Well-meaning Republicans who joined the Trump administration hoping to provide stability made a lot of mistakes, myself included. I spent two years in Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security before quitting in 2019, when I was chief of staff to the secretary. One of the biggest mistakes I made was assuming we could manage Donald Trump.
Another was assuming that he was an aberration — that his reckless ideas were a personality defect, not representative of a wider political movement.
We were wrong. Trumpism has overtaken the Republican Party.
The next GOP president, whether it is Trump or someone else, will seek to finish what the MAGA movement started in its first term. Nowhere is this more clear — and more disturbing — than on immigration.
Trump’s acolytes have adopted his stark anti-immigrant views. In some cases, they’ve championed some of the inhumane policies that even Trump himself abandoned. To understand why, it’s important to know that the border symbolizes the wider aims of the MAGA movement.
In order to “Make America Great Again,” adherents believe foreigners are ruining America and that their influx must be curbed.
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To be clear, the crisis is real.
The United States is unable to control the unprecedented flow of people and contraband across its border. Drugs and dangerous individuals easily infiltrate America because of inadequate security, creating a volatile situation for border communities and the wider country.
But Trumpism is also unfair to migrants seeking a better life. America’s porous border has incentivized human trafficking, cartel activity, and violence, which makes the journey more dangerous for these would-be Americans. When they arrive, a broken immigration system forces them into years of uncertainty in the shadows. Worse still, it takes the justice system years to deliver them a final answer about whether or not they can stay.
In theory, the solution isn’t complicated. Polls show a majority of Americans surveyed support tougher border security and immigration reform, whether it’s a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States or a faster process for aspiring Americans to become citizens.
In practice, political polarization has put a legislative compromise well out of reach for every recent US president who tried. Former president George W. Bush made an honest attempt to broker a bipartisan fix, but ever since the MAGA movement took over the party, the possibility for a deal has shrunk to almost zero.
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Trump and his allies saw only one side of this equation: security. To them, this was the primary mission of DHS — deporting undocumented immigrants and migrants, punishing those who made it to the border, and making it harder for any others to follow their path.
Over the past two years, I’ve spoken with dozens of fellow former Trump officials to get their sense of what Trump or his GOP successor might do if the MAGA cabal retakes the White House, particularly on border security and immigration.
The picture they painted isn’t pretty. Here are my biggest takeaways:
First, the White House will deliberately seek to make life more miserable for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
Stephen Miller, a top White House policy adviser during the Trump administration, bragged then that he had a “locked drawer of executive orders” on immigration that were intended for a “shock and awe blitz” if Trump got reelected in 2020. The next MAGA president will unlock the drawer. One example caught me off guard.
In summer 2018, Josh Venable, Trump’s former Education Department chief of staff, was on a work trip with then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in the Netherlands when they got a call from the White House. It was Miller. According to Venable, the Trump aide demanded that department leaders figure out how to cut off money to states that allowed undocumented immigrants to enroll in public schools. DeVos and her team had already told the White House it wasn’t legal.
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“Their plan was ignore it, get sued, and litigate it up to the Supreme Court,” Venable told me.
Like this, there are dozens of levers the White House could pull to make daily life harder for undocumented immigrants. None would be as powerful as the threat of mass deportation.
The next MAGA administration will almost certainly break with longstanding US policy that prioritizes the deportation of immigrants with criminal records, instead ordering a widespread roundup of immigrants and their families, regardless of whether they’ve committed crimes. Trump realized Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t have sufficient resources to do this. According to former ICE officials, his GOP successor may use presidential powers to “deputize” other agencies to assist with deportation operations.
And many of these anti-immigrant policies would be difficult to unravel.
“You can’t just turn those off overnight,” a current US Customs and Border Protection official told me. “It takes years to undo them.”
Second, the White House will turn migrants into political pawns.
This is one place where Trump’s MAGA acolytes are already going further than he did.
In early 2019, Trump called my team at DHS with an order to “bus and dump” all undocumented immigrants picked up at the US-Mexico border into Democratic cities. He wanted to punish those localities for protecting immigrants by trying to stir up mayhem. Trump later said he wanted to send the worst ones — the “murderers, rapists, and criminals” — into the cities to create even more instability.
At the time, I consulted administration lawyers, who reached the obvious conclusion that this would probably be illegal for any number of reasons. It also happened to be morally repugnant. I included several of Trump’s aides on an e-mail and warned them. None responded, and Trump let the plan go.
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Since then, states such as Florida and Texas have revived the concept with alacrity. Both have implemented de facto “bus and dump” programs of the kind we once told Trump were wrong and illegal. GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has bragged about shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and New York City, openly promoting a political stunt meant to exploit human lives to score points against Democrats.
Another MAGA president will probably scale these efforts exponentially. With federal resources behind the stunt, they’ll be able to transport hundreds or even thousands of migrants every week from the border to Democratic cities across the United States in order to overwhelm social services and local law enforcement. This money won’t directly increase “border security”; it will be state-sponsored political punishment.
The White House will also make an example out of recent arrivals. Expect a return of Trump’s family separation policy — this time on steroids.
I’ve previously written that the debacle was “a sickening display of bad judgment” and “a seminal moment of Trumpism gone too far.” But interviewees have confirmed that the original plan was even more drastic. Before adopting Jeff Sessions’s catastrophic zero-tolerance prosecutions policy at the border, Trump White House officials originally wanted to pull every single child from their parents at the border, not just those who illegally slipped between ports of entry.
When I later became DHS chief of staff, after the policy had been ended, I found out how obsessed the president was. Trump often waxed poetic about family separation. He was desperate to reinstate it and angry that DHS and others had talked him into signing an executive order to end the policy.
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Next time, the White House won’t hold back.
Third, the next MAGA administration will go on offense.
Americans should expect the resurrection of zombie policies involving the use of force against innocent civilians. This might include the regular use of tear gas to repel arriving migrants, the deployment of heat ray technology to make asylum-seekers feel like their skin is on fire, or shoot-to-kill orders for anyone who rushes the US-Mexico border — all in the name of deterrence. These were real ideas Trump or his loyalists considered.
I quit the Trump administration to sound the alarm about what he wanted to do in a second term. But even I didn’t anticipate how thoroughly his ideas would infect the wider Republican Party in the long run. Now we’re confronted with the likelihood — if not the certainty — that the next GOP presidential nominee will be beholden to the party’s anti-immigrant MAGA wing and hellbent on picking up where Trump left off.
Trump spoke earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which bills itself as “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world.” The former president riled up the room while talking about the situation at the southern border. He compared the spike in illegal immigration to a hostile military offensive against the United States. Next time, he said, he won’t let anyone — including Congress — deny him the resources to respond to the incoming migrants. He will turn to the Pentagon.
“I’m going to take it right out of the military because they’re invading our country,” he declared, vowing to deploy US armed forces to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history!”
The CPAC crowd roared its approval.
Miles Taylor served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book “Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump.”

