Who is Stephen Miller? President Trump’s anti-immigration advisor
The far-right hand of Donald Trump is the driving force of the president’s most controversial policies.
Stephen Miller, whose official title is deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, is known in Washington as “Trump’s brain”, such is his reputation for masterminding many of the president’s most radical policies. But perhaps a more accurate moniker would be “Trump’s translator”. Miller doesn’t think for the president but acts as a conduit for his most extreme messaging and impulses. While Donald Trump frequently obfuscates, leaving people unsure if he really means what he says, Miller distils his bluster and spells it out in no uncertain terms.
Take, for example, when Trump sent the military into Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro in early January. It was a brazen raid against another head of state and the world wondered if it marked a seismic shift in US foreign policy. Where Trump was vague, Miller was crystal clear: “We live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The full extent of Miller’s power is on display as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) patrol agents rampage around Democrat-run cities, tear gassing and dragging residents out of cars. It’s the realisation of his life-long ambition and the manifestation of a world view that divides everyone into “us” and “them”. Within hours of Ice agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti on 24 January, Miller was on social media calling Pretti a “would-be assassin” and directing homeland security secretary Kristi Noem – who, in theory, outranks him – to claim Pretti wanted to “massacre” law enforcement.
Once again, it was Miller who was in charge of the narrative. Even when it backfired and Trump distanced himself from the “assassin” comment, there was no suggestion that Miller would step down. He is among an exclusive group of people that the president trusts absolutely – a trust built up during Trump’s first term when Miller was a speechwriter and senior policy adviser. At the time, the policies that he devised – including the Muslim travel ban and the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border – were considered too extreme and many were reversed.
Now with the president emboldened by his second election win, Miller has found his moment. He is the architect of the mass deportations of migrants and the deployment of the National Guard and federal agents onto the streets of American cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. In May 2025, when the normal rules of immigration law enforcement were not producing the results that he desired, Miller demanded that Ice hit an arrest quota of a minimum of 3,000 a day, paving the way for the brutish tactics and dragnet approach seen today. Miller’s public comments often skirt close to white-nationalist rhetoric, with The New York Times reporting that Trump once said Miller would be content if there were “only 100 million people in this country and they would all look like Mr Miller”.
The 40-year-old’s disdain for people from diverse backgrounds dates to his high-school years in Santa Monica, where he wrote a screed to a local paper denigrating Spanish speakers and Native Americans. (It’s also worth noting that Miller himself has a family history of immigration: he is the son of Jewish parents whose ancestors migrated from Russia in the early 20th century.) He moved in fringe right-wing circles while studying political science at Duke University before heading to Washington and working for a series of conservative legislators. It was his single-minded obsession with curbing immigration that caught Trump’s attention, but today, Miller’s reach in policy goes well beyond border control.
From flooding the zone with executive orders to greenlighting military strikes on Yemen and engineering Maduro’s capture, all of the Trump administration’s most audacious policies are marked with Miller’s stamp. So, for anyone wanting to know what Trump is really thinking – and what he might do next – they would do well to pay close attention to Stephen Miller.
