Stephen Miller, the ‘general’ of Trump’s war on migrants

Stephen Miller has stepped out of the shadows he operated in during Donald Trump’s first term. Now back in Washington, the president’s powerful advisor has taken on a far more visible role. Alongside Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Miller is one of the few officials who meet with the president almost daily in the Oval Office.

At Elon Musk’s unexpected press conference held there on January 11, Miller was present — dressed in a gray suit, shirt, and tie — standing beneath a portrait of George Washington. Though he appeared only in the margins of that image, his influence and way of thinking have crept to the center of the administration’s agenda. In Trump’s war on migrants, Miller is the strategist leading the charge.

In this second act at the White House, the 39-year-old has gained power thanks to the mission he has been tasked with: overseeing public policy and advising the president on national security matters. “These are two key roles,” Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, tells EL PAÍS by phone. “What gave him influence last time was his closeness to Trump, but now he can coordinate the processes of the agencies responsible for migration and security.”

Miller — born in the progressive city of Santa Monica, northwest of Los Angeles — masterminded some of the measures that defined Trump’s chaotic first term. He is credited with crafting the 2018 Zero Tolerance policy at the border, which led to the separation of 3,000 children from their families. The cruel initiative — designed to deter illegal crossings — was halted after Ivanka Trump urged her father to end it following a public outcry. “Had it been up to Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and their allies, tens of thousands of families would have been separated,” wrote journalist Jacob Soboroff in his book Separated (2020).

Now, the loyal Miller has returned to Trump’s side. What’s more, his responsibilities go beyond writing campaign speeches, as he did last year. He has become an architect of the executive branch. “The people managing the day-to-day operations — the acting secretaries and agency heads awaiting Senate confirmation — are individuals he has been cultivating and preparing over the past four years,” says Selee. “He has spent this time building an army loyal to Trump.”

Part of that network has been woven by America First Legal, a conservative organization founded by Miller and his partner, Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who litigated in defense of Trump’s policies during his first term. Miller founded the group two months after leaving the White House in 2021. During the Biden administration, America First Legal became the go-to legal vehicle for Republican governors seeking to wage the culture war in the courts.

“During Trump’s early years, there was a lot of resentment and frustration with progressive lawyers and Democratic prosecutors, and especially with the American Civil Liberties Union, which blocked his worst initiatives with lawsuits, and Miller’s idea was to create its right-wing equivalent. He made himself indispensable to the Trumpist cause by raising the value of his shares in the movement,” says Jonathan Blitzer, a journalist for The New Yorker and author of Everyone Who is Gone is Here (2024), a book that reviews how Washington’s policies of recent decades have shaped the Central American migration crisis.

America First Legal has become a leading force in the American conservative community. It represented Texas in its lawsuit against Biden to keep the border closed. It accused companies like Disney and Nike of discriminating against white men. And it took legal action against the federal government for funding allegedly “neo-Marxist” scientific programs based on diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria. All this despite the fact that Miller is not a lawyer — he studied Philosophy at Duke University, where he was already arguing in the student newspaper that right-wing values and principles were under “unprecedented attack.”

Miller was exposed to these ideas from an early age. He is the second child of an affluent Jewish family: his mother, Miriam, was a social worker, and his father, Michael, a real estate attorney with openly Zionist leanings and strong support for Reagan’s Republican Party. Jean Guerrero, Miller’s biographer, recounts in Hatemonger (2020) how he became captivated in his youth by the books of Rush Limbaugh, the incendiary right-wing commentator from the 1990s whom Trump honored in 2021, shortly before his death. In The Way Things Ought to Be (1992), Miller found “a revelation” on every page. Limbaugh criticized multiculturalism, attacked feminism — coining the term “feminazi” — and urged white men not to shrink away in an increasingly diverse world.

The call had an impact on Miller. In his youth, he broke off a friendship with a close high school friend, Jason Islas, because he was Latino. At his high school in Santa Monica, he complained to administrators about the funding for a Chicano student group. He also accused his teachers of penalizing him for expressing right-wing views in his essays. On one occasion, he invited Larry Elder — a hardline African American conservative pundit — to speak at his school. Elder, who believes there should be no minimum wage and that climate change is a myth, later ran for governor of California in 2021 with Trump’s support.

But it was in 2015 that Miller found a receptive audience for his ideas. That year, he was able to win over the Republican establishment — just as the party gained control of the Senate. Miller co-authored a 23-page document with Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, urging fellow Republicans to adopt a more aggressive stance and not shy away from the party’s far-right flank. The memo proposed a leading issue for this new crusade: illegal immigration. “Few issues motivate the electorate as powerfully and passionately,” the text argued.

The document may be a decade old, but it remains the essential roadmap of Trumpism. It advocates for increasing deportations, ending amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants who contribute to the economy, and halting the practice of releasing migrants apprehended at the border. It also calls for reducing the number of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers. This caused the first schism within the executive branch, as Elon Musk — who has benefited from these visas and relies on them for his companies — believed the number of these work permits should not be changed. Trump agreed with him, defeating the ultranationalist bloc of Miller and Steve Bannon.

Blitzer tells EL PAÍS that in Trump’s first administration, it was other Cabinet figures who served as a firewall against the radical policies promoted by Miller. “There’s hardly anyone left around the president who can counter him or offer a different worldview,” he notes.

What’s more troubling, he adds, is the shift in public opinion — a trend that could deepen following the excesses of deportations to El Salvador. “There’s a feeling among Democrats that they’ve been defeated on this issue, a need to accept defeat and resign themselves to the fact that Trump’s vision of immigration has prevailed in key sectors of society. It’s a vindication for Miller, who now feels he has a mandate that didn’t exist during the first administration.”

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