Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration mastermind

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:10Today, Stephen Miller, The Trump Whisperer.

0:22Get on the ground! Alright, bro, you can't be doing that. I'm from here also. Get on the ground! Try and picture the scene. You're on your way to work when you're confronted by a gang in masks. They corner you. You're shouted at, handcuffed, manhandled off the street and bundled into the back of a truck. Your life is changed forever. I'm American. I stated I was American. He still attacked me. We're not safe, guys. We're not safe in America today. Be careful. For almost two months, the American public has been terrorized by an unprecedented wave of immigration raids across the U.S. People have been abducted in car parks.

1:00They've been snatched from their front gardens. Countless children have had to watch their parents disappear. Governments, please put your heart. Let my parents be free. The aggressive ramping up of immigration and customs enforcement agents, known as ICE, is a hallmark of Trump's second term. Behind it all is said to be one man. We are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3 ,000 arrests for ICE every day. And President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every... Stephen Miller. What's dehumanising is when American citizens are stripped of their rights and their liberties by the invasion of illegal aliens.

1:47That is dehumanising. The name might not be familiar, but it's likely that his policies will be. from separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border to opening up the notorious alligator Alcatraz detention facility. Miller is one of the most powerful driving forces behind this White House administration. But who is he? And what's motivating him? From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration policies.

2:25Jean Guerrero, you're the author of Hatemonger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. You've tracked Stephen Miller's political career from his teens to him now at 39 being in post as potentially the most powerful member of Trump's administration. Can you explain what role Miller plays in the White House? Stephen Miller is probably Trump's most trusted advisor. He's been with him since the beginning, since his first campaign, first as a speechwriter, then as a policy advisor, and now as the deputy chief of staff for policy and also recognized as the Homeland Security Advisor, whose role has expanded beyond the realm of immigration into other issues, including LGBTQ issues, foreign affairs, national security in general.

3:20So it's really hard to overstate Miller's power and influence. And how has he accumulated that power and that level of trust with Trump? He's essentially a kind of Trump whisperer, whether it's through flattery or through just his intense loyalty to Trump. This president has literally saved America, and I could not be prouder. I could not be prouder to come every single day to this building where we have a leader sitting in office whose first, last, and every thought is the safety, prosperity, security, and sovereignty of the citizens of this republic. Trump has grown to trust Stephen Miller in a way that very few other people have been able to establish that kind of connection with Trump.

4:07Stephen and I have a very good understanding. He's a terrific person. We have a great understanding. Trump recognizes that he would not be where he is today without Stephen Miller. He could not have won this election or the previous election without the influence of Stephen Miller over his immigration policy and his immigration rhetoric, which has been so central both times in winning him the White House. His main passion has always been immigration, always pushing Trump in a more hardline direction. Think about how corrupt and hateful and evil a system is that allows gangs to come into this country and rape and murder little girls.

4:48I'm not just saying that. You've read the stories. It happens every day. Jean, in your book, you amply demonstrate Miller's near lifelong antipathy towards immigrants. How has that translated to his influence on Trump? There's this idea, I think, in a lot of Trump supporters' minds that Trump's immigration policy is about law and order and about going after people who have committed serious crimes. But for Stephen Miller, when you listen to him talk and you, as I did, report on the ideological influences behind his thinking and his policies, it's really about expelling and extracting and excluding as many people from Black and brown countries as physically possible.

5:33Whether that's dismantling the asylum system, whether it's attacking birthright citizenship, all of these are ways for Stephen Miller to reduce the number of people in this country who are foreign born. Birthright citizenship is the biggest, costliest scam in financial history. Not to mention the fact that it is the number one magnet for illegal immigration and invasion. And it is used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States. It has nothing to do with law and order because in so many cases they're targeting specifically people with green cards, people with citizenship.

6:11And I would say that is his primary influence on Trump, is creating an immigration enforcement operation and deportation machine that has everything to do with re-engineering the racial demographics of the United States.

6:34Jean, what you've just described sounds like a polite way of saying that Miller is pursuing a white supremacist vision at the heart of government. And it does just make you wonder, wow, what happened here? You interviewed dozens of people for your book, including members of Miller's family. What can you tell me about his childhood and what you learned about him? Yeah. So Stephen Miller grew up in Santa Monica, which is a wealthy, progressive part of Los Angeles County. His dad ran a real estate business. His mom was initially a stay at home mom and they lived in a five bedroom house in one of the nicer parts of Santa Monica.

