Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 19, 2025
Adam Isacson
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 19, 2025
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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Staff are called to report for jury duty next week. If they are assigned to a trial, it may be impossible to produce a Border Update. If not, publication will proceed as normal.
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- Updates about “mass deportation” and detention: The population in ICE detention has leveled off for now as resources from the giant spending bill in July are only beginning to come online. Stepped-up ICE enforcement has sent a chill through immigrant communities in Chicago, where agents fatally shot a man from Mexico. Numerous media outlets published alarming investigations of miserable conditions in ICE detention facilities.
- Defense and law enforcement officials being diverted from non-immigration cases: Several stories over the past week detailed how military personnel, and civilian personnel normally assigned to missions ranging from stopping drugs to stopping child sex slavery, have been pulled from their regular duties to assist the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort.
- Expulsions of Central American children remain on hold: A Washington, DC judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from expelling a class of unaccompanied Guatemalan children, as it had sought to do during the pre-dawn hours of the Sunday before Labor Day. Evidence shows that government attorneys provided false information to the court when they claimed that the children’s families were seeking to reunite in Guatemala.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Updates about “mass deportation” and detention
Current numbers
As of late on September 18, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had still not reported the number of migrants that the agency encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during August. This release is later than usual: CBP had provided this notification 12 days into March, 14 days into April, 13 days into May, 17 days into June, 15 days into July, and 12 days into August.
The difference may be that, at least according to a leak to the New York Post near the end of August, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants stopped decreasing last month and instead increased by more than 50 percent over July. The reason, a “Homeland Security source” told the Post, was that people deported into Mexico after being apprehended in the U.S. interior have been “trying to sneak back into the United States.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data released on September 11 reported that the agency’s nationwide detained immigrant population totaled 58,766, down slightly from a likely record 61,226 on August 29 and 59,380 on August 14. Analyst Austin Kocher recalled that this number counts “people in one of 187 facilities across the country, as well as many potentially more in unmarked facilities and holding rooms.”
Of those in detention, 29 percent had been convicted of a crime and 25 percent faced criminal charges (ICE’s report does not specify the crimes or their severity). Forty-five percent had no criminal history at all.
Despite a massive new detention budget approved by Congress in early July, ICE’s “immigration enforcement blitz” is being bottlenecked by the slow pace of making new detention beds available, White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan told reporters. “The government has fewer than 65,000 beds,” about 6,000 more than the current detained population, an administration official told Politico.
ICE arrested 171,649 people in the U.S. interior between February 1 and September 7, averaging 784 arrests per day. During the first seven days of September, the average was 848 per day, down from a high of 1,052 per day in June. That month saw a sharp increase after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s widely reported late-May order to increase daily arrests to 3,000. Subsequent months’ modest decline in arrests, Kocher and Cato Institute analyst David Bier contend, may have been the result of a court order—overturned by the Supreme Court on September 8 (see WOLA’s September 12 Border Update)—that had limited street arrests in and around Los Angeles.
The data indicate that ICE has removed 302,192 people from the United States during the 2025 fiscal year, which started in October 2024. At the end of January 2025, this number had stood at 85,769, indicating that ICE, under the Trump administration, has deported approximately 216,423 people.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offered the conservative website Daily Wire a number that is impossible to verify: “more than 389,000 illegal immigrants already removed from the United States” so far in the Trump administration, a number that apparently takes ICE removals and adds CBP’s quick removals from the border, Coast Guard returns, and known “self-deportations.”
DHS repeated a claim to Daily Wire that another 1.6 million immigrants have left the United States on their own since January; PolitiFact looked at that number in early September and found it “half-true,” as it is based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey with a small sample size and large margin of error. Still, the Department’s top public affairs official apparently added the 1.6 million and the 389,000 and tweeted on September 17, “2 MILLION illegal aliens are out of the United States of America in less than 250 days.”
