Stephen Miller, the architect of the workplace crackdown haunting America

Introduction: the man behind the numbers that stagger the mind

A plan that never speaks its own name

There are numbers that should be enough to jolt a democracy awake. 3,200. That is the daily average of deportations that the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, proudly announced at a press conference in New York this week, a figure confirmed by several American outlets including the New York Times, which reported that ICE carried out more than 10,000 arrests in five days. This is no longer an immigration policy. It is a machine.

And behind that machine stands a recurring face, an openly declared political intent: intensify enforcement at workplaces. According to an exclusive CNN investigation, the Trump administration is preparing to escalate workplace enforcement operations, involving multiple federal agencies with the openly stated goal of boosting arrest numbers while satisfying the president's electoral base. This is not my claim. It is CNN's, citing five sources inside the administration.

Why this profile, and why now

This piece is a profile, in the journalistic sense of the term: a portrait of a doctrine, embodied by specific faces, that is redrawing the face of American labor. It features Stephen Miller, the ideological architect of the hard line, Tom Homan, the "border czar" who promised to "flood the zone," and Markwayne Mullin, the new face of the DHS. Three men, one shared obsession: turning the workplace into a migration battlefield.

I do not claim to know everything unfolding inside the corridors of the DHS. CNN's own sources note that "the plans remain fluid and subject to change." But what is already known is enough to sketch a chilling portrait of an administration that has made numbers a religion.

The origins of a numbers obsession

From 660 to more than 3,000 arrests a day

We need to rewind a bit to grasp the scale of the shift. Just a few months ago, daily arrests hovered around 660 per day according to several analyses cited by the BBC. Today, the official target is 2,000 daily arrests, with peaks already surpassing 3,000, even 3,200 on average over several weeks according to Markwayne Mullin's own words.

This jump is not an administrative accident. It stems directly from a documented political decision: according to the Daily Wire, the White House explicitly pushed ICE to "turbocharge" its arrests, driving agents into weeks of work with 100% of personnel mobilized, an effort that internal sources describe as destructive to the agents' own personal lives.

Stephen Miller's troubling role

The name Stephen Miller keeps surfacing in reporting on this escalation. The Wall Street Journal, cited by the BBC, reported that he instructed ICE agents to simply "go out and arrest aliens," without needing to build target lists beforehand. In other words: maximize volume, regardless of precision.

That detail matters enormously. According to data from the University of California, Berkeley cited in several analyses, two out of every three people arrested in large-scale operations between December 2025 and January 2026 had no criminal record. For every person arrested with a serious criminal conviction, twelve others with no prior record were apprehended.

The workplace, the new front of the migration war

A coordinated federal strategy

According to CNN, several federal departments are actively collaborating to build a coherent approach to workplace enforcement. Part of that strategy involves informing employers of their hiring obligations while carrying out arrests at sites tied to criminal activity.

A former DHS official, cited by CNN, describes these operations as "difficult" because they require "considerable paperwork" and rigorous analysis to establish guilt. That can take months, even years, often building on a criminal investigation already underway led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

The paradox of employers left untouched

Here is where the hypocrisy becomes almost comical, if it weren't so tragic. An analysis by the Washington Post, relayed by The Independent, reveals that only one company has actually faced charges among roughly twenty raids announced by ICE. A manager at a powder-coating company in San Diego pleaded guilty, receiving a one-year probation sentence and 50 hours of community service.

Meanwhile, it is the workers, often with no criminal history, who are filling detention centers, whose population now exceeds 63,000 people according to the New York Times.

Markwayne Mullin, the new face of the numbers

A secretary who loves statistics

Since his appointment, Markwayne Mullin has multiplied press conferences where numbers become trophies. In New York this week, he hammered home: "We are currently deporting more than 3,000 people on average, and for several weeks now, that average has topped 3,200 a day." He added that 70% of those individuals had pending criminal charges or had already been convicted of a crime.

That 70% figure deserves scrutiny, not outright dismissal, but the rigor demanded of any government statement on immigration. Independent tracking data, notably from deportationdata.org, paints a more nuanced picture in which the majority of people arrested in broad operations do not carry a heavy criminal history.

The standoff with sanctuary cities

Mullin also directly targeted the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, promising to "surge" ICE agents into the city in response to his criticism of the raids. This kind of political confrontation, in which immigration becomes a weapon for settling scores with progressive cities, says a great deal about the nature of the project: this is no longer just about security, it is about the politics of electoral terror.