7:16Miller's great-grandparents actually fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and came here as a result of being, you know, Jewish and being persecuted. And this is something that Stephen Miller's uncle has spoken about. If my ancestors had not immigrated to the United States when they did, if they'd waited a few more years till 1924, the door would have been shut. My parents would have gone up the crematory chimney. I wouldn't have been born, my sister wouldn't have been born, and certainly Stephen would never have existed. And it's interesting because Stephen Miller's grandmother, Ruth, she ended up writing down the family history and in this document that talked about the dangers of demonization and, you know, trying to memorialize that for her children, for her grandchildren.

8:04And I remember reading that document and really wondering what Stephen Miller made of it. Were there any early signs that hinted at who Stephen might become? So Stephen Miller had this kind of early rebellious streak. He talked about being in middle school and finding a copy of this magazine called Guns and Ammo and suddenly discovering the NRA and starting to explore conservatism at a young age. One of his best friends, Jason Islas, was Latino. And I spoke to Jason for the book and Jason talked to me about how they had this shared affinity for space travel. And Jason wanted to be an astronaut and he really related to Steven because Steven was really obsessed with Star Trek.

8:59Very much two boys into sci-fi. Two boys into sci-fi. That was the common bond. And when Stephen went to high school, he ended the friendship. He called Jason and he told him that he could no longer be friends with him because of his, quote, Latino heritage. Wow. So just bluntly, that was the explanation and that's how he delivered it. Exactly. Yeah. Jason told me about the call and he just talked about how devastating it was.

9:39So on the face of it, Miller is a Jewish millennial. His great-grandparents emigrated to America, presumably with not very much. He grew up in California and went to a really ethnically diverse school, as you've written in the book. What did you learn about what he was like in his teenage years? His really radical side didn't come out until early on in high school, which was after his family experienced some financial difficulties that forced them to move from their very nice five-bedroom house in this neighborhood called North of Montana in Santa Monica to a more diverse part of the city in a four-bedroom house.

10:22That's when he entered Santa Monica High School, which is this very diverse progressive school attended by a number of Latinos and people of all different races and ethnicities who were proud in many cases of their heritage. And so Miller felt alienated and combative in that environment, according to the classmates of his and friends who I interviewed. And so he was disturbed, for example, by the school celebrating holidays like Dia de los Muertos and Cinco de Mayo. He was disturbed by the school's failure to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. And so he began to call into this right-wing radio show, the Larry Elder show, to complain about his school and to cast himself as kind of a lone patriot standing against these liberally biased educators.

11:20So he found a mentor in Larry Elder and read his book, The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, which was a huge part of his formation because the book, you know, it claims that black people are more racist than white people. And it was an early purveyor of white grievance politics written from the point of view of a black man. Larry Elder is a black talk show host. What kind of message is that? It's hopelessness. Elder maintains the black community is being fed a diet of racism by black leaders who encourage a so-called victim mentality. Being a victim gives you a feeling of comfort, of security.

12:05After all, I didn't screw up. They stopped me. After all, it wasn't my fault I didn't get the promotion. They stopped me. He really sort of built an audience around giving white people permission to lean into racial grievance. And Stephen Miller really took a liking to Larry Elder's views. He was also listening a lot to Rush Limbaugh and reading Limbaugh's books as well. So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

12:44You know, in that worldview, wealthy white men are the aggrieved and everybody else just lacks self-reliance. He just really developed a reputation for using this confrontational style and inflammatory rhetoric for attention. Hi, I'm Stephen Miller. Some of you may or may not know who I am. And one of the ways that he did this early on in high school is that he ran for student government on a platform that was very offensive to many of the students because he targeted the janitors. He gave this speech where he said, you know, why should I have to pick up my trash when we have janitors that we pay to do it for us?

13:35Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash? And we have plenty of janitors who are waiting to do it now. His classmates viewed it as both classist and racist. And just generally quite an ugly attitude, right? Just pretty repellent. Well, it reflects this hierarchical view of society that people have roles and that, you know, people like janitors should stay in their roles and that people like him shouldn't have to be asked to pick up after themselves. This hierarchical view that continues to inform his immigration policy. And I think one of the clearest examples is the ways that he has made access to legal immigration a lot harder for people from low income backgrounds.