Chicago
In Chicago, the Trump administration’s so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” is now underway, with a surge of ICE, CBP, Border Patrol, and other federal law enforcement personnel fanning throughout the city seeking to detain undocumented people. Sweeps have so far been more “scattershot” than “massive,” Adrián Carrasquillo wrote at the Bulwark.
This deployment does not include National Guard personnel on a crime-fighting and ICE support mission, as President Donald Trump had threatened. Sending military forces against the wishes of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) promised too many “legal headaches” for the White House, as CNN put it. Trump has instead sent a new National Guard contingent to Memphis, in the Republican-governed state of Tennessee.
Word of stepped-up ICE (and accompanying agency) operations has spread a climate of fear through Chicago’s large immigrant and Latino communities. “The fear is not just overtly palpable but present in subtle ways as well,” Carrasquillo reported. “School attendance is down; parents are afraid to pick up their children from school. Community events are being canceled, and people are afraid to attend the Mexican Independence Day celebrations that started last week.” Businesses, particularly restaurants, are reporting 40 to 50 percent drops in revenue. Organizers decided to postpone a two-day “El Grito Chicago” festival that would have celebrated Independence Day in the city’s downtown.
While DHS released information on September 16 about 11 people arrested, portraying them as criminals, the total number of Chicago arrests so far is unclear. “I don’t have a sense of a number except to say that it is certainly higher than what ICE is reporting publicly,” read a statement from a spokesperson for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights reported by the Chicago-based investigative news site Unraveled.
The Chicago operation saw its first fatality on September 12, under circumstances that remain unclear in the suburb of Franklin Park. An ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old cook from Michoacán, Mexico, who had just dropped his children off at school. ICE reported that when agents sought to stop his vehicle, Villegas drove toward them, dragging one agent and injuring him, while another fired his weapon in self-defense. Villegas’s criminal record included only minor traffic violations, the local CBS News affiliate reported.
Reporting from Unraveled, citing security footage, “bystander videos,” and eyewitness accounts, casts doubt on the official narrative. “The sedan eventually reverses from the two agents, and the officer on the passenger side points his firearm at the vehicle. As Villegas-Gonzalez drives away from the agents—not toward them, as DHS claimed—the agent on the passenger side aims his weapon at the back of Villegas-Gonzalez’s car.”
The Mexican government’s Foreign Affairs Secretariat “condemns the violence” and has called for a “rigorous investigation” of the Villegas case, read a tweet from the agency.
Joe Botello, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, was briefly detained in a pre-dawn ICE raid on the house where he was living with several roommates, some of whom remain detained, in the suburb of Elgin. Masked, armed agents destroyed the home’s front and back doors. A camouflage-clad DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, visiting Chicago, was present for the raid; the Department shared a video including images of Botello, handcuffed. “I’m still a little bit in shock. I’m just glad that I’m OK,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I recommend that everyone always have their documentation—their passport if they can, and any type of ID that would identify them. … Stay safe.”
L.A. and D.C.
Los Angeles continues to reckon with a surge of immigration operations that began in June. The Border Patrol agent placed in charge of the “at large” mission in the city and in Chicago, El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, testified in the trial of Brayan Ramos-Brito, a protester charged with assaulting agents on June 7. Ramos-Brito’s defense attorney recalled a past misconduct investigation, citing Bovino referring to undocumented immigrants as “scum, filth, and trash”; Bovino said that he was referring to a specific individual.
The jury acquitted Ramos-Brito, as video indicated that agents shoved the defendant first. The Los Angeles Times notedthat the court had a difficult time building a jury in a community where “many potential jurors have negative views of immigration enforcement, or may be immigrants themselves.”
