The Latest Front in Stephen Miller’s Personal War

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Jamelle Bouie

Opinion

The Latest Front in Stephen Miller’s Personal War

March 28, 2026,

11:41 a.m. ET

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Jamelle Bouie

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The latest front in Stephen Miller’s personal and political war on the 14th Amendment, which began last January with President Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, centers on the equal protection clause.

In 1982, in Plyler v. Doe, a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the equal protection clause for states to deny to undocumented children the free public education they provide to legal immigrants’ children, who are themselves citizens. As Justice William Brennan wrote in his opinion for the court, “The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.”

Miller, whose crusade against immigration knows no bounds, wants Republican-led states to test the court’s commitment to its precedent. My newsroom colleague Lauren McGaughy has

the report

:

Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week, a move that would challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Mr. Miller, President Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser, cited gridlock in Congress as he encouraged the state lawmakers to pass conservative legislation on immigration and other issues that are crucial to Republicans, hoping such action would spur on other red states and federal lawmakers.

The effect of this change, if it were to become law, would be to mark about a million children as members of a subordinate class — a lower caste excluded from mainstream society. Here, again, is Brennan: “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Miller’s push to weaken the equal protection clause raises an important question: Why is he, and the MAGA right more generally, so intent on whittling down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing?

To answer this, we can’t just look at the origins of the amendment — we have to see it in its larger political context. Before the 14th Amendment was a question of law and legal interpretation, it was a political text meant to bring about a particular vision of American society.

It seems obvious to say, but it’s worth emphasizing anyway: The 14th Amendment is tied directly to the 13th. The 13th Amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It then adds, in section 2, that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

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