White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is encouraging red states to cut public funding to educational initiatives that benefit the children of undocumented migrants, according to a report.
Miller, well known as an immigration hardliner, challenged Texas Republican lawmakers during a four-hour meeting in Washington last week about why they had not already introduced a bill to that effect, according to The New York Times.
“Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?” he asked, using an acronym MAGA conservatives employ to disparage moderates within their own camp, which stands for “Republicans in Name Only.”
Miller’s remark at the meeting – which was also attended by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Housing Secretary Scott Turner, among others – was reportedly met with an awkward hush.
“There was no answer – it was just uncomfortable silence,” state GOP Rep. Tom Oliverson told the Times, adding that all Republicans consider themselves optimally positioned: “Everyone to the left of them is a RINO. And everyone to the right of them is crazy.”
Oliverson, chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus, said of Miller’s outlook: “He sees conservative states like Texas and Florida can be partners with the federal government.
“We can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.”
Miller’s shift in focus towards state legislatures comes as his party looks to stave off defeat in November’s midterm elections.
Should that come to pass and the Democrats manage to flip the House of Representatives and/or Senate in their favor, the second half of President Donald Trump’s second term is likely to be defined by congressional gridlock in which the administration struggles to get its immigration agenda passed.
Miller’s call for the Texas Legislature to pass a law granting public education funding only for the children of people “lawfully present in the United States” would fly in the face of a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Plyler v Doe.
The 1982 decision, which originated in Texas, found that states must pay for the elementary school education of all students in their care, regardless of their families' immigration status.
“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson told the Times, which estimated that Miller getting his wish would have an impact on approximately 100,000 of the Lone Star State’s 5.5 million schoolchildren.
His call appears to have the broad approval of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose spokesman, Andrew Mahaleris, said: “American citizens should be first in line for government services and not forced to bear the costs of supporting those whose entry into this country began with breaking its laws.
“The governor works daily to end unjust policies like this.”
However, Democratic State Rep. Ramon Romero, making the counter-argument, decried what he saw as an “effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state.
“Texas is strong because of our people, especially our young and growing Latino population. The Latino communities most impacted by these decisions will remember exactly who is behind them.”
Miller is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and declared Monday at a law enforcement roundtable in Memphis that the president’s crackdown on crime in his first year back in power amounted to a “national miracle that will be studied for centuries to come.”
Last week, he celebrated the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, now into their fourth week, as “politically incorrect” and lashed out at what he called the “woke Pentagon” under previous administrations.
However, he has also been attacked by his own side, with retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis recently calling him “out of his depth.”
Tillis unloaded on Miller during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union earlier this month in which he said: “It’s Stephen Miller that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassments for the president of the United States, speaking first and asking questions later.”
The senator went on to trash him for having an “outsized influence on the Cabinet” and told host Jake Tapper: “He’s a big problem in this administration, he has been from the beginning.”
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