Miriam Jordan of the New York Times covered another June incident in Los Angeles, profiling 48-year-old Narciso Barranco, an undocumented Mexican citizen who has been in the United States since 1994 and raised three sons who served in the Marine Corps. Masked agents, at least some clearly Border Patrol, arrested Barranco on June 21 when he was landscaping the exterior of an IHOP. DHS tweeted a brief video of the arrest showing Barranco holding a weed whacker aloft and running, with the text “Perhaps the mainstream media would like our officers to stand there and be mowed down instead of defending themselves?”
“Mr. Barranco’s family said he was scared and just trying to move away, not to harm anyone,” Jordan reported. “Mr. Barranco’s memory of his arrest is fragmented: the blinding sting of pepper spray; beefy federal agents taking him down and pinning him to the pavement; their relentless blows; the pain radiating from his left shoulder.” Barranco is currently out of detention, on bond.
In Washington, DC, where increased ICE operations also continue, Chabeli Carrazana at the 19th reported on undocumented childcare workers forced to “go underground,” unable to take kids to parks, libraries, or other public spaces. “Nationwide, about 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrants, but in D.C. it’s closer to 40 percent; about 7 percent nationally are undocumented. Nearly all are women.”
Family separations
A Washington Post investigation revealed that, in an echo of the 2018 family separations crisis, ICE is taking children away from parents pursuing asylum cases. Agents are detaining parents in the U.S. interior and offering them a choice: give up their cases and be deported together, or persist in seeking asylum and have the children placed in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody. As a result, “ICE has sharply increased the number of migrant children it is sending to federal shelters for unaccompanied minors,” more than 400 since the Trump administration began.
Death of Estela Ramos
Jacob Soboroff and Kay Guerrero of MSNBC reported on the September 8 death of 45-year-old Estela Ramos, the mother of a 17-year-old honors student who was the subject of a September 2 profile. The mother and daughter had been deported to their native Guatemala on July 4, just days after being apprehended at a routine ICE check-in in Los Angeles. Both had said that agents confiscated Estela’s blood pressure medications and did not return them. While in Guatemala, she was so afraid of the Barrio 18 gang members whom she had initially fled that she did not dare to seek medical help to replace them.
Detention
A Washington Post investigation revealed that an ICE inspection of the Trump administration’s sprawling new “Camp East Montana” tent detention facility at Fort Bliss, outside of El Paso, Texas, found that contractor Acquisition Logistics and medical contractor Loyal Source were in violation of at least 60 federal detention standards. These include failures to provide adequate medical care, proper recordkeeping, functioning plumbing, outdoor recreation, sufficient food, and reliable access to legal counsel or contact with relatives.
Even as the facility is “expected to hold up to 2,700 migrants at a time this month and as many as 5,000 by the end of the year,” armed guards at Fort Bliss lack clear rules for the use of lethal force. Still, it is “the first of at least 10 temporary, tentlike encampments that the Trump Administration plans to build at military bases and the sites of existing detention centers in the coming months.” Initial reports that “Camp East Montana” would only be used to detain people with criminal records appear to be inaccurate.
A four-month Guardian investigation found systemic due process violations, prolonged detentions, poor medical care, and opaque practices at ICE’s Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, which it calls a “‘black hole’ where immigrants disappear.” At the facility run by the Geo Group, a major detention and prison contractor, detainees are often denied legal representation, held without timely medical screenings, and deported before legal requests are resolved. Former detainees recounted examples of verbal abuse and ridicule from guards, as well as physical mistreatment.
The piece notes “a temporary and unexplained change to normal medical standards earlier this year.” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin countered, “This is the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
The New York Times reported on the worsening mental health of people detained in ICE facilities for long periods, with “persistent reports of suicide attempts and people expressing thoughts of suicide in detention facilities.” After one man tried to hang himself after seven months in detention, officers at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana placed him “on suicide watch. This meant solitary confinement, where he fought off biting ants and endured black mold on the wall and feces in his cell.”
Lauren Villagrán of USA Today also wrote about the increasing application of solitary confinement in ICE detention facilities. The practice began to increase during the Biden administration but has since grown as a percentage of the overall detained population. “The more data that is released the worse we realize it is,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler of Physicians for Human Rights and Harvard Medical School, part of a team that released a new report on September 17.
