Stephen Miller, a notorious white nationalist who was one of the first Trump administration’s longest-serving advisers and the principal mastermind behind its cruelest anti-immigrant policies, has returned to help carry out the “bloody” mass deportation agenda that was the signature promise of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Now holding an even more prominent role in the second administration as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Miller will be at the nexus of their radically nativist policy agenda.
Here are the three key things to know about Stephen Miller:
- While both Trump and JD Vance refused to discuss the details of mass deportation during the 2024 race, Miller was not shy in laying out his nativist vision for a potential second Trump term, describing plans for a red state deportation army, mass detention camps, and daily ICE flights. In one report, Miller “gleefully” described the plans as “greater than any national infrastructure project” the U.S. has ever seen.
- Miller was the architect of the first Trump administration’s most harmful anti-immigrant actions, including the discriminatory Muslim ban, the move to end DACA, and the inhumane policy ripping children from the arms of parents. While Miller pushed a combination of chaos and incompetence behind the scenes that often led to repeated political crises and court defeats, his cruelty has continued to have devastating consequences, such as the continued stain of family separation. And, he’s had four years to ensure he doesn’t make the same mistake again.
- Miller has also had close associations with some of the far-right’s most extreme figures. In college, Miller befriended Richard Spencer, who infamously led a Nazi salute at a white nationalist conference in 2016 and helped organize the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. While Miller later tried to publicly disassociate himself from Spencer and his views, leaked emails revealed that Miller was recommending Camps of the Saints, “a racist French novel popular among white nationalist and neo-Nazis,” as recently as 2015.
Previously described by Univision as “hostile” to minorities since his teens, Miller played a central role in the first Trump administration’s most xenophobic and widely-condemned policies, including the discriminatory Muslim ban, the rescission of the popular and successful DACA program, the termination of temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, attacks on the U.S. refugee system, and the cruel and traumatic family separation policy, which ultimately resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of 5,500 wailing children at the southern border.
Following Trump’s November 2020 loss, Miller played a significant yet underlooked role in pushing lies to justify the failed plot to install fake Trump electors and overturn his rightful defeat. In the months that followed the Jan. 6 insurrection, Miller cofounded America First Legal, a Trump-aligned outfit that has used the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline to block policies that might improve the everyday lives of working Americans, including immigrants. Heading into the 2022 midterms, Miller and his allies invested tens of millions of dollars into nativist ads, a strategy he continued into the 2024 election with the financial backing of billionaire and fellow conspiracy theory pusher Elon Musk. American First Legal further advanced this anti-immigrant agenda through its support of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the radical plan that in part targets immigrants and anyone who looks like one. Miller was one of the most vocal proponents of Trump’s signature “bloody” mass deportation agenda during the 2024 presidential election, gleefully describing plans for a red state deportation army, mass detention camps, and round-the-clock deportation flights. Miller has claimed that the effort to deport millions of our immigrant neighbors and likely some U.S. citizens is “greater than any national infrastructure project” in U.S. history and that “to save the nation, you need mass deportation.”
A number of former Trump administration officials, including former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, have returned to help Miller carry out this radical agenda. Like Miller, Homan doesn’t have to face Senate confirmation. “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said last year. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” And this time, Homan, Miller, and their allies don’t intend on foiling their plans by repeating the same mistakes that previously blocked Trump’s first administration from fully implementing its nativist agenda.
MILLER’S NATIVIST VISION FOR THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
During the 2024 campaign, both Trump and JD Vance repeatedly refused to discuss the ugly details of “bloody” mass deportation, their most consequential campaign promise of the election. At his lone debate against Vice President Harris, Trump would not answer specifics of his plan. Vance similarly refused to offer specifics during his debate, and instead offered the position of the Democrats, which is to prioritize deportation resources for those immigrants who have committed crimes. But look at the actions. In its first days in power, the Trump-Vance administration has carried out indiscriminate raids that have swept up workers with no criminal records and U.S. military veterans.
