The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Ruthless Ambition

of Stephen Miller

 

Illustration by Iris Legendre

By Jason Zengerle

Mr. Zengerle is a contributing writer at The Times Magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/opinion/stephen-miller.html

 

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

 

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

 

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

 

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

 

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

 

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.

 

Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision. “Stephen Miller translates Trump’s instinctual politics into a coherent ideological program,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said, “and he is the man for the moment in the second term.”

 

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Steve Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist in the early days of Mr. Trump’s first presidency, compared Mr. Miller to David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director who ran roughshod over the cabinet as he sought to slash federal spending. But even the Stockman comparison might not do the 2025 version of Miller justice. “I’m not sure anybody,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Miller, “has had this much authority.”

 

Indeed, at times it can seem as if Mr. Miller is trying to seize the moment as much for himself as for Mr. Trump — promoting a policy vision that is not just more coherent but more radical than the president’s. It’s clear what Mr. Miller’s agenda is. Does Mr. Trump share it?

 

Mr. Miller’s origin story is, by now, familiar. The son of wealthy Jewish Democrats, he grew up in the early aughts in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica, Calif., where he fashioned himself as a conservative provocateur. Running for student government in high school, he campaigned on the platform that the school’s janitors weren’t doing enough work. (“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 in his campaign speech.)

 

It was during his formative years that Mr. Miller developed a broader critique of society. He watched the left take over California and, in his view, turn it into a failed state — failures that he believed were directly attributable to immigration. As he explained years later, it was his experience in California that led him to conclude that “mass migration turns politics leftward” and that mass migration was turning the United States into California. “The question from the right, and this is the question that Miller is trying to answer, is whether the country functions as a ratchet that only moves leftward,” said Mr. Rufo, who also grew up in California. “It’s calling into question the basic nature of democracy itself if our democracy only moves leftward.” Mr. Miller didn’t accept that history traveled in such an inevitable arc; rather, history existed on a pendulum, and he made it his mission to swing it back to the right.

 

After graduating from Duke University, he worked as a Republican aide on Capitol Hill and then, in 2016, joined Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign as the candidate’s chief (and for a time, only) speechwriter. When Mr. Trump won, Mr. Miller was put in charge of writing the administration’s immigration policy, and he set out to reduce all immigration to the United States, not just illegal border crossings. That proved to be a difficult task.

 

As with his early thwarted effort to institute a family separation policy, Mr. Miller was frequently stymied. The courts blocked the first version of the Muslim ban — an executive order drafted primarily by him and Mr. Bannon. And while the Supreme Court upheld a subsequent version, Mr. Miller believed it left off numerous countries that should have been included. His efforts to freeze asylum applications, enlist the F.B.I. to conduct immigration raids and turn Guantánamo Bay into a migrant detention facility were all successfully resisted by other government officials who believed they were probably illegal and definitely ill conceived.

 

While many of his former colleagues cashed in as lobbyists and consultants after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Miller chose to continue the political fight, starting a group called America First Legal. It was one of several think tanks and policy shops started by former Trump aides, including the Center for Renewing America, founded by the former budget director Russell Vought; the America First Policy Institute, started by the former domestic policy adviser Brooke Rollins; and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was run by Paul Dans, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management under Mr. Trump.

 

What set America First Legal apart was its focus on litigation. “He understood that the lawfare was going to be a central thing,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Miller. Modeling America First Legal as the conservative analogue to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the first Trump administration 413 times, Mr. Miller used it to launch a fusillade of legal challenges to Biden policies that sought to remedy racial discrimination against minority farmers and minority restaurant workers, support L.G.B.T.Q.+ students and expand voting rights; later, America First Legal filed civil rights complaints against corporations, including IBM and American Airlines, over their diversity practices.

 

The legal strategy, Mr. Miller explained at the time, was intended to combat the “insidious and explicit discrimination against white Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry.” Although Mr. Miller recently denounced universal court injunctions against Trump policies as “judicial tyranny,” America First Legal regularly sought, and celebrated, them in its lawsuits against the Biden administration. The group typically filed the suits in the Northern District of Texas, where it knew the cases would be heard by judges nominated by Republican presidents, including Mr. Trump.

 

After Mr. Trump’s second election victory, Mr. Miller brought with him the lessons he learned during the first administration and the interregnum. When a transition official reached out to Mr. Miller for the names of people he wanted to serve in immigration-related positions at D.H.S., ICE and Customs and Border Protection, Mr. Miller provided them. He also sent over names of people he wanted in posts at the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. As Mr. Miller explained to the transition official, these were positions that might not appear to be related to immigration, but Mr. Miller had learned the hard way that they were. During Mr. Trump’s first administration, officials in those jobs had resisted Mr. Miller’s actions on immigration; now he wanted to make certain that he had his own people in those posts.