At the family migrant detention center that the Trump administration reopened in Dilley, Texas, “the tap water is cloudy, smells strange and upsets stomachs,” attorneys, citing families, told the court in a case emerging from the administration’s effort to terminate a 30-year-old judicial agreement governing treatment of minors in immigration custody. “Children also struggle eating the food, like the snacks of graham crackers, apples, juice, and milk,” the Associated Press reported, adding that those in detention are charged $1.21 for a bottle of water, $5.73 for deodorant, $1.44 for soap, $2.39 for toothpaste, and $1.30 for a dose of Tylenol. “Parents said there are no organized activities for the children and only an hour of instruction from workbooks.”
A federal judge in New York issued a preliminary injunction strengthening an August 12 order to ICE to improve conditions in its short-term holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan found that conditions in the cells—designed for stays of 12 hours or less—likely “violated the First and Fifth Amendments,” the New York Times reported. Migrants, the report continued, have been “complaining about being held in the cells for days, and even up to three weeks. They said they were forced to sleep on the floor or sitting upright, and were deprived of showers, sufficient medical care, and legal representation. Some migrants said they had to contend with a stench emanating from shared toilets, which were in plain view of other detainees.”
The Women’s Refugee Commission launched a new Detention Pregnancy Tracker, which it describes as “the first nationwide tool designed to collect real-time reports on pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women in U.S. immigration detention.” This is necessary, the organization notes, because DHS “has effectively gutted its monitoring and oversight agencies and is no longer submitting the previously required reporting to Congress on the number and treatment of pregnant detainees.”
Defense and law enforcement officials being diverted from non-immigration cases
WOLA’s September 5 Border Update cited data, obtained by the Cato Institute’s David Bier, regarding the large number of federal law enforcement personnel that the Trump administration has pulled away from their agencies’ missions and assigned to immigration enforcement. The call to support “mass deportation,” according to this data, has diverted one in five US marshals, one in five FBI agents, half of DEA agents, over two-thirds of the ATF, and nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigations.
These diversions, along with drawdowns of military personnel and resources, were the subject of several media outlets’ investigations over the past week.
A Wall Street Journal investigation of the booming cocaine market found the migration mission hampering U.S. drug interdiction efforts. “The president’s campaign to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally has taken federal agents away from drug-traffic interdiction. In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants.”
A Guardian investigation found that the Trump administration’s redirection of resources to immigration enforcement has dismantled U.S. programs to combat human trafficking, undermining “decades of progress” in developing programs to combat sexual slavery, forced labor, and child exploitation. The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons office lost over 70 percent of its staff, while Homeland Security Investigations agents have been reassigned to immigration raids, which has demoralized them. Reduced access to visas for victims, and intimidating “welfare checks” carried out by ICE agents in tactical gear have further complicated efforts. Meanwhile, “Traffickers exploit the fear of immigration enforcement and the police so they [victims] don’t come forward,” pointed out Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Pulling 20 percent of FBI agents into the immigration enforcement mission—a greater percentage than were pulled into counter-terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks—has crippled the FBI’s ability to investigate cases against child predators, reported MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian. “Nearly every agent on Baltimore’s domestic terrorism squad was reassigned this year to work full time on immigration enforcement, forcing them to walk away from investigations of a network of violent predators that targets and exploits children online,” two former FBI officials said.
The Associated Press reported on a letter to the military services, signed by 12 of 13 Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, voicing strong concerns about the administration’s plan to assign 600 military lawyers, or Judges Advocate General (JAGs), to the Justice Department to serve as immigration judges. “These actions are inherently law enforcement actions that may not be performed by members of the armed forces,” the letter warns.
