudicial detainments to further justify their actions.
The post Stephen Miller Behind Draconian Orders That Set Off L.A. Protests appeared first on New Republic.
