Who is Stephen Miller, architect of Donald Trump's mass deportation plans?

Stephen Miller watched on TV as Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce he was running for president. Few were taking the real estate magnate seriously in June 2015, but Miller wanted in.

"As soon as I saw it, I said, 'I have to join his campaign,'" Miller told Lara Trump in April on her podcast, The Right View.

Within days, by Miller's account, he was a volunteer "providing thoughts, input, analysis." He wrote Donald Trump's first immigration policy paper and by year-end, Miller – then a little-known, 29-year-old staffer on Capitol Hill – had secured a paying job with the campaign, crafting policy and speeches for the future president.

His ideas would shape both Trump's policies and how Americans view one of the fundamental aspects of American identity: immigrants.

Past Republican and Democratic administrations had paired hardline stances on the border with relief for some immigrants – amnesty under Ronald Reagan, an attempted temporary worker program under George W. Bush, protections for the children of immigrants under Barack Obama.

But Trump's immigration plan hinges entirely on enforcement and removal, including mass deportation, underpinned by Miller's firm belief that immigration is something to be stopped, not managed.

"The moment that President Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office, as he has said, the occupation ends and liberation day begins," Miller, who has been named deputy chief of staff for policy in the new administration, told Fox News on Tuesday. "He will immediately sign executive orders sealing the border shut, beginning the largest deportation operation in American history."

An alleged sympathizer of white nationalist ideals, as well as the grandson of Jewish immigrants, Miller has drawn up some of Trump’s hardest-line immigration policies and his most vitriolic speeches.

"He was the architect of two of the most notorious policies of the first Trump administration: the Muslim ban and the family separation policy," said Naureen Shah, a lobbyist for the ACLU in Washington, D.C. "Who is the brains behind the worst of it? It’s Stephen Miller."

Miller, 39, is balding and keeps his head shaved. He prefers dark, tailored suits and pocket squares, even at political rallies. When he speaks in public, Miller has a tic: He repeatedly angles his head like a movie villain cracking his neck before a fight.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, has called him "one of the smartest people to work with President Trump." Miller's critics also recognize him as a "big thinker" and a "mastermind" – but whose ideas dehumanize immigrants. Journalist Jean Guerrero titled her biography of Miller "Hatemonger."

Trump recently rewarded Miller with his new title, deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, setting Miller up to once again leave his mark on the nation's immigration system. The Trump transition team didn't respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Miller.

"He is very loyal to Trump," said Steven Camarota, who, as director of research at the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, has known Miller since his days on Capitol Hill. "He really believes in the president, and his loyalty is sincere."

Plans for making 'mass deportation' a reality

Throughout the campaign, Miller outlined how he expected a second Trump administration would operationalize the president's mass deportation promise. It involved the U.S. military, shifting federal law enforcement to deportation work, building out immigrant detention, revoking the legal status of some immigrants and ramping up removal flights, among other plans.

Miller is also a proponent of ideas – borrowed from far-right extremists – that include deporting families along with their U.S. citizen children, stripping some U.S. citizens of their naturalized citizenship and ending birthright citizenship, which is written into the Constitution and guarantees citizenship for everyone born in the United States.

Experts say Miller's political success is both a testament to, and a consequence of, the rightward shift in how Americans think of immigrants and immigration.

"A lot of these ideas have been created on the fringe and are now being dragged into the mainstream by folks like Miller and Trump," said Caleb Kieffer, senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked Miller's ties to groups it considers extremist because of their anti-immigrant positions.

"They were born in extremist movements," he said, "laundered, sanitized and proposed to mainstream audiences."

Who is Stephen Miller?

When Miller's Jewish family fled the horrors of Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, according to Guerrero, they found refuge in the United States. His paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents immigrated through Ellis Island.

He grew up in Santa Monica, California, in a traditional "liberal Democrat" Jewish household, Miller said in a 2021 episode of Gingrich's podcast, Newt's World.

According to Guerrero's biography, Miller, a contrarian by nature, began rebelling early against the liberal bent of his family, hometown and high school. He tuned in to right-wing talk radio and began promoting far-right ideologies, including anti-immigrant ideas. He found early mentors in conservatives like David Horowitz and among right-wing radio hosts like Larry Elder and the late Rush Limbaugh, according to Guerrero.

Miller told reporter Megyn Kelly on her podcast that he hasn't read Guerrero's book about him, adding, "The accusation from a handful of insane people that I am a white nationalist or other various smears are detestable and exorable lies that I have repeatedly rebutted."

At Duke University, Miller made a name for himself as a conservative columnist for the college paper before graduating and heading to Washington, D.C.

