In the public imagination, Stephen Miller is the dark heart of the Trump administration — a pulsing mass of anti-immigrant hatred behind its most aggressively authoritarian moves.

But what if there’s a different story to be told — that Stephen Miller’s obsession with deportations isn’t helping President Donald Trump secure control over the country, but actively undermining it?

Take Trump’s militarization of Washington, DC, as an example. The move is puzzling, in that it’s authoritarian in principle but ineffective in execution. While seemingly designed to expand Trump’s ability to control the American public, the on-the-ground deployments are doing nothing to repress protest — in fact, they’re assuredly generating far more resistance than they’re suppressing.

So what’s going on? The best answer I’ve found is a recent piece from Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (and Vox alum). Looking granularly at the details of the operations in DC, Lind found they heavily focused on immigration enforcement — things like forcing DC police to cooperate with ICE and setting up checkpoints to try and trap people they think look like migrants.

“Every day since the federal takeover, DC residents have posted videos of federal agents — often with a mix of uniforms or no official badges at all — in patrols, staffing checkpoints, or going after people. And the people they’ve been going after have largely been (apparent) immigrants,” Lind writes. (Her findings are supported by recent on-the-ground reporting from the Wall Street Journal.)

This is, I think, a viciously cruel policy (not to mention a waste of federal resources). But it is also a very ineffective policy when it comes to consolidating authoritarian control. Undocumented migrants do not vote, but the administration’s ceaseless efforts to deport them en masse is galvanizing street protests and

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