In an exclusive interview today with Raw America, former Trump Administration Chief of Staff to Homeland Security Miles Taylor told me that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be disbanded.
“This past year,” he said, “I very much came around to the viewpoint that DHS, as currently constructed, in the wrong hands, is effectively the architecture of a police state. Few of the safeguards we needed to prevent that were actually put in place.”
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Taylor told me there needs to be “a wholesale reassessment” of the entire department. And he said it “as a national security conservative, someone who wants a DHS prepared to protect the people. First and foremost, it can’t be a department that hurts the American people.”
Taylor isn’t a Democratic critic. He helped design and build the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. He’s the most senior Trump administration official ever to call for the wholesale dismantling of the very department he helped run.
Trump’s former DHS chief of staff also told me the architecture he helped construct has become, in Trump’s hands, a tool for oppression.
“It’s like a home builder who builds your house perfectly for summer, and then the place is freezing in winter. We didn’t put insulation in. We didn’t think winter would come. Guess what — winter is here.”
And it’s not just ICE. Every single agency inside DHS has been corrupted.
“I could go agency by agency across DHS,” Taylor told me, “and show you how easily this White House has politicized every single one of them.”
Bannon May Be Right — And That Should Terrify You
Last week, Steve Bannon said out loud what the rest of us feared: that sending ICE to airports is a test run for deploying them at polling places in the 2026 midterms. I asked Taylor directly: does that scare you as a real possibility?
“Very much,” he said. “We should take Bannon at his word.”
What makes Taylor’s answer so explosive is that it’s not just speculation. Years ago, he spoke to Mark Harvey, the White House National Security Council official responsible for election security under Trump. Harvey predicted this exact scenario. Taylor read me Harvey’s words directly:
“It would be the inverse of election security. They would militarize the election process. They would have sheriffs that agree with them, reservists, potentially even active duty soldiers standing outside of polling places. They would do anything possible to intimidate their political opponents from casting a ballot.”
That was Trump’s own election security official. Predicting years in advance what Bannon is now describing as the plan.
“States’ attorneys general, secretaries of state, and local leaders need to be prepared today to file these lawsuits,” Taylor told me. “It may not wait until November. It may happen in some primaries.”
Trump Allegedly Called Emergency Powers His “Magical Authorities”
The most chilling thing Taylor revealed: Donald Trump has a pet name for his most extreme executive powers. He calls them his “magical authorities.”
Taylor told me he was tipped off, on the eve of a State of the Union address, that Trump was in the Map Room of the White House literally dictating words into his own speech to invoke the Insurrection Act and send US military forces to the southern border. His own lawyers said it would probably be illegal. Trump didn’t care. A panicked aide called Taylor, who rushed to the White House and personally talked the president down.
“That’s how close Donald Trump has come to invoking those powers,” he told me. “And that’s not how the system should work.”
Taylor believes Trump is still looking for his pretext, and that an Iranian terrorist attack on US soil could provide it.
“If there were, God forbid, an Iranian terrorist attack on this country,” he told me, “yes. I believe Donald Trump would gladly use that event to invoke those emergency powers. He has been on the cusp of doing so for nearly seven years.”
DHS Made No Preparations for Iran War
Taylor also revealed something that should be front-page news everywhere: the United States went to war with Iran while its own Department of Homeland Security had done zero planning.
“The president made the affirmative decision to go drop bombs in a foreign country while his DHS was shut down and had apparently not been engaged in any defensive planning whatsoever,” he told me. “I cannot convey to you how unconscionable this is.”
Even in Trump’s first term, DHS officials did war gaming on their own just in case. This time: nothing. No preparation. No war games. No defensive posture. Just bombs and a department with its hands tied.
Meanwhile, elite counterterrorism units called BORTAC — which exist specifically to hunt Iranian operatives and track ISIS infiltration — were deployed to Minneapolis to police protesters.
“We face one of the most sophisticated terrorist adversaries in world history right now in Iran,” Taylor told me, “and we’re sending BORTAC around the United States to police protesters. They should literally be focused on Iranian threats.”
Trump Would Trade Taiwan to China for a Big Deal
In what may be the most explosive foreign policy revelation of our conversation, Taylor told me he believes Donald Trump would willingly hand Taiwan over to China.
“My speculation would be that Donald Trump is more than willing to let the Chinese take Taiwan if the Chinese will give him some sort of bargain,” he told me.
Taylor said people who worked on China policy inside the Trump administration believed the president wasn’t looking for a strategic outcome. He was looking for a number. A big one.
“He just wanted a big number. He wants the ability to come out and say: I’ve struck a $5 trillion trade deal with China. And that would be the type of thing people were worried Donald Trump would be willing to trade Taiwan for.”
Taylor was unsparing: “Donald Trump doesn’t care about Taiwan. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the people of Taiwan.” It is US law that America goes to the defense of Taiwan. Taylor believes Trump would sell them down the river anyway.
Trump ‘Bombed Venezuela Because Maduro Mocked His Dancing’
And then there was this.
Citing New York Times reporting, Taylor told me that Donald Trump made the decision to deploy US military forces to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro not because of narco-terrorism or national security, but because he saw a video of Maduro mocking the way Trump dances at rallies.
“Not making that up,” Taylor told me. “You can go look up that article. The president of the United States seizes a foreign leader with the United States military. Why? Because Nicolas Maduro mocked the way he danced.”
Taylor said the same logic applied to Iran. “The Washington Post reported that part of the decision-making was that Donald Trump didn’t like it that Iran was targeting him personally. Trump didn’t like it that the Iranians were going after him, so he went there.”
His conclusion: “Donald Trump has always carried out US foreign policy with his personal self-interest in mind. He’s not against dictators. He’s only against dictators who make fun of him or go after him. He’s more than happy to align the United States with dictators who want to kill Americans, as long as they’re beneficial to his personal self-interest.”
Why Raw America Broke This Story
I started Raw Story in 2004, fresh out of college, believing that independent journalism answering to nobody but the truth could hold power to account. Our intelligence reporter exposed a CIA black site in Poland in 2007 that the Washington Post had declined to name.
I returned to launch Raw America because I watched billionaires — Bezos, Ellison, a right-wing pharma executive at the LA Times — systematically dismantle the American press. Miles Taylor came to Raw America first because we answer to nobody but you.
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If you are a paying subscriber, your support bought this exclusive today: the most senior Trump official ever to call for dismantling ICE and DHS, Trump’s willingness to trade Taiwan to China, and the story of a president who deployed the military against a foreign leader because that leader mocked his dancing.
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