By Ted Hesson, Jeff Mason and Kristina Cooke
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Marines on the streets of Los Angeles. Masked immigration officers at courthouses and popular restaurants. Bans on travelers from more than a dozen countries.
For senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, things were going according to plan.
He’d set an aggressive quota of 3,000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal pushed U.S. immigration officers into more communities and businesses, triggering protests and political tensions with Democrats.
Then the president called Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was in Los Angeles with other immigration officials in mid June, according to three former U.S. officials with knowledge of the call.
“He said: ‘We’re going to do this targeted,'” one of the three former U.S. officials said. “Everybody heard it.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement paused raids on farms, hotels, restaurants and food processing plants after the call, the former officials said. Trump was not aware of the extent of the enforcement push, one of the former officials told Reuters at the time, and “once it hit him, he pulled it back.”
The pause was short-lived. ICE rescinded the guidance days after it was issued, leaving some officials confused about how to proceed.
The episode illustrated a moment of dissonance within Trump’s immigration team, which has otherwise appeared to be in lock step on strategy, two of the former officials said. It was a sign that Miller’s no-holds-barred approach could go too far, even for the president, they said.
A White House official said there was no daylight between Miller and Trump and Miller’s approach to immigration enforcement had not made farms a primary target. The official also said the initial ICE directive pausing raids had not been authorized by top administration leaders.
Miller, 39, has long been known as obsessed with immigration but now wields immense power over multiple areas in the West Wing as deputy chief of staff for policy, an increase in influence since Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency.
Under his leadership, the Trump administration has doubled immigration arrests, pushed the legal limits of deportations, blocked travelers from 19 countries, moved to restrict birthright citizenship and helped Republicans pass a spending law that devotes an estimated $170 billion to immigration enforcement.
Miller also has been a prominent voice on many of the president’s other priorities, including countering diversity initiatives and targeting transgender rights. He is one of a small group of White House staffers who approve all executive orders, a person familiar with the matter said.
But when it comes to immigration, Miller pushes experimental policies that test the bounds of the Constitution, three former colleagues said, including a challenge to birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14th Amendment.
“He just has a worldview that he is 100% sure of,” one Republican official said.
In a social media post urging Republicans to support the spending package Trump signed into law last week, Miller suggested society could crumble if the bill failed to pass.
“Republicans have spent generations promising Americans full, complete and total border security,” he wrote in a post on X. “Now is the moment to fulfill the promise on which the fate of civilization itself depends.”
Critics say Miller is stoking nativism for political purposes and endorsing policies that seem crafted for cruelty rather than effectiveness.
Administration officials, including Noem, praised Miller for his loyalty to Trump and said he was instrumental in shaping the administration’s immigration agenda.
“Stephen’s passion, patriotism and persistence help fuel this administration in our efforts to carry out the largest deportation of criminal illegal aliens in the history of our republic,” she said in a statement to Reuters.
UNPRECEDENTED INFLUENCE
Trump recaptured the White House in part by campaigning to curb illegal immigration, saying millions had entered unlawfully under former President Joe Biden and portraying them as dangerous criminals who needed to be removed. Miller was a central figure driving that narrative and championed the policies that have fueled Trump’s aggressive crackdown.
Initially, immigration was Trump’s strongest-polling issue, but public approval slipped to 44% in mid-June from 47% a month earlier as the crackdown accelerated, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The unprecedented influence Miller now has over the U.S. immigration system stems from his lengthy and close relationship with Trump, colleagues said.
“He was there from the very, very beginning of the Trump phenomenon,” said Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence. “He has stayed loyal throughout the first administration to the president and to this day.”
Miller, who is married with three young children, established himself as a major policy figure during Trump’s first term. He was remarkably driven and assertive, and used the same tone with colleagues as he did in appearances on TV, a former Trump administration official said.
“It was hard to get a word in edgewise,” the former official said. “He’s not very interested in what you think. It’s not a collaborative conversation. If you try to engage, he will talk over you.”
Miller called senior homeland security officials so often that they needed a dedicated staffer to talk to him, the former official said.
The direct outreach to agency staffers has carried over into the current administration, according to one current and one former official.
Two former officials said the threat of crossing Miller and then getting fired and potentially blacklisted by Trump and his political allies also contributed to his authority.
Miller co-founded the conservative advocacy group America First Legal after Trump left office in 2021, which filed or supported lawsuits over immigration policies and other issues.
In the second Trump administration, in addition to his deputy chief of staff role, Miller helms the White House’s Homeland Security Council, which coordinates immigration and other domestic security policies within the administration.
Miller came in with all of his staffers in place, a contrast to other areas within the National Security Council, and appears to operate more independently, a person familiar with the matter said. “He was ready to rock and roll on Day One,” the person said.
While dozens of officials were fired from the NSC as part of a downsizing, Miller’s homeland group remained unaffected, the person said.
‘XENOPHOBIC WORLD VIEW’
Miller grew up in Santa Monica, California, where about a quarter of residents are foreign born. He embraced conservative ideas as far back as high school and developed a reputation early in his political career as a provocateur.
He attended Duke University in North Carolina where he stood out for his defense of white lacrosse players who had been accused of raping a Black woman working as a stripper in 2006, writing about the prominent case in newspaper columns and appearing on Fox News. The accusations were determined to be a hoax, which the woman admitted last year.
Democrats have criticized Miller as the driving force behind Trump’s harshest policies.
A group of congressional Democrats who in 2019 called Miller “a far-right white nationalist with a racist and xenophobic world view” included Karen Bass, who is now the mayor of Los Angeles and has clashed with the Trump administration over ICE raids there.
Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, was an aide to billionaire Elon Musk during his roughly four-month stint at the White House. She departed to work for Musk after he left in late May. Current and former Trump officials gave no indication that Trump’s off-and-on friction with Musk had caused tension between the president and his longtime aide.
Nearly a month after Trump’s call and the back-and-forth over ICE raids, Miller’s crackdown continues.
On Tuesday, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said agricultural workers would not receive “amnesty” and that the administration wants an entirely American workforce.
In Los Angeles, federal agents flanked by heavily armored U.S. troops marched through a city park in a show of force that angered local officials.
Trump called Miller “our star” when introducing him last week at the opening of a migrant detention center officials dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” because of its location in the Florida Everglades, a subtropical wetland teeming with reptiles and other wildlife.
Speaking at a roundtable with Miller and Noem, Trump said even Miller would respect how Noem had handled her role. “I don’t think he likes anybody,” Trump said.
Miller, in turn, praised Trump for empowering ICE and Border Patrol to step up immigration enforcement and using legal tools and diplomacy to ramp up deportations.
“Watching what you’ve done, sir, has been one of the honors of a lifetime,” Miller said. “I’m proud to be able to play any role in it.”
(Reporting by Ted Hesson and Jeff Mason in Washington, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Michael Learmonth)
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