CNN reported on Monday that anti-immigrant bigot Stephen Miller is expected to join the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for policy, putting him in a key role in shaping Donald Trump's second-term policy agenda.
“This is another fantastic pick by the president. Congrats @StephenM!” Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote in a post on X.
Miller, who has spent his career palling around with white supremacists and working to enact anti-immigrant policies, is one of the most nefarious people in Trump's orbit. He’s been working for Trump since his first campaign in 2016, and stayed on as a senior adviser to Trump for the entirety of Trump’s first term.
During that time, Miller wrote some of Trump’s darkest speeches, including the 2017 inaugural address where Trump spoke of “American carnage” and said he will ensure Americans will “live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.”
Miller also helped Trump craft the "zero tolerance" immigration policy that led to family separations at the border, as well as Trump's Muslim ban, which led to chaos at numerous airports with legal residents even being blocked from entering the country. And Miller was reportedly behind Trump’s effort to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to remain in the country and work or attend school legally.
A group called Hatewatch obtained emails Miller sent in 2015 where he decried the DACA program because he said it uses “immigration to replace existing demographics”—pushing the white supremacist “great replacement” theory that has inspired violent attacks on immigrants.
Vanity Fair reported in 2019 that Miller sickeningly took pleasure in witnessing the suffering his policies created, writing that Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures" of anguished families at the border.
Even after Trump’s first term in office ended, Miller never left Trump’s orbit. In 2023, Miller told The New York Times that Trump would once again come for immigrants if elected to a second term.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times, saying that Trump will again try to end DACA, refuse to accept asylum seekers, and carry out mass deportations. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
Most recently, Miller gave a vile speech at Trump’s racist campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, where he declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
His hatred of immigrants and non-white communities runs deep. Before joining the Trump White House, Miller worked with anti-Muslim hate groups and white supremacists like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow, who founded the white nationalist hate website VDARE, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Early on in his career, Miller worked for now-former Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters due to their mutual disdain of immigrants but later had a falling out after Trump thought Sessions did not adequately protect him from investigations into his collusion with Russia in the 2016 campaign.
Miller helped Sessions defeat a 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, with Politico reporting in 2016 that Miller wrote a handbook for House Republicans that they used to kill the legislation.
Miller is so awful that the SPLC added him to their list of extremists in January 2020.
“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implements policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the SPLC wrote in its profile of Miller.
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