Stephen Miller: how an anti-immigrant crusade is remaking US policy

France 24

6 hours ago

Stephen Miller no longer feels at home in his country. As tens of thousands of people across Los Angeles took to the streets last weekend to protest against a wave of immigration enforcement raids on workplaces and warehouses in the city's garment district, the deputy White House chief of staff took to social media to square off against Californian Governor Gavin Newsom.
'Huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations,' he wrote. 'A ruptured, balkanised society of strangers.'
Miller has become the face of US President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies at their most militant. He is a figure who increasingly frames his calls for mass deportations as a public safety measure to keep the West free from foreign invaders pouring in from the global South – despite the government's own findings that even illegal immigrants commit crimes at dramatically lower rates than US-born nationals.
During Trump's first term in the White House, Miller was the key architect of the president's 'Muslim ban', a 2017 executive order that banned people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
Miller was also a vocal supporter of the policy of deliberately separating children from their parents at the Mexican border to discourage families from trying to seek asylum – a practice that reached new heights as a deliberately punitive measure under Trump.
Miller has hardly softened since his return to the halls of the White House. Weeks before the wave of armed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on workplaces set off mass demonstrations in Los Angeles, Miller hammered the agency's leadership for its failure to make arrests at a rate that would allow Trump to keep his pledge to deport a million undocumented migrants in his first year.
What the country needed, he said, was 3,000 arrests each and every day – a dizzying increase from the daily average of about 650 in the president's first five months in office. As of 2023, more than 13.7 million people were believed to be living in the US without legal authorisation, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
The mass demonstrations that greeted this rise in arrests has so far not deterred the administration. Echoing Miller's warnings of degenerating inner cities overrun with foreign invaders, Trump on Monday called on ICE to ramp up their raids in Democratic-run cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, accusing the Democratic Party – without evidence – of using millions of undocumented migrants to artificially bloat their voter base and steal elections.
'I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tie of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia,' he wrote on social media.
Rut Bermejo Casado, associate professor in politics and public policies at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, said that Miller had played a powerful role in changing the public debate around immigration during the Trump interregnum.
'I think he's key,' she said. 'He has had time to strategically plan his policies from the first administration to the second one, and he has refined the coherence of the discourse – a cultural nativist discourse. During the first administration, [the Muslim ban] or the policy about separating families were just initiatives, not very well planned in advance. He has since had time to plan the discourse and the methods very well, to do it in a more rational way, and also to make it more difficult to … stop all of them.'
Enfant terrible
Miller, 39, rose quickly from being a congressional staffer to sit at the right hand of the president of the United States. Born and raised in the wealthy liberal enclave of Santa Monica in southern California, Miller found himself thrust into the state school system after an earthquake devastated a number of rental properties managed by his family's real estate business.
In high school, Miller quickly made a name for himself as an arch-contrarian with a taste – and talent – for provoking his liberal peers. In a school divided between largely working-class Latinos and children from wealthier White families, he railed against his classmates' supposed lack of ' basic English skills ' and the school's policy of making announcements in both Spanish and English.
Classmates recall a young Miller ostentatiously leaving his garbage lying around for custodial workers to clean up, at one point standing up to deliver a now-infamous speech calling on his classmates to throw their leftovers on the ground, according to Jean Guerrero's book, "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda."
'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 said.
Warming to his role, the teenage Miller became an unrelenting critic of the school administration's allegedly liberal leanings and soon caught the attention of Larry Elder, a right-wing radio host who would have the ferociously articulate Miller on as a guest more than 70 times.
At North Carolina's elite Duke University, Miller quickly leveraged his growing media presence and ties with right-wing ideologues such as David Horowitz to land a gig as a bi-weekly columnist for the campus newspaper. Flourishing in the tense climate of the US War on Terror, he was the national campus coordinator of Horowitz's Terrorism Awareness Project, designed to warn students of " Islamofascism", the threat of Islamic jihad and 'mobilise support for the defence of America and the civilisation of the West'.
His big break came when three White lacrosse players were accused of raping a Black woman who had been hired to strip for them. Miller's outspoken support for the three men became a constant refrain across the national right-wing media landscape, with the college junior appearing on the Bill O'Reilly Show and Nancy Grace to denounce what he called 'the moral bankruptcy of the left's politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture'.
When the players were found not guilty after a four-month secret investigation by the state attorney general, Miller championed it as a vindication of his view that the US had become a hostile place for White Americans.
'Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were White and their accuser Black,' he wrote.
Rising star
Miller's newfound national celebrity catapulted him into the fast-radicalising world of Republican politics, where he landed his first job as press secretary first to Tea Party heavyweight Michelle Bachmann and then Alabama senator Jeff Sessions.
While working for Sessions, Miller played a key role in torpedoing a bipartisan immigration bill that would have tightened border security while providing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented migrants in the US. The proposed legislation's collapse would mark an abrupt end to the Republican party's efforts to reach a compromise on undocumented migration, wilting before the onslaught of rising far-right calls for mass deportations.
It was during these formative years that Miller would deepen his contacts with far-right figures such as Steve Bannon, frequently lobbying his publication Breitbart to cite reports from the explicitly anti-immigration Centre for Immigration Studies, a think-tank founded by the eugenicist John Tanton.
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In leaked emails, he enthusiastically encouraged the publication to draw comparisons between US immigration policy and Le Camp des Saints, a French dystopian novel popular across the far right that imagines refugees from the global South flooding the West and overwhelming its White population.
When Trump announced his presidential bid with a promise to crack down on irregular immigration and build a wall on the Mexico border, Miller launched himself into the campaign.
Bermejo Casado said that Miller and his allies had been instrumental in the growing militarisation of immigration policy in the US.
'If they say that we are in a crisis, we are in an exceptional time, we need exceptional measures, that brings onto the table methods and tools that were unpalatable or would be considered draconian if we were in another moment,' she said.
No more half-measures
During Trump's first term, Miller led the fight to dismantle Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a programme giving short-term renewable protections to undocumented migrants who had been brought to the US as children. He fought for, and won, a sharp reduction in the number of refugees accepted by the US each year – despite the fact that Miller's own family fled to the US at the turn of the century to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute's US Immigration Policy Program, said that the US's longstanding gridlock over immigration reform had given Trump a powerful platform on which to call for drastic action.
'The fact that the US immigration system is so outdated and overwhelmed and under-resourced means that yes, Trump has been able to exploit some of these really long-standing problems,' she said. 'In terms of the politics, even under the Biden administration there were leaders of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions who were calling for more federal action. They wanted coordination of new arrivals, they wanted help with the reception of tens of thousands of people who didn't have community ties that were trying to go into these city shelters – which are not designed for receiving immigrant families in such large numbers. So some of this is really a reflection at the end of the day of congressional inaction.'
She said that the relentless spectacle of armed ICE raids and military planes packed with shackled deportees were designed to send a very clear message to Trump's base.
'Manufactured crisis of the nation: Stephen Miller depicting L.A. protests as an existential fight'
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'There's rhetoric, and there are images,' she said. 'And there are these high-profile moves like Alien Enemies Act deportations, putting people in jail in El Salvador, sending people to Guantanamo Bay, using military planes for deportations. These are a very calculated part of the administration's rhetoric and narrative, and the story that they're trying to tell about immigration. And while those moves are happening, they've been laying the groundwork for doing the things that will actually lead to the deportation of large numbers of people over time – because the high-profile ones are not that.'
Despite Miller's zeal, though, the ICE raids that set off the Los Angeles protests reveal the extent to which the Trump administration has been hard-pressed to deliver on its promised mass deportations. Liam Haller, a researcher at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, said that ICE just didn't have the means to make Miller's dream a reality.
'While immigration hawks such as Miller have certainly achieved short-term policy implementations such as increased ICE raids, long-term or fundamental reforms remain elusive,' he said. 'Although the ICE raids have garnered much attention and significant blowback, the agency is fundamentally constrained. They still do not have the manpower to enact deportations on the scale originally envisioned – which is largely why deportation numbers under Trump's second term still fall near where they were under Obama.'
With Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' potentially devoting more than $150 billion to immigration enforcement, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents and the construction of new detention centres capable of housing 100,000, Miller's dream of mass deportations may soon find itself on surer footing. In any case, Bermejo Casado said, the architect of Trump's most hardline immigration policies had already succeeded in taking the debate around migration into muddier waters.
'I think there has been a change – before, the discourse was to control borders, to focus on irregular migrants, but I think that focus has blurred in the last years, and particularly with the far-right discourse against migration,' she said. 'But it's very different, because in one case you are focusing on 'They are not law-abiding people' and this other one your focus is that 'They are not like us – they are different, they are not culturally integrated'. And that is also part of the discourse of Miller.'