But even if the Trump-Vance ticket refused to discuss the details during the campaign, they existed. We know because a giddy Miller laid out some of the horrific agenda in print and on the airwaves, from plans to recruit a red state deportation army, to mass detention camps, to daily ICE flight schedules.
“Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are our flights back to the Northern Triangle. Every Tuesday and Thursday are our flights to South America. Every Saturday and Sunday are our flights to Africa. Right once a week we do a flight to India. Once a week we do a flight to China, so on and so forth,” Miller told a right-wing podcast last year. In his piece, “Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps,” Huff Post’s Matt Shuham writes Miller has “gleefully” described these deportation flights, along with mass camps where immigrants and possibly U.S. citizens will be jailed before they’re deported, as “greater than any national infrastructure project” our nation has ever seen. “Without deportation you have no borders, no nation, no territory, no security, no sovereignty, and no future,” he said. Ahead of Trump taking to the stage to spew fascistic rhetoric at an October 2024 rally in Aurora, Miller went on a wildly racist tirade in front of blown-up photos of Latino men purported to be gang members. Miller was not subtle in his underlying message: brown people are a foreign enemy, brown people are to be feared, and brown people do not belong here. This was the vicious and vile closing argument of a white nationalist who has been bullying people of color since his youth and will now be running the show on immigration.
THE HATEMONGER, THE BILLIONAIRE, AND THE 2024 RACE
During the 2022 midterms, a brand new super PAC showed up out of nowhere to run some of the ugliest ad campaigns of the cycle, “depicting a torrent of obviously Latino immigrants pouring over the border” that was “threatening your family,” Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote at the time. Subsequent reporting would reveal that not only were key allies of Miller behind the so-called “Citizens for Sanity” project, but it was funded by billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk, who donated more than $50 million to the Miller-aligned organization for the strategically racist ads. Musk’s massive influx of cash allowed Citizens for Sanity to jump to the overall eighth-largest spender in the 2022 midterm elections and blanket battleground states with ads that falsely demagogued undocumented immigrants as criminals and peddled ugly transphobic bigotry.
While the strategy failed at the time, 2024 saw Musk fully immersing himself in the election to both annoying and unprecedented degrees, literally cheerleading for Trump at a Pennsylvania rally and funneling at least $75 million of his own money to help Trump in the final months of the campaign. Trump’s campaign also essentially contracted its ground game in key battleground states to Musk’s America PAC, which staged legally dubious $1 million handouts to prospective voters in Pennsylvania. Musk made no secret of the belief that despite funneling tens of millions of dollars into the race that his future and fortune were tied up in the success of Trump’s campaign, telling fellow conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson that he would be “fucked” if the Republican lost the race.
Like Miller, Musk is now another unelected Trump bureaucrat who is attempting to wreak havoc and chaos for working families by slashing federal programs and workforce as part of his phony Department of Government Efficiency agency despite receiving billions of dollars in government subsidies himself. Musk is also all in on kicking out millions of undocumented workers despite having possibly worked illegally in the U.S. himself, according to AP reporting. But as a white, super-wealthy immigrant, Musk’s immigration history’s “gray area” appears to be of little concern to Miller.
‘THERE CAN BE NO FIFTY-FIFTY AMERICANISM’: MILLER’S EARLY RADICALIZATION
Miller’s evolution from Southern California teen to extremist dates back decades. Univision reported in 2017 that as a teen, Miller was close friends with a Latino classmate named Jason Islas, “united by their passion for Star Trek.” But as both boys were transitioning from middle school to high school, Miller reportedly stopped talking to Islas. “Miller only returned Islas’ phone calls at the end of the summer, to coldly explain the reason for his estrangement,” Univision continued. “‘I can’t be your friend any more because you are Latino,’ Islas remembers him saying.” Miller soon turned himself into a social pariah by bullying Latino and Asian students, attacking administrators over multicultural celebrations and the school’s tolerance of a gay club, and penning letters complaining about the use of Spanish in the United States. In a preview of the kinds of actions that would eventually be taken his America First Legal outfit, Miller also purposely sabotaged “a committee created to help Hispanic and African American students,” Univision said.
