Just hours before Stephen Miller arrived at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on New Year's Eve'where he would welcome 2026 by dancing next to the soon-to-be-defenestrated homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as the 1990s cultural relic Vanilla Ice performed'he won a great, though ultimately fleeting, victory. The Labor Department's Foreign Labor Certification office announced that the Trump administration would cut the number of approved visas for seasonal workers by about 50 percent. Miller had been trying since his days as a Senate aide to reduce reliance on visas granted annually to the hospitality, construction, and landscaping industries. But the plan unraveled within weeks. After the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, President Trump reversed the visa cuts as part of a late-January retreat from Miller's hard-edged goals. Miller was not involved in the walk-back, according to two people with knowledge of the process and who requested anonymity to discuss internal...
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