Few former White House officials would find themselves listed in a terror watch file, but Stephen Miller is not just any official. Not that the Trump White House is a typical White House. Miller has the unusual dishonour, however, of having an informational bio on the “Extremist Files” section on the website of the civil rights non-profit the Southern Poverty Law Center..
Miller was the architect of the draconian anti-immigrant programme during Trump’s first term. In Trump’s second, he has returned with a more powerful position and an even more vengeful spirit, not only against immigrants—legal and illegal—but against anyone who opposes the Trump regime. The Democratic party leadership is among his enemies, but he also hates all Democratic party officeholders simply because they are Democrats. He opposes any judges trying to uphold a fraying American constitutional framework who rule against the administration and activists seeking to defend a similarly fraying democracy.
Miller’s official titles are White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. He’s a frequent presence both in the Oval Office and when Trump travels around the US, and in politics, proximity is everything. Trump appears to give Miller nearly free rein in a White House led by people who seem to prize loyalty above all else.
Forty years old, his early jobs, after graduating from Duke University, were with prominent congressional representatives, first the former Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann and later Jeff Sessions, a former senator who was attorney general briefly in the first Trump term. By the time he was in college (as a philosophy major), Miller used a bi-weekly column, titled “Miller Time”, in the university’s student paper to rail against feminism, the culture wars, left-wing “propaganda” and immigrants. “Why aren't our airports, borders or ports secure?… Why are there 3,000,000 people in the United States who have overstayed their visas? Why isn’t the murder of 3,000 people enough to shake us out of our apathy?” he wrote in 2006, in a piece about the 9/11 attacks.
During these years, Miller immersed himself in Breitbart News and the newly pungent and powerful right-wing media networks. He joined the first Trump White House as a speechwriter and spent the intervening years before his return promoting and fostering non-profits in communications and the legal right-wing ecospheres in order to create a support system for Trump’s re-election. Miller headed up the conservative legal activist group America First Legal (though he has no law degree) and was an adviser for the notorious Trumpian blueprint Project 2025.
Miller is one of a handful of hardcore ideologues who have served in both Trump White Houses. He will likely be remembered in history for his current project, turning the streets of America into war zones so that he can meet his professed goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. Both he and his ally, the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, have laid out that directive to the troops that Trump is deploying in US cities. Miller has said that nothing less than “the fate of civilisation itself depends" on fulfilling his agenda.
The Trump administration has offered us several windows into family angst, most notably from the heirs of the late liberal senator Robert F Kennedy, as his son proceeds to dismantle the American health system. But the Miller family hasn’t shied away from sharing their profound pain concerning Stephen, either. I suspect that Miller and his wife and children are no longer invited to break bread around a family holiday table. (His wife, who recently worked in the White House communications office, left to work with Elon Musk and has since moved on to start a conservative podcast).
Recently, a first cousin of Miller’s from his father’s side posted a damning attack against him on social media. “I grieve what you’ve become, Stephen. And I grieve what I’ve lost because of it. I grieve your children I will never meet. I grieve the future family you’ve stolen from me by choosing a path so filled with cruelty that I cannot, and will not, be a part of it. I will never knowingly let evil into my life, no matter whose blood it carries—including my own,” she wrote. ‘We celebrated holidays each year with the reminder to stand up and say, ‘never again.’ But what you are doing breaks that sacred promise. It breaks everything we were taught.”
This followed an earlier post from Miller’s maternal uncle, David S Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist. He displayed similar heartbreak and confusion about how someone raised in a liberal, intellectual Santa Monica West Los Angeles milieu could be working against US democracy. Like so many other US Jews, Miller’s family were grateful that in the last century they had arrived from pogroms in Russia to a democratic America. Glosser’s post was made during the first Trump term, when the president and Miller both defended the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia who chanted “Jews will not replace us”. Trump said at the time that the protesters included “some very fine people.”
Miller's uncle counselled: “The Glossers came to the US just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the ‘America first’ nativists of the day closed US borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.”
There is probably nothing more central to the liberal and mainstream American Jewish experience than the history of being immigrants and of having the opportunity to thrive and prosper in a US that welcomed them. In a 2018 Rosh Hashanah sermon Miller’s childhood rabbi, Rabbi Comess-Daniels, preached: “Honestly, Mr Miller, you’ve set back the Jewish contribution to making the world spiritually whole through your arbitrary division of these desperate people. The actions that you now encourage President Trump to take make it obvious to me that you didn’t get my, or our, Jewish message.”
Indeed, Miller has abandoned his liberal Jewish upbringing, making a political home instead among the Christian—and largely white—right wing. As a featured speaker at the recent memorial for murdered Maga activist Charlie Kirk, Miller proclaimed that enemies of the Maga movement “have nothing”, while conservatives “are on the side of God”. This ideology hails, too, from someone who heavily influenced Miller and another Jewish right-wing ideologue—the recently deceased David Horowitz, who swerved jaggedly from the Marxist left (when he founded the 1960s magazine Ramparts), to the far right. Both deny that Trump lost the 2020 election and Horowitz, like Miller, was a warrior against any kind of diversity and inclusion.
Criticism of Miller comes from outside of his family, too, of course. Former Republican strategist George Conway (whose ex-wife Kellyanne Conway was an adviser in the first Trump White House) recently said, for instance, that Miller was less like Joseph Goebbels—the Nazi propagandist whom some people have compared him to—and more like Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi interior minister responsible for implementing the “Final Solution”.
Miller’s profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website sits among those of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Holocaust deniers—an extraordinary place to be for someone who wields so much power in the White House. His profile says: “Stephen Miller is credited with shaping the racist and draconian immigrant policies of President Trump, which include the zero-tolerance policy, also known as family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Miller has also ‘purged’ government agencies of civil servants who are not entirely loyal to his extremist agenda.”
For most Americans, being included in such a listing would be a profound stain. For Miller, it’s possible he would regard it as a badge of honour. Meanwhile, this month there has already been a dangerous, unprecedented and heightened military presence on America’s streets. Economic sectors are hurting as a result of anti-immigrant policies. According to the National Immigration Law Center, “Mass deportations are forecast to reduce our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP, a measure of the overall economy) by more than 7 per cent in the next three years—greater than the damage to the US economy during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009.” Students are staying out of schools in immigrant-heavy neighbourhoods, fearful of ICE raids on educational establishments or what will happen to their parents while they are gone. The stakes for American democracy are high. What happens in these cities, and how far the courts will allow Miller to achieve his goal, will reverberate for many years to come.
