I Was Stephen Miller's Student Body President. Now I'm Saving Migrants From Him

Yahoo

12-06-2025

As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller kept pushing for 3,000 immigration arrests a day, a former high school classmate who became a leading immigration lawyer was in court on Wednesday.
Cynthia Santiago remembers being on stage with Miller in 2002, when they were both running for student government at Santa Monica High School at the western edge of Los Angeles. She recalls that Miller was as much a deliberately provocative attention seeker then as now, and his microphone was turned off just a few moments into his campaign speech as a candidate for speaker of the house.
'I'm Stephen Miller,' he began. 'I'm the only candidate up here who really stands out… I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do."
And then he did just that.
'Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?' he asked.
Santiago might have been more surprised if she had not heard him speak dismissively in class about diversity, affirmative action, welfare, non-English speakers and anyone else who did not completely assimilate to his notion of being an American, all of it derived from right-wing writings. The reaction of his fellow students to his truncated speech presaged the fate of his candidacy.
'They booed him off,' Santiago recalled on Wednesday. 'He lost.'
Miller could not have been pleased when Santiago became the school's first Latina student body president.
'He was very vocal about his political views of communities of color,' she noted. 'We celebrated diversity, and we were respectful to our staff and to the custodians on campus.'
Santiago went on to Wesleyan University and then Southwestern Law School. She began working immigration cases in 2012, when the Obama administration instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offered a temporary shield to young immigrants who arrived in the United States.
'We were able to help a lot of young folks that could benefit from the DACA program,' she said.
But at the same time, Obama was starting to make a name for himself as the 'deporter-in-chief.'
'I also saw the side of many families being put into detention for being turned over by local law enforcement, because there was a very high number of contracts with local law enforcement, including in LA County,' Santiago remembered.
She had one case involving a woman in Santa Monica who had just dropped off her child at middle school when she was arrested for driving without a license. The police turned the woman over to ICE, which put her on a bus to Mexico just as Santiago was in court, securing a deportation stay. The driver was instructed to keep the woman aboard when the bus reached the border and bring her back.
'She was returned back that night, so she was able to be reunited with her family,' Santiago reported.
Santiago also represented a man on the same bus who had been picked up outside his home on the way to work. He too was returned.
When Trump was elected to a first term, her classmate Miller's politics made him a perfect fit for a position at the White House.
'I was very concerned about where his thoughts were going, his views on immigration and the immigrant communities, his views against diversity in the United States,' she recalled.
But Miller's time seemed to pass when Joe Biden defeated Trump. Deportations eased up, but Biden increased them as Trump sought to revive his political fortunes by conjuring fears of an invading horde of murderers, rapists and mental patients across the southern border.
After Trump returned to office, he made Miller his deputy chief of staff. Miller had been relatively quiet during the campaign, and Santiago figures he spent the years in exile immersed in right-wing writings such as those that informed his world view during high school, a view that was more of an imagined past than the actual moment.
'A lot of the thoughts are just things that he digs from history, and not very much a perspective of the world we live in today,' she said. 'So, he's trying to repeat history, which is what we see now.'
Trump declared that his second term was going to see mass deportations. But that requires more than a Sharpie signature on an executive order. And Miller began to push, push, push for it to happen.
ICE had been hunting down actual murderers and rapists but there was not enough of them to deliver a fraction of the 3,000 arrests a day Miller was demanding. Miller declared that even people who followed all the official procedures before crossing the border and applied for asylum are criminals.
ICE mounted ever more raids, including at a Los Angeles clothing company on Monday that triggered an impromptu protest, during which police arrested a prominent union leader.
An unfounded rumor of another raid led to more protests. Trump used the disturbances as a pretext to activate the California National Guard without the approval of its Gov. Gavin Newsom.
As Newsom predicted, the arrival of soldiers on the street only inflamed the situation, though not to the degree that Trump claims. The LAPD said that it could handle the situation without the military, but Trump went ahead and activated a Marine Corps unit to augment the guard who were not needed in the first place.
Meanwhile, fear driven rumors reached Miller and Santiago's alma mater. The superintendent of the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District posted a letter on its website.
'I am writing to you today because I understand that many of you are feeling deeply concerned and anxious about recent reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in the greater Los Angeles area,' Superintendent Dr. Antonio Shelton wrote on June 9. 'We have heard the rumors circulating about ICE patrols in and around our schools and the Santa Monica community… As of 2:30 p.m. today, these sightings have not been confirmed, and we can assure you that ICE officials are not currently present in or at our schools.'
Shelton went on, 'We recognize that the unrest unfolding across Los Angeles, sparked by reports of ICE raids in public spaces, is unsettling. For many of our families, these fears are very real and can make daily activities like leaving home, using public transportation, or even bringing your children to school feel daunting. We want to emphasize that the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, (SMMUSD), along with the City of Santa Monica and the SMPD, remains committed to supporting and serving every single one of our families.'
As the high school was preparing for its 2025 graduation on Wednesday, Miller was at the White House, expecting more arrests. Santiago was at Santa Ana Immigration Court, asking a judge to give her time to study the particulars of a new case.
The client has no criminal history, and the judge agreed. That gives the client an interim reprieve.
While there, Santiago observed a new tactic by the government to increase the number of deportees. The government has been going back to pending asylum cases that have been filed away as favorable.
'So they can put them back into court and try to deport them,' Santiago said. 'Every angle they can, they're doing this.'
Then, having brought the asylum seeker into court and revived the case, the government asks the judge to dismiss it. And that removes the temporary protection asylum seekers receive when they successfully apply pending the ultimate outcome.
'The person is basically at an undocumented status with no case pending, and they're vulnerable to be picked up,' Santiago said. 'They have no status, no filing, no case opening.'
And in several instances on Wednesday, ICE agents in their usual plainclothes attire of flannel shirts and jeans were waiting in the hallway of the courthouse to make an arrest and take the prisoner out to a van in the parking lot.
'I saw [ICE ] taking people from courtrooms, sticking them in the van,' she told the Daily Beast. 'It's very sad.'
The sight was in keeping with the Miller she and her classmates knew back in high school. What she could not have foreseen is that a president would encourage him to do it.
'I don't think anyone imagined that there would be an administration like the one we have,' she said.
When she is not in court, the 2003 president of the Santa Monica student body travels California in a van of her own, advising as many people as she can of their rights.
'I'm just, you know, trying to do my best to see who I can help,' Santiago said.