After Donald Trump won the election on November 5, 2024, thus becoming the 47th president of the United States, he has named several figures for his next cabinet, which will take office on January 20, 2025; among his appointments is Stephen Miller, whom he named as his deputy chief of staff for White House policy.
At 39 years old, Miller has made this new signing after serving as Trump's advisor during his first term in the White House.
The right-wing political activist has been the ideologist of Trump's immigration strategy and has been the architect of the mass deportations carried out during the first term of the Republican president, known, among other things, for his immigration and border policies.
This new position gives him a greater role than he held previously, allowing him to be closer to the president and thus support him in his new strategies.
In addition to writing several of Trump's speeches, Miller also served as communications director for then-Alabama Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Congressman John Shadegg.
Among his "creations," Miller was the one who masterminded Trump's travel ban, the reduction of refugee acceptance in the United States and Trump's policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
Miller grew up in a Jewish family in Santa Monica, California. His parents were Democratic, but Miller opted for conservatism and merged with the Republican wing, finding in Donald Trump the perfect element for his radicalization.
“We have a judiciary that has taken on a lot of power and has become, in many cases, [a] supreme branch of government … Our opponents, the media and the entire world will soon see as we begin to take new steps, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be challenged,” Miller said in 2017 on CBS’s political talk show Face The Nation, where he criticized federal courts for blocking Trump’s travel ban.
Miller has also been linked to false statements, including when he made unsubstantiated allegations that there was significant voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election and that “thousands of illegal voters were bused” to New Hampshire.
As that statement made multiple claims about election fraud, all of them false or unsubstantiated.
In 2017, the New York Times reported that Miller blocked the Trump administration from publicly releasing an internal Department of Health and Human Services study that found refugees had a net positive effect on government revenue, insisting that only the costs of refugees be publicized, not the revenue they brought to the country.
Miller is also known for his xenophobic rhetoric, particularly in countries of Muslim origin and Latin America; in the latter, beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program have been the target of his attacks.
Stephen Miller has made a career out of fear-mongering messages and policies, portraying immigrants as a threat to American society, something Trump has repeated time and again in his hundreds of speeches.
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