Getting rid of the worst? Start with Miller

Any changes after Minneapolis will mean nothing if he remains

- GUSTAVO ARELLANO COLUMNIST

President Trump and his supporters like to think of their MAGA movement as an unstoppable locomotive. After Border Patrol agents brutally beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti last weekend in Minneapolis, we're seeing the Trump Train derail in a way it never has.

Already, Border Patrol commander at large Gregory Bovino seems to have been relieved of his post leading a nationwide caravan of cruelty and sent back to his home base of El Centro in Imperial County. Republicans are publicly calling for the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and privately freaking out that her Minnesota mess will doom their chances of holding Congress in the 2026 midterms. Trump has promised a “deescalation” of immigration enforcement actions, and is doing everything possible to stem nationwide outrage over his deportation machine.

But it means nothing if one Stephen Miller remains in the White House. Keeping him in power is like performing surgery and knowingly leaving a cancerous tumor behind.

The hate-filled ghoul has got to go.

The deaths of Pretti, Renee Good two weeks earlier and more and more people on the streets and in detention facilities are the logical outcome of what happens when Miller is in charge of anything.

When he is the beating heart of one of the ugliest, most xenophopic and violent periods of immigration enforcement this country has seen.

No one should be so naive to think that Miller is the only dark-hatted villain in that White House — there’s a whole gallery. But he sure makes the strongest case for being the most malevolent, influential force there, a malignancy that poisons everything he touches.