Money, the sinew of this administrative war

Thirty billion for ten thousand new agents

None of this would be possible without colossal funding. The law nicknamed the "One Big Beautiful Bill," signed on July 4, 2025, allocated roughly $29.9 billion specifically to enforcement and removal operations, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents. The overall budget for immigration enforcement now exceeds $75 billion, making ICE the best-funded police agency in the country, according to data cited by several independent analyses.

Another component, the Secure America Act, guarantees $70 billion in funding for ICE and CBP through 2029, according to Mullin's own statements.

Doubling detention capacity

The July 2025 law also includes $45 billion for building new detention centers, allowing the country's capacity to double from 41,000 to 100,000 beds. This is an unprecedented investment in carceral infrastructure aimed at a population that, overwhelmingly, poses no documented violent threat.

The faces erased behind the statistics

Ordinary places turned into war zones

The targets are no longer just underground factories. According to several reports, including those from the BBC and Vox, raids have hit car washes, farms, Home Depot parking lots, a racetrack in Louisiana, and even a construction site for an electric battery plant in Georgia, where 475 people were arrested in the largest single raid of this administration.

These are not abstract statistics. These are people who went to work on an ordinary day, in a country that prides itself on being a land of opportunity, before finding themselves handcuffed in front of their coworkers.

The testimony of a wrongly detained veteran

In Newark, according to Voice of America, a raid led to the detention of an American military veteran whose documents were questioned by agents. The city's mayor, Ras Baraka, denounced a violation of the constitutional rights of the people present, whether citizens or not.

The employers in the shadows, never troubled

The double standard between red and blue states

An analysis published by Vox highlights a striking imbalance: operations mostly target undocumented workers in Democratic states like California, rather than holding employers accountable in Republican states. A researcher cited by Vox says she has not observed a single employer prosecuted in red states for hiring undocumented workers, while workers themselves are the ones targeted in blue states.

This finding is not trivial. It reveals that the White House's promise to "hold employers accountable" remains, in practice, largely rhetorical.

The White House's own words

A White House official told CNN: "This is not a new policy. The administration has been investigating various violations since taking office, targeting issues like fraud, theft, and more. These investigations are criminal in nature. If they require law enforcement action to apprehend those breaking the law, the Trump administration will enforce the law."

Tom Homan and the "flood the zone" doctrine

A promise kept to the letter

As early as June 2025, Tom Homan, the White House immigration adviser, had warned: "You're going to see more worksite enforcement than you've ever seen in the history of this nation. We're going to flood the zone." A year later, the numbers confirm this was not just a shock phrase.

Homan also confirmed to media that these operations would continue targeting farms and hotels, while claiming a priority on criminals, a nuance that, on the ground, seems to routinely evaporate.

Sanctuary cities, a priority target

Homan specifically singled out sanctuary cities, accusing them of "knowingly releasing individuals who pose a risk to public safety." This is rhetoric that turns municipal protection policies into an accusation of complicity, a confrontational discourse that fuels an endless escalation between Washington and major American cities.

What history will remember of this escalation

A precedent that outlasts Trump

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, it is essential to understand that this immigration enforcement infrastructure, once built, will not disappear easily. The 10,000 new agents, the 100,000 detention beds, the contracts with private companies to identify people without legal status: all of this constitutes a permanent apparatus, transferable to any future administration, regardless of its political leanings.

It is a lesson history has already taught us with other security apparatuses: once built, they are rarely dismantled, only redirected.

The inevitable comparison with the Biden era

Under the Biden administration, secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had ended massive workplace raids, arguing that they "diverted enforcement resources while discouraging worker cooperation" in investigations of exploitative employers. That policy was abandoned in record time as soon as Trump returned to power in January 2025.

The international dimension of a domestic policy

A message sent to the entire world

This migration escalation is not just a domestic matter. It sends a clear signal to allies and adversaries of the United States about the nature of American executive power under Trump: a power that favors a show of force over diplomatic nuance, even toward its own residents.

In a world where China, Russia, and Iran scan every crack in America's social fabric to fuel their anti-Western propaganda, a migration policy this brutal and poorly targeted hands an easy angle of attack to those who want to portray the West as hypocritical on human rights.

The West cannot afford this contradiction

I say this as a committed defender of Western leadership in the world: we cannot preach human rights to Moscow and Beijing while mistreating workers who, for the most part, have quietly contributed to the American economy for years.

The voices pushing back

Immigration lawyers on a war footing

Organizations like the American Immigration Council meticulously document every wave of raids, every arrest figure, every case of prolonged detention. Their work, though often ignored by major media, constitutes an essential counter-record against the official public safety narrative.