In his college years, Miller openly associated with notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer, who infamously led a Nazi salute at a white nationalist conference days after Trump’s first victory in 2016 and later helped organize the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. They met as members of the Duke Conservative Union, Mother Jones reported in 2016:
Spencer says Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy that Spencer organized in 2007 featuring influential white nationalist Peter Brimelow. Another former member of the DCU confirmed that Miller and Spencer worked together on the event. At DCU meetings, according to a past president for the group, Miller denounced multiculturalism and expressed concerns that immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating.
“It’s funny no one’s picked up on the Stephen Miller connection,” Spencer says. “I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.”
But when reporters began to dig into Miller’s backstory, he claimed to have “absolutely no relationship” with Spencer (though he “did not respond on the record to specific questions about his activities with the DCU or his views on immigration,” Mother Jones noted). “I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false,” Miller insisted. Miller’s actions, however, have told a different story. Emails leaked by SPLC Hatewatch in 2019 revealed that Miller sent nearly 1,000 emails to Breitbart, the far-right website at one time chaired by white nationalist Steven Bannon, including one exposing Miller as an avid fan of Camps of the Saints, “a racist French novel popular among white nationalist and neo-Nazis,” Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said. The novel, originally published in 1973, has “gained popularity among extremists for its fictionalization of the ‘great replacement’ or ‘white genocide’ myth,” Hatewatch said.
SENATE AIDE, HOUSE MEDDLER
While the vast majority of Americans were unfamiliar with Miller until the 2016 presidential campaign and eventual appointment as senior White House advisor to Trump in 2017, Miller got his start in politics years earlier, using his connections to an anti-Muslim group, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, to get a job as then-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s press secretary before moving to the office of then-Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
“During his time with Sessions, Miller became known for sending mass emails on immigration to fellow Republican staffers,” SPLC reported. But far from just promoting junk anti-immigrant propaganda from fringe websites, Miller was a critical player in the House demise of the comprehensive immigration reform package passed by a wide bipartisan margin in the Senate in 2013, including drafting a 30-page memo to Republicans that falsely posed immigrants as a threat to U.S.-born workers (Miller also tried to tank the bill while it was the Senate, and got Breitbart to publish a whole bunch of false accusations demonizing the legislation). One talking point from Miller urged House Republicans to say that their Democratic colleagues “think the first goal of immigration policy should be bringing in more low-wage workers to replace them,” offering an echo of the white nationalist replacement theory that would eventually become top GOP messaging.
“While the bill ultimately failed for a variety of reasons, Steve Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, lauded Miller and Sessions’ role in stopping the bill, likening it to ‘the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties,’” SPLC said. The consequences of S. 744’s failure reverberate to this very day, because millions of long-settled undocumented immigrants who would currently be protected under the provisions of the bill are instead at risk of the second Trump administration’s “bloody” mass deportation agenda.
MILLER IN THE FIRST TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
America’s Voice noted in 2019 that while Miller was one of the first Trump administration’s most trusted advisors, he was also its biggest loser. Behind the scenes, Miller pushed a combination of chaos, cruelty, and incompetence that led the first Trump administration into repeated political crises and court defeats. “For clear proof, look no further than Miller’s role in propagating the longest ever government shutdown that began at the end of 2018 and lasted well into the new year,” Zachary Mueller wrote at the time. “After holding hundreds of thousands of American families hostage and forcing them to line up at food banks, Donald Trump caved on his demand for more money for his unnecessary wall.” But in other areas, Miller’s cruelty has continued to have devastating consequences to this very day:
- Muslim ban: Miller was the architect of the first Muslim ban, which created massive confusion throughout the nation and left lawyers, immigrants, U.S. permanent residents, elected officials, and even immigration agents without answers. After the courts blocked the first implementation, Miller followed up on his original catastrophe by publicly stating that the second version of the ban had the “same basic policy outcome for the country,” which was later cited by the judge who blocked the administration’s second attempt at the Muslim ban.