14:26And then he goes to enroll at Duke University in North Carolina, which has a reputation as being pretty liberal and pretty progressive. How does Miller get on there? So he actually was able to get into Duke in part, I would say, because of his mentor, David Horowitz, who is another man that he met in high school, a conservative activist who was really focused through the 90s and early 2000s on training a generation of conservative provocateurs who view politics as warfare. The Democratic Party has become a very vicious, I would say, totalitarian party. If you stand up to them, they call you a racist, first thing, and smear you.

15:14God knows I've been smeared enough by them. And they twist what you said. But it's very, very ugly. He started a chapter called Students for Academic Freedom. It's one of the organizations that Horowitz was running, which was meant to challenge, quote unquote, liberal dominance in academia. Right. And he was able to get a column in the campus newspaper, you know, by advocating for like diversity of opinion, which is this tool that David Horowitz taught him and other young conservatives in Southern California at the time, essentially using the language and the tactics of the civil rights movement to attack the gains of the civil rights movement.

15:59So, for example, people who are against racism are racist. People who are fighting oppression are oppressors. It's this kind of gaslighting that's so confusing that it works for a lot of people and it worked for Stephen Miller. And so he continued to use controversy to gain attention and to frame himself as a kind of truth teller who is being silenced by liberal institutions. You know, people tend to really associate Miller with influencing Trump's immigration policy. But what's happening on universities, the attacks on DEI and on liberal education, all of this goes back to Stephen Miller's time at Duke University and the mentorship that he was getting from Horowitz, who had a long history of writing about universities as sort of left-wing indoctrination machines.

16:58Gene, after Miller graduates with a degree in political science, he makes the unsurprising move into politics. He becomes press secretary for Congresswoman Michelle Backman, one of the Tea Party Republicans. And then in 2009, he began working for Jeff Sessions, who at the time was Alabama's Republican senator and later became Trump's first attorney general. We will secure our border, expand immigration enforcement, and choke off supply lines. If you are a gang member, we will find you. What do we know about what Miller learns here and how he operates? While he was working for Sessions, one of the most consequential actions was that he helped to kill the bipartisan immigration reform bill that was known as the Gang of Eight.

17:44He wrote this messaging handbook that was used by Republicans to paint immigrants as criminals and Democrats, And they succeeded in painting support for immigrant rights and any form of compromise on the immigration issue, even if it includes more resources for border security as contrary to working class interests. And this was a very sophisticated strategy that Miller developed in collaboration with Sessions, with Horowitz, and with Steve Bannon. David Horowitz wrote a strategy paper that he sent to Stephen Miller to share with his colleagues on Capitol Hill about how the Republican Party needed to reinvent itself, doubling down on the use of fear to rally people around a candidate.

18:35and Horowitz talked about how Obama had used hope to win in the 2008 election and that it was important to move away from hope and to instead double down on fear, which he saw as a stronger, more compelling emotion. So cynical and so frightening when you look at where that then ended, which is where we are now. Exactly. I mean, they've just very successfully used fear mongering and hate mongering, which is the title of my book, A Hate Monger, to completely transform the United States and what it means to be American and how it feels to be American. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

19:25They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. In 2015, Donald Trump launched his outsider bid to be president of the United States. How did Miller feel about Trump at the time? Yeah, Miller was immediately taken with Trump, And he started emailing the campaign almost right away, asking the campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski, let's talk about immigration. We have to talk about immigration. He was hired in January of 2016, but he was contributing immigration policy documents before that.

20:16It caught the attention of Trump. And so he started almost immediately also shaping Trump's speeches to become more dystopian and also to really deliberately demonize immigrants. But he used these anecdotes of Americans being killed or brutalized by immigrants. And he would put them into Trump's speeches. And they were very effective in creating an emotional and a fear-based response in Trump's audiences at his rallies. And Trump recognized how effective that was. And then, of course, in what was a major political shock to the establishment, Trump won the presidency in 2016. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

21:12This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. Jean, what role did Miller then play in that first administration? So Miller played a huge role in a number of immigration policies. First, there was the Muslim ban, where he helped craft and defend the executive order that banned travels from Muslim-majority countries. That was issued in January of 2017. And according to my sources, Stephen Miller played a significant role in convincing Trump to move forward with canceling the DACA program that provides deportation protections to people who were brought here as children. And then probably the most notable was Miller's central influence over the family separation policy, where they used the separation of children from asylum-seeking parents at the border as a deterrence strategy.