At the Intercept, Nick Turse tallied the number of active-duty and National Guard personnel serving in border security and immigration enforcement support roles, and found that the Trump administration has now deployed roughly 35,000 military personnel on domestic missions within the United States. That is 75 percent more than an estimate the Interceptcompiled in July. Most are in Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas. “The true number of federal troops deployed may be markedly higher.”
The annual National Defense Authorization Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives, included a provision that would allow the Defense Department to deploy private military contractors to the border. This would enable the Pentagon to outsource tasks currently performed by soldiers to companies like the controversial outfit formerly known as Blackwater or the data-mining giant Palantir, the Lever reported.
The Justice Department’s instructions to prosecutors to prioritize immigration cases have brought a sharp increase in prosecutions of undocumented immigrants in San Diego, noted the San Diego Union-Tribune. Prosecutors filed 127 felony or misdemeanor re-entry cases in December 2024 under the Biden administration; that number increased to 486 cases in May 2025, even as border apprehensions plummeted.
In Texas, state police assigned to enforce federal migration law, organized as “regional tactical strike teams,” have helped arrest 3,131 undocumented immigrants between late January and early September, reported Alejandro Serrano at the Texas Tribune. Many arrests took place hundreds of miles from the border: 700 in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
Expulsions of Central American children remain on hold
Washington, DC federal District Judge Timothy Kelly (a Trump appointee) issued a September 18 preliminary injunctionblocking the Trump administration from deporting dozens of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. DHS had sought to expel 76 children from U.S. shelters in the pre-dawn hours of August 31, the Sunday before Labor Day, only to be blocked by an on-duty judge’s temporary restraining order (see WOLA’s September 5 Border Update).
Kelly’s opinion takes administration officials to task for telling that judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, that the children’s parents were in Guatemala and desired to be reunited with their children. Separately, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Miller had tweeted that Sooknanan, whom he called “the Biden judge,” was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children.”
This was not true. After the revelation of a document from the Guatemalan government’s General Counsel’s Office recounting unsuccessful efforts to find any parents who actually sought to bring their children back, Trump administration attorneys retracted their story. On September 16, the Government Accountability Project added a whistleblower disclosurealleging that the acting head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), career ICE Homeland Security Investigations official Angie Salazar, likely knew that at least 30 of the Guatemalan children would have faced danger if returned.
“Counsel for Defendants [the Trump administration] explained why it was ‘fairly outrageous’ for Plaintiffs [the children’s attorneys] to have sued: all Defendants wanted to do was reunify children with parents who had requested their return,” read Judge Kelly’s opinion. “But that explanation crumbled like a house of cards about a week later. There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return.”
“While he limited the ruling on Thursday to Guatemalan children,” the New York Times explained, “Judge Kelly… warned the government not to interpret the opinion as an invitation to expand its operations.” This refers to indicationsthat the administration has been discussing similar transfers of unaccompanied children with pending immigration cases to Honduras and perhaps elsewhere.
A federal judge in Tucson, Arizona issued a similar temporary restraining order on September 11 to prohibit the deportation of another class of 57 Guatemalan and 12 Honduran children. That order expires on September 26.
The Guatemalan children’s attempted expulsion was a frequent topic in a contentious Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about unaccompanied minor migrant children held on September 17. Republican senators alleged that hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors were released to unvetted sponsors and that more than 300,000 went “missing” during the Biden years, a misreading of a 2024 DHS Inspector-General report noting that 291,000 lacked court dates. Democrats said the “missing kids” narrative is being weaponized and that the real danger is the Trump administration’s attempts at mass removals and obstacles to sponsors seeking to get kids out of ORR shelters.
