Miller is “functionally a prime minister if not an unelected president,” remarks America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas
Let’s just be real: as long as Stephen Miller is an unelected de facto president and the single driving force behind the anti-immigrant policy currently creating heartbreak and havoc across the country, any notion that the administration will rein in its agenda or chart a different course following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good and cruel targeting of our immigrant neighbors is sadly mistaken. 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, returned to a second term for the sole purpose of carrying out his life-long vision of a non-white America. Miller claimed that this effort to deport millions of immigrants is “greater than any national infrastructure project” in U.S. history and that “to save the nation, you need mass deportation.” And despite new polling showing Miller’s unpopularity and growing concerns that his agenda is going to tank Republicans’ political chances in 2026, Miller’s reach only appears to be expanding while also helping to steer dangerous state policymaking in states like Tennessee. The Miller rot runs deep.
MILLER IN THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: HE WANTS ‘EVERYBODY ARRESTED’
During the 2024 election, both Trump and JD Vance repeatedly refused to discuss the ugly details of their mass deportation promises. Miller, however, gleefully described the details of this plan, from his desire to recruit a red state army to invade blue states and round up immigrants down to the minutiae of daily ICE flight schedules. Now back in the White House, Miller is running the show. During a meeting last May, Miller – and not DHS’ actual confirmed secretary, Kristi Noem – ripped into her agents and ordered them to massively inflate their daily arrests by a whopping 450%. Miller wanted “everybody arrested,” one official said. “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’’ Miller reportedly questioned. Some attendees later said they felt their jobs were being threatened. Home Depot stores are now “hotbeds for ICE arrests,” as Reuters reports. Miller has fervently backed the purging of dads and contributors to a Salvadoran mega-prison, going so far as to publicly contradict the Justice Department on the topic, and during a White House meeting last April, spoke over Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in order to rant in defense of the purging. In another example of his status as co-president, Miller was key to the reversal of a plan to exempt farms, restaurants, and hotels from raids. Trump had floated the exemption not as a matter of decency, but as a favor to distressed, wealthy pals. “The Washington Post reports that Trump adviser Stephen Miller opposed making any exceptions for specific industries, despite warnings from business leaders about the economic fallout of the raids,” Democracy Now! Reported.
MILLER IN THE FIRST TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: PLANTING THE SEED FOR TODAY’S CRUELTY
Miller was a driving force in the first Trump administration’s cruel and traumatic family separation policy, reportedly seeking to kidnap as many as 25,000 children. The administration’s policy ultimately resulted in the separation of more than 5,000 children, including nursing infants and toddlers, from their families. In 2024, Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as 1,360 children remained separated from their loved ones. Miller was the architect of the Muslim ban, was key in pushing Trump to rescind the popular and successful DACA program, and, when members of Congress then reached a tentative bipartisan compromise to give Dreamers legal status, Miller tanked that deal by packing it with poison pills that even members of his own party couldn’t stomach. As Sen. Susan Collins (ME-R) 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.” Today, DACA recipients are now among those who have been unjustly targeted for arrest. Miller also pushed to dramatically cut the cap on refugees entering the U.S., as part of his personal desire to eliminate our historic refugee admissions program completely. Under the second Trump administration, the U.S. has slashed refugee admissions to a record low of just 7,500 individuals, with the vast majority of these slots reserved for white South Africans. For comparison, 100,034 refugees were resettled in the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration.
KEY DRIVER OF THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT JUDICIAL PIPELINE AND PROJECT 2025 AGENDA
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, teamed up to form America First Legal, a Trump-aligned outfit that took more than 100 legal actions using what we’ve previously coined the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline in order to block policies that might have improved the everyday lives of people, including immigrant families. In just one consequential ruling from 2024, Miller and Hamilton helped score a court decision that blocked the Biden administration from processing applications for its short-lived “Keeping Families Together “program that sought to protect 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 program as soon as it opened for applications, only to be blocked by the courts. America First Legal also endorsed Project 2025, which among key demands called for the rescission of ICE guidelines that made houses of worship, schools, and hospitals largely off-limits to mass deportation raids. On day one of the second Trump administration, Miller delivered for Project 2025 on that front. The administration’s agenda has had a devastating effect on churchgoers in areas that have been an epicenter of the administration’s raids. In D.C., one faith leader said attendance has fallen 20%. In L.A., another faith leader said attendance has fallen as much as 70% following nearby enforcement actions.
IMMIGRATION REFORM MEDDLER AND PROPONENT OF WHITE NATIONALISM
Miller is a key reason why millions of long-settled immigrant contributors remain at risk of detention and deportation today. In addition to sabotaging a proposal to protect Dreamers in 2017, 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. Miller, at the time an aide to then-Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (AL-R), drafted a 30-page memo to House Republicans that falsely posed immigrants as a threat to U.S.-born workers. 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,” a preview of the white nationalist replacement lie that has since 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,’” said Southern Poverty Law Center. The organization also published emails that Miller sent to far-right rag Breitbart that showcased “the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency,” according to their Nov. 2019 report. Miller “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage,” SPLC said. In his college years, Miller also 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. In 2018, a number of lawmakers called for Miller’s resignation, calling him “a white nationalist and he has no business serving in the White House.”
THE CONSPIRACY THEORIST BILLIONAIRE SUGAR DADDY
During the 2022 midterms, a 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. 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. In 2024, Musk became the single biggest donor of the election season, donating more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump and Republicans. Following Trump’s win, Musk was personally rewarded with a so-called “DOGE” outfit that has carried out an “unconstitutional government takeover,” including gaining access to the Social Security numbers and other private information belonging to millions of Americans. Wired reported that Miller and his wife, Katie, were at one point “pivotal figures in Musk’s orbit,” “tasked as intermediaries, bringing news about Musk’s latest targets and communications strategies to the rest of the White House …”
“De facto President Stephen Miller is running America and Donald Trump’s political support into the ground,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “Functionally a prime minister if not an unelected president, with a sphere of influence that is as expansive as it is dangerous, Miller continues his relentless assault on America and Americans. As new reporting makes clear, despite public outcry, political blowback, and real world harm to citizens and non-citizens alike, Miller is proceeding full speed ahead in his anti-immigrant crusade and broader attack on Americans’ rights. ”
FURTHER RESOURCES ON STEPHEN MILLER
- Agents of Mass Deportation: Who is Stephen Miller?
- Stephen Miller Is Getting $170 Billion To Build His Own Army To Target Our Immigrant Neighbors. Here’s What That Funding Could Do Instead
- Stephen Miller Puts Boot on Neck of ICE Agents: Deport More Parents, Long-Settled Contributors, and Students – Or Else
- Private Prisons Are Set To Massively Profit From Stephen Miller’s Mass Detention Agenda
- Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Effort to Exploit the Anti-Immigrant Judicial Pipeline
- Biden Process To Keep American Families Together Blocked By Ken Paxton and Project 2025 Allies Led by Stephen Miller
- Stephen Miller Planning the Great Purge: Recruit ‘Red State’ Deportation Army To Round Up Immigrants, Rip Them from Their Homes and Community, and Forcibly Deport Them
- Let’s not overlook Stephen Miller’s Role in Jan. 6: Pushed Voting Lies To Justify Fraudulent 2020 Electors Scheme