22:11Inside an old warehouse, children can be seen in steel cages with foil sheets as blankets. And this policy resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents, many of whom, you know, families that were never reunited. It's utterly chilling. It's one of the cruelest things I've ever heard in politics.

22:35And so in January 2025, Donald Trump is back in the White House. Stephen Miller's right there. What do you think he learned from the first time around? How did he change his approach in the second presidency? In Trump's first term, Miller, as an experienced policy advisor, was stymied again and again by cabinet officials, by the courts, by legal constraints. But all of this gave Miller a level of experience that he was able to bring to this term, where he is now essentially running key departments, you know, including the Homeland Security Department. You know, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, reportedly defers to him.

23:18Miller has been described as the, quote, de facto attorney general. And so there's just no guardrails because they made sure to put allies in place who would not push back at all against their most extreme ideas. he's really expanded his influence. He was able to play a role in the drafting of a number of executive orders against DEI, against birthright citizenship, making it easier to deport immigrants without due process and essentially flooding the zone, creating so much chaos and litigation to fight back against that it becomes hard to really stop the administration from significantly impacting immigrant communities, and not just immigrant communities, but LGBTQ communities across the country as well.

24:14Coming up, where so many others have failed, how has Stephen Miller survived working with Trump for so long?

24:29Jean, one of the reasons we're talking today is because of this barrage of videos that we see posted on social media every single day of ICE agents, who are these federal agents in militarized uniforms, these immigration and customs enforcement officers, who are filmed and posted all over social media as seemingly kidnapping people from the streets. Turn the door. No, no, you can't! You can't! No, I beat you! I beat you! It's really disturbing. how central is Miller to how emboldened ICE are and to what they're doing? He is 100 % central to what is happening in these ICE raids across the United States.

25:13He's the one who told ICE that they needed to meet these quotas daily and to do so that they should go to workplaces, that they should go to 7-Elevens, that they should go to Home Depots and just round up as many people as possible to satisfy his appetite for that. I think what's really telling is he was on a podcast ahead of the inauguration where he talked about what we're seeing now and sort of forecasted it. And he said that people were going to be so excited by these mass detentions and deportations that they would set their alarm clocks to wake them up two hours earlier than usual just to watch the deportation flights out of the United States.

26:00It was going to be that exciting and that wonderful. The through line in Miller's life and career is this loathing for multiculturalism and this fear of multiracial and multi-ethnic democracy and a desire to really create a homogenous United States. And this is why you're seeing these raids where valued community members are being rounded up and disappeared into these expanding detention centers. And in some case being sent abroad to prisons like the prison in El Salvador, completely being denied due process. because, again, Stephen Miller has a very fanatical view of immigration and wants to get as many people who are foreign-born out of this country.

26:58Jean, one of the most surprising things to me seems to be the fact that Miller has managed to maintain his relationship with Trump throughout all of this. I mean, he has pursued a really hateful campaign and agenda without empathy and Trump likes to be liked. So I wonder how on earth has Miller survived? I think Trump recognizes that Miller was central to his ability to win the White House both times. Because every time that he followed Miller's instincts to double down on the demonization of immigrants and being as tough on the immigration issue as possible, it paid off. And I think Miller also is very devoted to Trump or at least knows how to perform devotion in a way that Trump really likes.

27:49You know, Miller does not use the media to paint himself as, you know, somebody who is responsible for what's happening in the White House. He always uses his media appearances to promote Trump and to flatter Trump and to talk about the genius of Trump and to frame things in ways that Trump likes. You know, Trump wants credit for Trumpism and Miller knows how to give him that. However, I do think we're in a very interesting moment where it is possible that Trump and Miller's relationship could fracture because of the American public's response to what they are doing. This unprecedented cruelty and disregard for due process when it comes to rounding up immigrants in America.

28:42And I think how the American public responds is going to determine the fate of the Trump and Miller relationship, because Trump is a lot more sensitive to the public's perception of him than Stephen Miller is. And he knows that most Americans, or at least I personally would like to believe that most Americans do not have the same appetite as Stephen Miller for the suffering of immigrants. And they don't take joy or pleasure in seeing moms torn from their children or seeing devoted fathers separated from their families. And so I think as you see these videos coming out on social media that are going viral, that are showing who the administration is actually targeting, and people are responding to that and becoming angry or sad or heartbroken or disillusioned, that could end up creating a rift between Trump and Miller.