He was working as a staffer for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, when Trump declared his first presidential run. Miller said he called his friend Steve Bannon at the right-wing Breitbart News Network and asked for a meeting with the campaign.

"The rest is pretty much history," Miller told Lara Trump.

Suddenly, Miller was everywhere Donald Trump was. He joked that the only person who logged more hours with Trump was his chief of staff, Dan Scavino.

The slight thirtysomething banged out speeches on Trump's private jet during the first campaign, later on Air Force One, writing into existence the ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations, outlining the zero-tolerance policy that would see children taken from their parents at the border, engineering the use of a 1942 public health law that, for a time, ended asylum at the border, planning to revoke the status that let immigrants brought to the country as children live in the country lawfully.

In 2021, Kelly asked Miller on her podcast whether he regretted family separation – a policy Trump abruptly ended after a public outcry. Miller gave Kelly a nearly five-minute answer without ever saying whether he did.

Can Trump deport millions of people?

On the campaign trail for Trump in 2024, Miller often got asked whether Trump could really deport millions of people. His answer was always yes.

While the candidate preferred catchy phrases and broad brushstrokes, Miller often delivered his responses in minute detail – selling not just the goal but the plan to get there.

During a roundtable at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Miller rattled off a "series of interlocking foreign and domestic policies" that would deliver on Trump's promise.

They included, he said, a reboot of Remain in Mexico, which forced migrants to await U.S. court hearings in Mexico; fencing at the southern border; "robust" prosecutions of migrants; repatriation flights to Mexico; use of Title 42, which temporarily suspended asylum at the U.S. border; "several muscular 212-Fs," referring to travel bans; plus the establishment of "large-scale staging grounds for removal flights."

"You’d grab illegal immigrants and then you’d move them to the staging grounds," Miller said in February. "That’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home."

Many of the Trump administration's immigration policies, including those drafted by Miller, didn't hold up in court, in part because they "weren't written in a legally sound way," said Amanda Frost, director of the Immigration, Migration and Human Rights Program at the University of Virginia.

This time around, "Miller really knows what he is doing," Frost said. "He is likely to be extremely effective."

This month's election – which Trump won by nearly 3 million votes at last count – suggests that millions of Americans agree with Trump's tough immigration stance.

But recent polls also suggest there is a chasm between "mass deportation" as a winning slogan and the American appetite for policies that could divide families and upend communities.

A CNN exit poll showed voters gave Trump a 9-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris on trust to handle immigration. But 56% to 40% voters also said most immigrants in the U.S. illegally should be offered a chance to apply for legal status rather than be deported.

"Stephen Miller is just way outside of where the American people are, even as many are reading the results of of the election as a rebuke of immigrant justice," said Shah, the ACLU lobbyist.

'Thank you, Stephen Miller'

A trove of emails from Trump's first campaign showed how Miller pushed anti-immigrant narratives in right-wing press, including sharing content from known white nationalist organizations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But experts say he was careful while in the White House not to put his more controversial views in writing.

American Oversight, a nonprofit dedicated to holding government accountable, has sought emails and other communications between Miller and other federal agencies during his time at the White House.

The investigation "revealed what appeared to be a concerted effort to avoid creating a paper trail by sending emails to agency officials asking them to call him on the phone," Liz Hempowicz, American Oversight's deputy executive director, said in a statement.

Yet, Miller's role deserves public scrutiny, she said.

"The American people deserve to know," she said, "how someone with such outsized influence will implement any new draconian policies, as well as what outside extremist groups or individuals are influencing him or the White House.”

Whatever he kept out of writing during his White House years, Miller has been vocally trumpeting his plans for achieving Trump's goals all year.

On "The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show," a conservative talk radio podcast earlier this year, the hosts asked, could Trump really deport millions of people? How many in year one?

"I don’t want to put a number on it," Miller said, adding: "Here’s your sound bite for today, gentlemen. When Donald Trump goes back to the White House, as God is my witness, you are going to see millions of people rapidly removed from this country who have no right to be here."

Travis told him, "That’s a good sound bite that would make a lot of people very, very happy."

Still, as an adviser, Miller serves the president. "There is no way Miller is going to push Trump to do something he doesn’t really want to do," said Camarota, the researcher.

And the night of the election, Trump appeared to walk back his harshest campaign rhetoric.

"We're gonna have to seal up those borders," Trump said in his victory speech, "and we're gonna have to let people come into our country. We want people to come back in. But we have to, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally."

Lauren Villagran can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Who is Stephen Miller, architect of Trump's mass deportation plans?