Other news
- Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem demanding more information about the Trump administration’s deal with El Salvador to imprison Venezuelan migrants. The letter results from the disclosure, as part of ongoing litigation, of that agreement’s text. The document, dated March 22, commits $4.76 million in State Department International Narcotics and Law Enforcement funds for El Salvador’s acceptance of 300 Venezuelans accused (in most or all cases without due process) of membership in the Tren de Aragua criminal group. “This administration’s own statements make it clear,” Murphy’s text reads, “that they were not only aware of conditions inside the prison but actively sought to send individuals to CECOT [the Salvadoran government’s notorious mega-prison] precisely because they knew they expected detainees to be subjected to cruelty, torture, and possibly death.”
- When the UN General Assembly meets for General Debate in New York starting September 23, the State Department is planning a side event, led by Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau, that would “call for reframing the global approach to asylum and immigration to reflect Trump’s restrictive stance,” including making asylum a temporary status and requiring asylum seekers to apply in the first foreign country they enter, according to documents viewed by Reuters.
- The administration began building a 27-mile border wall segment in southeast Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, in the ecologically fragile Sky Island region. “This biodiversity hotspot includes the most significant wildlife corridor remaining along the Arizona-Mexico border,” halting migrations of jaguars and ocelots, warned the Center for Biological Diversity.
- Stephanie Leutert and Caitlyn Yates published the latest edition of the University of Texas Strauss Center’s long-running series of quarterly updates on “asylum processing at the U.S.-Mexico border.” While there is no longer any U.S. “asylum processing” to monitor, the report estimates that about 6,600 non-Mexican migrants remain in Mexican border cities, the lowest number since 2019, mainly in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ciudad Juárez. “These migrants are also less visible than in the past. Many people have moved out of the cities’ shelters and into rented rooms and apartments, and there are no longer any tent encampments along the border.”
- U.S. and international law make asylum or refugee status available to people who fear for their lives or freedom on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. At Just Security, Karen Musalo of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies warned of a July 18 decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews immigration court decisions and sets precedents, ruling that one’s sex (or gender) now may not be considered a “particular social group.”
- In Boston on September 12, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration can proceed with its March decision to cancel humanitarian parole for about 430,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who received it under a Biden-era program. The Supreme Court had already lifted a lower court’s stay of the cancellation in May.
- A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that CBP is lagging in deploying vehicle scanning systems meant to improve the detection of illicit drugs passing through border ports of entry. “CBP’s deployment plans exclude 9 major crossings that account for nearly 40 percent of passenger vehicle traffic.” Since 2020, the agency has managed to increase scan rates from 2 to 8 percent for passenger vehicles and from 16 to 27 percent for commercial vehicles. (In 2024, the acting head of CBP told NBC News that he hoped to get those numbers up to 40 and 70 percent by the end of 2025.)
- A GAO ruling found that DHS is in violation of appropriations law (the Impoundment Control Act of 1974) by withholding money that Congress assigned for the FEMA Shelter and Services Program (SSP). The fiscal 2024 appropriation allocated $650 million for this program to help U.S. shelters provide emergency assistance to recently arrived migrants. Because Congress passed a “continuing resolution,” essentially repeating most of the 2024 budget for 2025, it appropriated an additional $650 million this year, even as the Trump administration has sought to shut down the SSP and force shelters to return funds.
- A New Yorker piece by Cristian Farias took a deep dive into the Trump administration’s exaggerated efforts to pursue and retaliate against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man brought back to the United States after being wrongfully deported and imprisoned there in March.
- Six relatively moderate members of Congress—three Republicans and three Democrats belonging to the “Problem Solvers Caucus”—paid a visit to the border in Arizona. Their release does not indicate meetings with migrant community leaders, rights defenders, humanitarian workers, attorneys, or environmental defenders active in the area they visited.
- A lengthy read at Rolling Stone documented the extraordinary power that hard-line immigration opponent Stephen Miller has amassed from his perch in the office of the White House deputy chief of staff. “With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank,” the piece reads, adding, “In private conversations this year, the top Trump adviser has said that liberals promoting immigrant families’ ‘sob stories’ are engaging in emotional ‘blackmail’ that Miller and the government simply will not fall for.”