- Ending DACA: In September 2017, after being pushed by Miller, Trump rescinded the popular and successful DACA program. Members of Congress then reached a tentative bipartisan compromise to give Dreamers legal status, but Miller tanked that deal by packing it with poison pills and anti-immigrant demands. In February 2018, the Senate voted on four immigration-and-DACA related deals. While all four failed to pass, the Trump/Miller bill garnered the least amount of votes, creating a major embarrassment for the White House. As Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Politico, “I read different things and hear different things that [Trump] is actually sympathetic to the DACA population. But he’s obviously under pressure from hardliners like Stephen Miller to do the wrong thing.”
- Family separation: Miller played a crucial role in Trump’s cruel and traumatic family separation policy that ultimately resulted in the separation of more than 5,500 wailing children from the arms of parents. He argued that family separation policy would be a deterrent against future migration; it wasn’t. In fact, the numbers of families seeking asylum at the U.S./Mexico border increased. Eventually, the overwhelming public backlash to the policy and a federal court ruling forced the Trump administration into retreat. The issue was a major debacle which generated months upon months of terrible press for the White House, not to mention enormous devastation for countless children and families. Some parents said their children were separated from them “under the guise of being given baths” and “weren’t told where their sons and daughters were or when they would see them again,” The Washington Post reported in 2019. Under a 2023 settlement stemming from the 2018 lawsuit that forced the Trump administration to stop separating families, the federal government is barred from enacting policies that again separate children from their parents, except in limited circumstances, for a period of eight years. However, Trump’s refusal to rule out reinstating this policy, his promise of “bloody” mass deportation, and open law-breaking just days into his second term make clear that further separation could still be on the table.
- Government shutdown (2018-2019): In late 2018, Miller began pushing Trump to shut down the government in an attempt to extract more taxpayer dollars for his unnecessary border wall. Miller crafted Trump’s first Oval Office speech in an attempt to win support for the border wall, which failed, as did a later January 19 speech. With each speech, Trump’s approval rating actually got worse. Miller then worked behind the scenes to help craft new a poison-pill bill which inexplicably offered terrible, anti-immigrant proposals in order to get the wall that Trump wanted. Unsurprisingly, this approach also failed. Miller’s strategy eventually led to a public revolt among GOP senators, forcing Trump’s hand and leading to a temporary end to the shutdown. Miller’s strategy caused massive problems for federal workers and their families all across the country, while ultimately gaining nothing in return.
- Fake national emergency: After Congress refused to waste money on Trump’s wall, Miller pushed Trump to pull another political stunt by declaring fake a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border. Miller defended the move, even after Trump admitted that the declaration was unnecessary. Both the House and the Republican-controlled Senate then voted for a resolution opposing the national emergency, giving Trump a stunning rebuke and forcing him into his first veto. In a slew of executive orders from the first week of his second term, Trump again declared another fake national emergency. The move could again draw fierce public blowback, as the authority sought buy the Trump administration could be used as an excuse to carry out its authoritarianism and deploy the U.S. military onto U.S. streets to carry out mass roundups, including of Americans exercising their right to peacefully assemble.
MILLER AND THE JAN. 6 INSURRECTION
In August 2023, Trump was indicted on felony charges related to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, with the four count indictment detailing how Trump knowingly spread lies that he knew to be lies regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election. “But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said.
While Miller was never named in any of the court documents, his ideas – like the debunked claim of widespread non-citizen vote and push to seat fraudulent, pro-Trump electors despite the fact that Joe Biden had already secured enough electoral votes to make him the next president – were rife within the charges.
