$70bn in enforcement funding through 2029 likely limits Democratic oversight
Congressional Democrats pledged investigations and subpoenas for Stephen Miller after President Donald Trump named him White House chief of staff on Friday — an appointment that followed Tuesday’s voting, in which voters rejected Republican candidates up and down the ballot, near and far from the southern border and in blue and deep-red states, and rebuked Trump and the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat poised to lead the House oversight committee next year, warned that Miller “should lawyer up,” promising to investigate him and his involvement in the administration’s mass deportation campaign. Senator Alex Padilla said that if Trump was doubling down, “so will we,” promising to use “every tool at our disposal – oversight, investigations, subpoenas, and our leverage over federal funding – to expose this administration’s abuse of power and hold those responsible accountable.”
The Guardian described Miller as “the architect of the administration’s most aggressive immigration policies.” Miller’s record on immigration long predates the appointment. During the first Trump administration, he devised the travel restrictions on Muslim-majority countries that became known as the “Muslim ban,” and he designed the zero-tolerance policy that separated more than 5,600 children from their parents and caregivers at the US-Mexico border. More recently, he has pushed the administration to accelerate the deportation of undocumented children.
In the current term, Miller constructed the legal framework for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to cast Venezuelan immigrants — including asylum seekers — as foreign terrorists associated with the Tren de Aragua cartel, a rationale the administration used to expel them to a Salvadorian megaprison and to strike small Venezuelan boats. He has also pushed the administration to all but shut down legal immigration.
After immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a nurse, amid immigration raids in Minneapolis, it was Miller who raised the idea that Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to send in military troops, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian’s analysis credits Miller, more than any single other person, with unleashing a series of immigration raids across US cities this year and last — raids that sent masked agents in military gear through residential streets to round up undocumented immigrants, in a mass deportation campaign that, the Guardian reported, has sent military tanks through those streets as well.
Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of Raíces, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services non-profit, said the elevation of Stephen Miller to chief of staff signals “a doubling down on the administration’s cruelest impulses.” “Miller’s promotion guarantees an acceleration of mass deportations and of brute force unleashed within our neighborhoods,” Al-Juburi said. Human rights activists and advocates on behalf of immigrants are immediately calling on members of Congress to do everything they can to stop Miller.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth welcomed the appointment in a congratulatory social media post, calling Miller a true patriot. “He never backs down,” Hegseth said.
Democratic lawmakers, who have retaken control of Congress, governor’s offices and statehouses, may have to spend much of the next two years bringing Miller’s ambitions to heel, the Guardian reported. In the Guardian’s analysis, it was never likely that Trump — who rose to political prominence on a promise to expel immigrants en masse from the United States — would dampen his agenda, even after voters rejected Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
Even with full control of Congress, Democrats will likely have a limited ability to rein in the administration’s immigration enforcement agencies, which the Guardian described as bloated with $70bn in funding through 2029. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is poised to massively expand its workforce, and immigration arrests and detentions are already at an all-time high.
Miller, 41, is himself the descendant of Jewish immigrants to the United States and grew up in liberal Santa Monica, California, the Guardian reported. He came to reject his home town, viewing California as a failed state that had been perverted by mass immigration, and eventually came to see immigration as a leftwing plot to undermine his vision of a traditional United States.
Miller has been at Trump’s side since the president’s first term, serving until now as a deputy chief of staff and policy adviser. In more than a decade by the president’s side, the Guardian reported, Miller has worked with Trump to wrest extreme executive authority, to undermine Congress and the judiciary and to defy oversight — a push that, in the Guardian’s assessment, has aimed in large part at advancing his anti-immigrant campaign. The Guardian added that, in his previous roles, Miller has stuck close to Trump’s side and “stoked the president’s most extreme instincts.”
Miller has shown what the Guardian called a unique unwillingness to concede. In 2018, he reportedly sank a deal that would have given Trump $25bn in funding for a border wall in exchange for a provision granting permanent protection to undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children.
The Guardian reported that the administration’s policies have alienated the coalition of voters who elected Trump in 2024, including a large contingency of Latino voters, and that Miller is unlikely to be moved by voters’ backlash against the administration’s most extreme policies. Al-Juburi said the new role leaves Miller positioned to press further. “This puts him in a position of greater power to wreak havoc,” Al-Juburi said.