Stephen Miller at a the Conservative Political Action Conference (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Smirking bigot Stephen Miller thought he was going to get away with his latest effort to terrify migrants. Instead, he has unleashed a torrent of resistance, as huge protests spread throughout major United States cities.
He’s the architect of Donald Trump’s vicious clampdown on migrants—and at the forefront of the far right radicalisation of the regime.
From his teenage years, Miller has firmly entrenched himself in the centre of anti-immigration activism.
Miller is the descendants of migrants. In 1903 his maternal family arrived in New York, fleeing from persecution in their native Belarus. They were escaping antisemitic pogroms and couldn’t speak English when they arrived in the US.
But by age 16, Miller was already whipping up hatred through his school newspaper. He raged about the “rampant political correctness”—and complained students “lacked basic English skills”.
While still a teenager, he forced the school to comply to a state requirement that a “patriotic exercise” be conducted every day.
And in December 2001, he tapped into an rising Islamophobic atmosphere. He wrote, “Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous.
“And not to kill terrorists poses a serious threat to the security of the nation.”
A high school speech saw him declare, “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do.
“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?”
This vile racism is a running thread through his time at Duke university in North Carolina too. There he carved out a degree of campus notoriety with his fortnightly column in the student newspaper.
During his time at Duke, Miller was the first national coordinator of the Terrorism Awareness Project. This was to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilise support for the defence of American and the civilisation of the West”.
This theme of an international enemy threatening the US is one that continues to this day. On X, Miller has been spewing forth racist justifications for the unrest in Los Angeles.
Earlier this week, he called the city “a ruptured, Balkanised society of strangers” and the actions of cops, Ice and the national guard as “the fight to save civilisation”.
“Los Angeles is all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies,” he said. “You can have all the other plans and budgets you want. If you don’t fix migration, then nothing else can be fixed—or saved.”
Miller’s programme is a qualitative shift in policy and an act of far right political theatre. The immigration raids last week are a desperate and divisive attempt to show that the Trump administration means business.
California is a “sanctuary state”—this means that migrants aren’t routinely deported if they are arrested for a crime. But Miller wants this to end. He wants undocumented migrants in the event of arrest or custodial sentence, to be systematically turned over to Ice and deported.
Miller’s fingerprints were all over some of the most racist measures in the orange figurehead’s first term too.
It was Miller who was a critical voice in the travel ban from Muslim majority countries. And it was Miller who pushed forward a “zero tolerance” approach on separating migrant children from their parents at the US border.
After university he worked for Tea Party congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. During this time, he strengthened his links with racist organisations, such as Breitbart News, and its fascist founder Steve Bannon.
Miller developed with Sessions what they called “nation state populism,” with racist immigration controls at its centre.
Sandwiched in between Trump’s two presidential terms, Miller founded the America First Legal Foundation. The legal campaign group was on the advisory board for Project 2025—the collection of right wing policies for Trump’s most recent election campaign.
It sued the Joe Biden presidency over its border enforcement policy and issued a complaint to the Department of Education encouraging schools to teach critical race theory.
All this has led to Miller featuring on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of extremists. In 2019, the organisation leaked more than 900 emails between Miller and Breitbart News writer Katie McHugh.
The emails showed his support of the racist Great Replacement Theory and various conspiracy theories that focused around anti-immigrant racism.
Miller is in a uniquely strong position within the White House. He packs both the far right ideological framework and organisational contacts—and is one of the figures driving the radicalisation of the second Trump presidency.
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