In fact, the hare-brained scheme to seat pro-Trump electors was so outlandish that no one from Trump world wanted to endorse it. That is, except Miller, who publicly pushed the plan on Fox News. Miller’s arguing for the seating of fraudulent electors was rich, considering how often heIn accused migrants of faking their asylum claims. Under Trump, Citizenship and Visa Agency Focuses on Fraud,” read a 2020 headline from NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. “Miller told the AP that USCIS was plagued by a ‘huge amount of fraud,’” the report said.
Miller also pushed the lie that non-citizens were voting in elections, as part of the Trump administration’s “false and widely-criticized assertion that 3 to 5 million non-citizens illegally voted in the 2016 election,” Time reported in 2017. “We know for a fact, you have massive numbers of non-citizens registered to vote in this country,” Miller claimed to ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.” Narrator: the White House did not. Ahead of the 2024 race, Trump and his GOP allies made this lie – the Big Lie 2.0 – a mainstay of their messaging in order to deny any unfavorable results. Following Trump’s win in November, it unsurprisingly disappeared from the discussion.
AMERICA FIRST LEGAL AND THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT JUDICIAL PIPELINE
Following Trump’s violent exit from the White House in January 2021, Miller and Gene Hamilton, a top ally and former Justice Department staffer who authored the family separation memo, united to form America First Legal, a Trump-aligned outfit that as of March 2024 had taken more than 100 actions using what we’ve coined the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline to block policies that might improve the everyday lives of working Americans, including queer people and folks of color. Democracy Docket summarized just a handful of them:
In the last three years, Miller and AFL have made good on their promise to wage a legal war against all things progressive: the group has filed dozens of legal actions against “woke corporations,” civil rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights and just about any other cause championed by the left. These include a myriad of lawsuits against some of the world’s biggest corporations — like their lawsuit against Nike that alleges the company discriminates against white males, or their Mattel lawsuit that accuses the massive toy company of “promoting a radical LGBT+ agenda” — whose success rate is hard to measure. As the New York Times put it in a recent profile of the group, “assessing its success rate is more complicated, partly because many of the group’s cases are still pending, while the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] does not publicize which complaints it investigates.”
In one consequential ruling last year, Miller and Hamilton tapped into the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline to score a decision that blocked the Biden administration from processing applications for its program protecting the long-settled undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. America First Legal represented Texas and 15 other states in this baseless lawsuit seeking to make American families deportable. Some of these families had eagerly sent paperwork to be a part of the “Keeping Families Together” process as soon as it opened for applications, only to be blocked by Miller and Hamilton. Families said they felt trapped in a “cycle of fear and uncertainty” following the ruling and are now at risk of separation under the second Trump administration.
America First Legal also endorsed Project 2025, which supports ending DACA and making Dreamers deportable, carrying out mass raids at schools, hospitals, and houses of worship, and unleashing family separation from coast to coast, among its horrific policies on immigration. America Legal First was also on the plan’s advisory board, while Miller appeared in a recruitment video for the initiative and Hamilton authored its chapter on the Justice Department. During a Congressional hearing, Hamilton boasted that he and his colleagues “are proud contributors to Project 2025.” That is, until more and more Americans began to find out the details about Project 2025 (thank you, Taraji P. Henson). What followed was a failed PR strategy that sought to create public distance between Miller’s group and Project 2025, including a public denial from Miller. Miller also asked to be removed from Project 2025’s advisory board – after two years of membership. Nice try, Stephen.
In Hatemonger, her 2020 book on Miller, journalist Jean Guerrero wrote that Trump and Miller’s “brand of nationalism – politically incorrect, full of dog whistles for white supremacists, built from white nationalist ideas – deliberately energized and enraged white men across the nation. Miller and Trump rode that rage to the White House, where they began to change the ethnic flows into the United States and will continue to do so for as long as they can.”
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