The Trump administration’s hardline immigration stance has been acquiring vociferous detractors, even from Republicans, particularly after two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during enforcement operations earlier this year.
Soon after the shooting of Pretti, Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security in the Trump administration, posted on X that the nurse was a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement” agents.
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Mr. Miller’s right-wing positions crystallised early on. Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1985 to Jewish liberal refugee parents, he attended a diverse high school that he came to view as too liberal. A report suggested that his transformation as a hardline conservative was influenced by the book Guns, Crime, and Freedom (1994), written by Wayne LaPierre, a gun rights lobbyist and former chief of the National Rifles Association (NRA).
As a political science student at Duke University, he continued his conservative advocacy through speeches and articles, writing a column titled ‘Miller Time’ for The Chronicle, the school’s newspaper, and serving as the first national coordinator of the David Horowitz Freedom Centre’s Terrorism Awareness Project.
After his graduation in 2007, Mr. Miller dove into Republican politics. He was tapped as press secretary for Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota, and then as Communications director for Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona. He later started working for Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, a staunch anti-immigration advocate, and later became his Chief of Communications.
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Mr. Miller helped Mr. Sessions sharpen his immigration stance. In 2013, he helped craft an effort to prevent the passage of a 2013 Bill, mooted by a bipartisan group of Senators called the ‘Gang of 8’, which was proposing a way for undocumented immigrants to gain legal residency. Steve Bannon likened Mr. Miller’s opposition to the Bill to “the civil-rights movement in the 1960s,” and his efforts proved fruitful after the Bill, which passed in the Senate, was not brought to a vote in the House.
Trump’s adviser
As Donald Trump prepared to run for President in 2016, Mr. Miller joined his campaign as a policy advisor, later becoming his speechwriter. Post his victory, Mr. Miller joined the administration as a senior policy adviser, focusing on immigration.
He led advocacy for the zero-tolerance policy at the Southern Border, widely characterised by critics as a family separation policy where children were taken from parents who crossed illegally over the U.S-Mexico border. Mr. Miller also supported the so-called Muslim ban, where entry from seven Muslim-majority countries was banned. After Mr. Trump’s failed re-election bid in 2020, Mr. Miller echoed claims that the election was stolen.
In Mr. Trump’s second administration, Mr. Miller took up roles as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and as homeland security adviser, which didn’t require Senate confirmation.
Since then, he has furthered Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He has frequently stressed the goal of one million deportations in the first year, telling ICE agents in May 2025 that he wanted 3,000 immigration arrests a day.
He has also been credited with increasing coordination with law enforcement and the FBI for the anti-immigration effort. Further, Mr. Miller reportedly came up with the plan to deport migrants to an El Salvador prison using the wartime Alien Enemies Act.
Lately Mr. Miller has expanded his focus beyond immigration to foreign policy, spearheading the policy to strike Venezuelan drug boats in the Caribbean and supporting the seizure of Greenland. As Mr. Trump seems determined to continue with his hardline anti-immigration agenda, Mr. Miller remains the main driving force of the policy.
Published – February 08, 2026 01:25 am IST