 

Mr. Miller worked closely with Gene Hamilton, the top lawyer at America First Legal who joined the White House as a senior counsel for its first five months before returning to America First Legal, to draft or directly inspire an extraordinary barrage of executive orders. Many dealt with issues that fell under Mr. Miller’s new, expanded remit — including terminating D.E.I. and environmental justice programs across the federal government; proclaiming that the federal government will recognize only two genders, male and female; and rolling back energy-efficiency regulations for certain household appliances, such as shower heads and gas stoves.

 

A number of the orders also dealt with Mr. Miller’s old hobbyhorse, immigration, including one that purports to end birthright citizenship. But his most audacious immigration move came in the form of a presidential proclamation, which Mr. Trump used to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and deport Venezuela immigrants accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua street gang.

 

Mr. Miller had discovered the Alien Enemies Act while at America First Legal. Speaking to the podcast hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton in 2023, he hailed the statute as something “that’s been on the books since the John Adams administration which allows you to deport any alien age 14 or older without due process if there’s a declared state of incursion, of predatory incursion or invasion from that country.” (Mr. Miller slightly misinterpreted the statute, which specifies that the alien must be both male and above 14 years of age.) Since February, Mr. Miller has used the act to send nearly 140 Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process. Federal judges have ruled several times that the men were deported illegally, prompting Mr. Miller to argue that the court has “no authority” in the matter.

 

That strategy reminds me of something a former senior administration official told me in 2019 about Mr. Trump and his aggressive approach to immigration policy. “His constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued,” the official said. “To him, it’s all a negotiation. Almost as if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different, and there really isn’t a settling step when you break federal law.” Now in his second term, with Mr. Miller greenlighting this approach and a compliant Supreme Court — which recently curtailed the power of district court judges to issue universal injunctions — seeming to ratify it, Mr. Trump’s contention that federal law isn’t in fact different appears to have been proven correct.

 

The challenge confronting Mr. Miller, who did not respond to interview requests, is how long he can maintain such power. His longevity in Mr. Trump’s circle is a testament, in many ways, to his ruthlessness and cunning. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Miller abandoned two old allies — Mr. Bannon, who originally introduced him to Mr. Trump, and Jeff Sessions, his old boss in the Senate — when they fell out of favor with Mr. Trump. Instead, Mr. Miller struck up an alliance with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. He’s notorious for bad-mouthing colleagues to the president. In the leaked Signal chat among Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance and several other senior administration officials, it was notable that only Mr. Vance questioned Mr. Trump’s decision to carry out strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. A third Trump adviser said that was because, of the group, only Mr. Vance was elected to his position; the rest serve at the pleasure of the president, which means they could lose their jobs if they contradict Mr. Trump in Mr. Miller’s presence.

 

At the same time, Mr. Miller is a world-class brown noser. In an administration that puts a premium on sycophancy, he stands out for just how much he sucks up to his boss. “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American president in history,” Mr. Miller wrote on X shortly after Mr. Trump’s tariff flip-flop in April. Last year, when he was asked on a podcast to name his favorite ’80s action movie, he answered Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport,” an unusual choice — until you realize that Mr. Trump once deemed “Bloodsport” “an incredible, fantastic movie” and that he liked to watch it during flights on his private plane. The transition official told me that while it would overstate things to suggest that the president viewed Mr. Miller as indispensable — since no one in Mr. Trump’s circle ever is — Mr. Miller has been so central to Mr. Trump’s political operation for so long that the president would have a difficult time imagining what it would be like not to have Mr. Miller working for him.

 

And yet, Mr. Miller’s power could ultimately unravel because of something far more profound than office politics.

 

Translating Trumpism into a coherent ideological doctrine can be a vexing proposition, as MAGA’s isolationist wing recently experienced with the U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Mr. Miller has done this translation work perhaps better than anyone. At times, he has exhibited the necessary flexibility, rolling with Mr. Trump’s contradictions and flip-flops. During the first Trump administration, Mr. Miller jettisoned his own protectionist stance once it became clear that the administration’s free-traders had the president’s ear. When I asked the third Trump adviser about the foreign policy views of Mr. Miller, who’s reportedly angling to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, the adviser said that they were consistent with whatever the president was currently thinking.

 

Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.

 

While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.

 

For the moment, though, it seems Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are aligned — and that means Mr. Miller has achieved a level of success, and satisfaction, that he didn’t dream of during Mr. Trump’s first term. Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”