Is Stephen Miller failing?

True, Miller has amassed unprecedented power for a deputy White House chief of staff. He exerts extraordinary influence over an unusually large swath of the government, from immigration to criminal justice to even the military’s operations on American soil. Much of what defines public life in the Trump era—masked kidnappings on U.S. streets, standoffs between ICE goons and protesters, military patrols in U.S. cities—has been authored by Miller. His ever-present unctuous smirk suggests he’s visibly relishing the violent hatreds all this has unleashed.

Yet now that we’re one year into President Trump’s second term, it’s clear that in important ways, Miller is falling short of his most elaborate authoritarian designs. The deportations are lagging far behind his hopes. He has not persuaded Trump to deploy the dictatorial power he pines to see. And he has unleashed a cultural moment in defense of immigrants that is more powerful than anything he anticipated.

Miller swaggered into Trump’s second term bursting with hubris, but that bubble deflated quickly. Last spring, only a few months into the new term, he was already privately shrieking at top ICE officials over lackluster deportations, angrily demanding the arrests of 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day.

Nine months later, Miller is still two-thirds short of that goal: Arrests are currently averaging around 1,100 daily. Yes, that’s a lot of people, and tragically, large percentages of them are people with no criminal records. A lot of immigrants whose only crime was to illegally enter the country in search of a better........

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