Specialized lawyers also continue advising workers on their fundamental rights: the right to remain silent, the right to refuse to show identification documents, the right to speak with a lawyer. This advice, widely disseminated, becomes a form of civic resistance against the scale of the federal apparatus.

The doubt that must remain in public opinion

I do not claim to know how this confrontation between the federal executive and sanctuary cities will end. But I know that history judges harshly the periods when fear replaced debate, when numbers replaced faces.

What this obsession with numbers reveals about the soul of power

Governance by dashboard

The fact that senior government officials, like Markwayne Mullin, communicate their migration policy almost exclusively in terms of quotas and daily averages reflects a troubling technocratic drift. Public policy becomes an exercise in statistical performance rather than an exercise in individualized justice.

Every immigration case deserves human review, not a simple addition to a spreadsheet column meant to impress an electoral base.

The risk of a point of no return

With tens of billions of dollars already committed and a detention infrastructure in full expansion, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a quick reversal, no matter who the future occupant of the White House may be.

What the administration is not yet saying

The exact scale remains unclear

CNN makes it clear: "the exact scale of the latest enforcement push remains uncertain." This opacity, whether deliberate or not, leaves a legitimate unease hanging over employers, workers, and civil rights advocates, who must navigate an almost permanent legal fog.

This uncertainty is itself a weapon. It keeps an entire population in a constant state of anxiety, with no precise official announcement ever coming to clarify the DHS's rules of the game.

What I cannot state with certainty

I cannot predict whether this escalation will continue at this pace, nor whether federal courts will intervene to curb some of the most aggressive aspects of this strategy. What I can state, based on available sources, is that the current trajectory is unambiguous: toward more raids, more detentions, more funding.

The human cost nobody counts

The children left behind

No DHS release counts the number of American children separated from a parent during a workplace raid. This statistical silence is not neutral: it reveals what the Trump administration chooses to measure, and what it chooses to ignore. Rights organizations, including the American Immigration Council, nonetheless document these cases with a rigor official releases never match.

This numerical void is telling. An administration that so loves statistics when they flatter it grows strangely silent when they would expose the real human cost of its policy.

Local communities under permanent strain

In cities like Los Angeles, where more than 900,000 residents live without legal status according to estimates cited by the BBC, every workplace raid sends shockwaves far beyond the people arrested. Schools, businesses, parishes, an entire social fabric finds itself weakened by a diffuse and constant fear.

This fear, methodically sustained, becomes itself a tool of governance, a means of deterrence that reaches well beyond the strictly legal scope of law enforcement.

Conclusion: the portrait of a country at a crossroads

An America that must look itself in the mirror

This portrait is not of one man. It is of a system, carried by several faces, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Markwayne Mullin, but above all carried by a clear political will to turn the workplace into an internal border. The numbers I have cited, 3,200 daily deportations, $29.9 billion in funding, 100,000 detention beds, are not statistical abstractions. They are the foundations of a structural change in how America treats those who, often for decades, have worked and lived there.

What the West owes itself

I believe deeply that the West remains, despite its flaws, the best hope for freedom and prosperity in the world. But that hope must be earned through consistency between our principles and our actions. An America that hunts its workers with the same intensity it denounces authoritarian regimes loses part of its moral authority against Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran.

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my acknowledged biases

I am Maxime Marquette, columnist and analyst. I do not claim clinical neutrality: I believe in a West that is strong, united, and consistent with its own democratic values. I take a critical view of the Trump administration when its policies appear to contradict those values, while acknowledging the real challenges that irregular immigration poses for any state governed by the rule of law.

I rely exclusively on reporting corroborated by multiple recognized journalistic sources, notably CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, Vox, and The Independent. No claim in this piece rests on personal testimony or an anonymous contact.

What I don't know and my method

I do not know the exact scale of the future operations announced by CNN, since the sources themselves describe the plans as "fluid." My method is to systematically cross-reference official DHS figures with independent analyses, such as those from deportationdata.org and the American Immigration Council, in order to avoid blindly reproducing the government's narrative.

Sources

Primary sources

CNN — Exclusive: Trump administration plans to boost worksite immigration enforcement operations, July 2, 2026

The Daily Wire — White House Renews Pressure On ICE To Turbocharge Arrests, July 2, 2026

The Independent — Trump threatened tough punishment for employers, June 30, 2025

Secondary sources

Voice of America — US agents raid New Jersey worksite as Trump escalates immigration crackdown

BBC — Immigration raid at car wash shows how Trump's crackdown is changing, June 11, 2025

Vox — Why Trump is suddenly ordering immigration raids

Deportation Data Project — Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months of the Second Trump Administration, January 27, 2026

By Maxime Marquette, columnist