1 week Ago
A key far-right adviser is returning to the White House in an important position for Donald Trump’s second term. Stephen Miller, Trump’s point person on immigration for nearly a decade, will be the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN first reported Monday. Vice President-elect Sen.
JD Vance (R-Ohio) confirmed the news, congratulating Miller . Miller has worked as a speechwriter and policy adviser for Trump since his first run for office. And for all of that time, Miller has been considered one of the most influential people in Trump’s ear, particularly on immigration policy.
His new, high-profile job only cements that status. He is also known for getting involved in the decision-making process within the executive branch agencies, working behind the scenes to exert his will on the government. The New York Times separately reported Monday that Miller was also “taking over policy planning for the transition,” and that his eventual portfolio is expected to be “vast.
” Both CNN and the Times cited unnamed sources. “President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon,” a Trump spokesperson told HuffPost in a statement Monday afternoon. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.
” Miller has also been a mainstay on the campaign trail. He notably spoke before Trump at the Aurora, Colorado, rally that highlighted Trump’s aggressive mass deportation plans, angrily denouncing what he called an “invasion” and “occupation” of “illegal” immigrants. Promising to “send the illegals back home,” Miller spoke in front of posters of two mug shots.
“Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors you want in your city? No!” he said. He referred to immigrants as “homeless” and “criminal,” and claimed they were “consuming and depleting our public resources,” “overwhelming” schools and hospitals, and “murdering innocent Americans.” At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City last month, Miller bellowed that Trump would declare, “America is for Americans, and Americans only!” Miller’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s first term, including his ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations, aggressive pushes at the U.
S. southern border, and efforts to limit legal immigration . The legal advocacy group Miller started during the Biden administration, America First Legal, was one of the groups on the advisory board for Project 2025 , the conservative playbook for a second Trump term.
Perhaps most notably, Miller has provided the most detail of any Trump adviser on potential plans for Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda, which aims to massively increase the rate at which the United States expels undocumented immigrants. Miller has spoken about the plan in far-reaching terms, saying “it would be an undertaking that would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date,” involving the local and state law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and even National Guard and military personnel — though the legal grounds for that are contested. Miller has publicly imagined constructing “very large staging facilities” to house would-be deportees, “where planes are moving off the runway constantly.
” (Private prison executives were thrilled when Trump won, due to the potential for a massive expansion in the immigration detention, surveillance and transport sectors.) News of Miller’s spot in Trump’s White House came shortly after Trump announced that Tom Homan, the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be serving as his “border czar.” Homan has pledged to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.
” Pressed on “60 Minutes” whether that would involve separating “mixed-status” families — of which there are millions — Homan replied, “Families can be deported together.” Neither position needs Senate confirmation, so Miller and Homan will be able to serve Trump without first being grilled by Democrats in Congress. Both men were key architects of Trump’s first-term “family separation” policy, wherein prosecutors were ordered to pursue criminal charges against all adults who crossed the border without authorization, meaning immigrant parents were taken to jail and separated from their children, who were treated as “unaccompanied minors.
” The policy separated some 5,500 children , including extremely young children , from their parents. The Biden administration created a family reunification task force , but according to an update in April this year, 1,360 children had still not been confirmed as reunited with their families. Of those children, 446 came from families for whom the government did not have valid contact information, and 648 were from families the government was still trying to reach with valid contact information.
As of August, up to 1,000 children had not been reunited with their parents, the ACLU, which led litigation against the policy, told PolitiFact . Later in the Trump administration, Miller successfully pushed for a far more wide-reaching policy known as “Title 42,” which the Trump administration invoked at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to seal America’s land borders, even to asylum-seekers, who traditionally have the right to pursue refuge in the United States once they step foot on U.S.
soil. The Biden administration has its own share of responsibility for that policy: Joe Biden kept Title 42 in place for years . Ultimately, it ended in 2023 when he ended the pandemic national emergency more generally.
But after that, the Biden administration pursued policies in 2023 to dramatically limit border crossings by severely curtailing asylum rights. Miller has projected he will pursue Title 42 again, telling The New York Times last year Trump would cite “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.
V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.” He told the paper more generally, “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.
” That includes trying again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era deportation protection and work authorization program for people brought to the United States without authorization as children. Miller also called for the reinstatement of another program — one that was supplanted by Title 42 — meant to keep some asylum seekers out of the country. The program, known as Migrant Protection Protocols, mandated that asylum seekers “remain in Mexico” to await their court dates rather than being released inside the United States after being detained at the border.
Title 42 resulted in vastly more expulsions than MPP, but as analysts at the Migration Policy Institute wrote earlier this year , many people expelled under the program likely just kept trying to enter the U.S. anyway — without facing the same criminal penalties as people normally do for trying to cross the border without authorization multiple times.
“The evidence indicates [Title 42] was not the success its admirers contend in limiting irregular migration, and it may represent failed deterrence,” the MPI analysts wrote. “During its use, the numbers of encounters surged and cases of migrants attempting unauthorized re-entry soared, as did the number of ‘gotaways’—the term used by U.S.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for migrants who were not intercepted while crossing the border illegally. Because Title 42 short-circuited the careful series of consequences that CBP had put in place over earlier years, including criminal prosecution for illegal entry or re-entry, it created major churn at the border: Facing no formal consequences for their unauthorized entry, expelled migrants kept trying to cross until they succeeded.” Miller’s focus on immigration isn’t limited to people who cross the border without authorization.
He also pushed hard to limit legal immigration in Trump’s first term, and is likely to do so again. He has also called for the mass investigation of naturalized citizens, specifically, as a Justice Department spokesperson said in 2020 — “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization.” Don't let this be the end of the free press.
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Whether you give once or many more times, we appreciate your contribution to keeping our journalism free for all. You've supported HuffPost before, and we'll be honest — we could use your help again . We view our mission to provide free, fair news as critically important in this crucial moment, and we can't do it without you.
Whether you give just one more time or sign up again to contribute regularly, we appreciate you playing a part in keeping our journalism free for all. Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages. Last year, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec commented on X, formerly Twitter, “We used to strip foreign-born anarchists and communists of citizenship and deport them.
Laws still on the books. Just planting seeds.” Miller responded , “Yes.
We started a new denaturalization project under Trump. In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.” In 2019, leaked emails analyzed by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed ties between Miller — a descendent of Jewish immigrants to the United States — and the white nationalist movement.
And though Miller has claimed he has “no relationship” with the well-known white nationalist Richard Spencer and “completely repudiate[s] his views,” Spencer said he interacted with Miller when they were at Duke University, recalling as much to Mother Jones and telling HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias of Miller, “I don’t want to get him in trouble.” Related From Our Partner.
