Miller helped drive Trump’s immigration agenda; Democrats likely to scrutinize his record
Stephen Miller’s on-record statements across nearly a decade — from declaring “We are being conquered” during a 2023 spike in illegal border crossings to describing the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization” — form the record he now carries into the White House chief of staff’s office under President Donald Trump. Miller has been behind many of the administration’s signature domestic policy initiatives, especially its immigration agenda, going back to his defense of Trump’s most far-reaching goals to remake government since his 2016 run for president. He is known for harsh language and unapologetic bombast, according to the Associated Press, and his remarks have drawn outsized attention from supporters and critics alike. His record is likely to be scrutinized by Democrats in the powerful new role as he leads the White House through the lame duck period that followed the Republican Party’s loss of both houses of Congress.
During a 2023 spike in illegal border crossings, Miller described migrants as invaders, even though many were escaping poverty and violence in their home countries. “We are being conquered,” he told Fox News Channel in December 2023. “We have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems.”
Miller warned that “a generation from now,” people “will not know the country that they are living in. These consequences are permanent. Unless there’s massive large-scale deportations by the millions, it will be irrevocable.”
During Trump’s first term, Miller championed family separation, a strict immigration deterrence policy that previous administrations had been hesitant to adopt. It called for routinely having federal agents separate children from their parents if families were apprehended illegally crossing the border. Miller defended the policy to The New York Times in 2018, saying it “was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period.” “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law,” he added.
The tactic sparked widespread outcry, and the Trump administration did not revive it in its second term. Still, Miller has helped promote mass deportations of people already living illegally in the United States — deportations that have divided families according to legal status.
In January, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident, during protests against the administration’s immigration policies. Miller posted on social media that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” who had “tried to murder federal agents.” Miller later said in a statement that the federal officers in Minneapolis “may not have been following” protocol.
Miller’s commentary has also extended to foreign policy. In January, after a U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Miller used a lengthy post on X to decry what he called “reverse colonization,” suggesting Western nations were sacrificing too much for the developing world — a practice, he wrote, that “has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.” He defended the right of the U.S. to take over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, writing: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
Defending Trump’s assertion that the United States was now running Venezuela, Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” In the same interview, Miller argued the U.S. could seize Greenland by military force from NATO ally Denmark. “Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States,” he said. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
In May 2025, Miller suggested the administration was looking for ways to expand its power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally. To that end, he said officials were “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government. “The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said. “So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at.” He added: “Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” In the nearly 18 months since, the idea has not been publicly pursued by Trump and his administration.
After the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to throw out birthright citizenship, which grants citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil, Miller said immigrants and their children pose an existential threat to the nation. “This is absolutely a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic,” he told Fox News Channel in June. “If your ruling requires you to suicide your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong.”
The Statue of Liberty has featured in Miller’s arguments before. Appearing in the White House briefing room in 2017 to detail plans to cut back on the number of green cards issued while prioritizing English speakers and skilled workers, Miller was asked whether doing so might violate the spirit of the poem on the Statue of Liberty, which reads in part, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here,” Miller responded, before arguing: “The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
Miller is among the members of the administration who have expressed skepticism about childhood vaccines. In August, he praised the president for signing an executive order aimed at curtailing the vaccine schedule for children. “Millions and millions of parents feel they’ve been pressured when their children are just weeks out of the hospital to take five shots, six shots, seven shots all at once,” said Miller, a father of four, including an infant born in June. “Nobody has studied it. Nobody’s looked at it. Nobody’s thought about it.” His comments contradict what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, which is that research shows getting several vaccines simultaneously “does not cause any chronic health problems.”
In August 2025, Miller appeared on Fox News Channel to respond to criticism from Democrats over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and other U.S. cities. Critics had raised concerns that the presence of troops was frightening residents while having only a questionable impact on crime. Miller used the occasion to take aim at Democrats more broadly. “The Democrat Party does not fight for, care about or represent American citizens,” Miller said. “It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang bangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists.” He added: “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Taken together, the statements trace nearly a decade of positions Miller now brings to the chief of staff’s office as he leads Trump’s White House through the lame duck period that followed the Republican Party’s loss of both houses of Congress.