Stephen Miller’s Fellow Immigration Hawks Are ‘jubilant’

Immigration hardliners and Republican moderates were poised for a wrenching intra-GOP debate after voters rejected supporters of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Then Trump named longtime immigration hawk Stephen Miller as his next White House chief of staff — formally placing the mastermind of his crackdown at the center of power in the West Wing.

Former and current DHS officials, as well as outside advocates of mass removals of unauthorized immigrants, see Miller’s rise to power as a sign that their side has already won the argument within the administration about how to proceed on immigration enforcement in the last two years of Trump’s term.

“He never put a political limitation on it or a carveout saying, ‘Well, we’re only going to go after illegal aliens that have also committed a violent crime or terrorists or gang members,’” said Mark Morgan, who served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner during Trump’s first administration.

Morgan argued that some Republicans and administration officials have pushed the president on the idea that his immigration agenda is politically unpopular. He said he hopes Miller will “take this opportunity to try to regroup from the people that the president was listening to on mass deportations — that I think have been giving him some really bad advice.”

Following the immigration surge in Minneapolis, which saw immigration agents kill two American citizens in January, Trump softened the tone and tenor of his administration’s immigration crackdown. But while deportation figures remained high, comments from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seeming to express openness to a changed approach on immigration prompted deportation proponents to accuse the president of retreating from one of his biggest campaign promises.

Now they are “jubilant” about Miller’s promotion and “hope it is an indication of what's to come,” Mike Howell of the Oversight Project, who helped found the Mass Deportation Coalition, told POLITICO.

“Miller has spent his entire career basically centered on this issue,” Howell said. “It's been a bad week. So it's nice to go into the weekend with such great news.”

Miller, who has been one of the president’s closest advisers on immigration since Trump ran for president in 2016, has been seen as the conductor and architect of the administration’s immigration policies. His role has included setting lofty deportation goals and pushing agencies across the government to devote as many resources as possible to the removal of unauthorized immigrants, even after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Miller’s views have long made him a boogeyman among Democrats. The longtime Trump adviser has pushed to suspend habeas corpus protections, labeled Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” and accused unauthorized immigrants of unlawfully voting in U.S. elections with little evidence. Critics have also accused him of embracing theories espoused by white nationalists that refugee resettlement is a ploy to erase American identity.

It is unclear how much Miller’s elevation will affect the Department of Homeland Security, which Miller has already closely monitored in his role as deputy chief of staff and the president’s homeland security adviser. While Mullin called Miller “my friend” and “an excellent choice” to be chief of staff in an X post Friday, the two have often disagreed on how to implement Trump’s immigration crackdown.

One DHS official — granted anonymity to speak freely about immigration policy dynamics within the administration — said Miller’s elevation is “not great” news for Mullin, who has at times pushed for a more discreet approach to deportations that would prevent immigration enforcement from driving headlines and hurting the president’s political standing. Miller was among those White House aides pushing for a very visible approach to immigration.

But Miller’s newfound power comes with limits. While he will be in position to define potential negotiations between the White House and Capitol Hill on immigration, he will also oversee a much vaster policy portfolio than he did until now. Some hardliners acknowledged that his attention will be more divided.

In addition, Cabinet secretaries who often relied on Wiles to slow-walk aggressive moves on immigration will still retain their own influence and relationships with the president. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have been seen as particularly sensitive to the demands of industry groups reliant on immigrant labor.

“Miller being there doesn’t automatically preclude or guarantee that there won’t be a slowdown on immigration enforcement,” argued Mark Krikorian, the head of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies think tank in Washington. “He’s been very good at surviving and deciding which fights have a good chance of being won. … This is something Miller has been navigating for a decade, the competing tensions within the GOP on immigration.”

Still, Miller’s elevation also comes as several of the party’s biggest moderating voices on immigration — including Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) — have been blown out of power by Tuesday’s election.

It’s a combination of events that advocates of mass deportation call ripe for a full deployment of a tactic the administration has not entirely embraced: targeting companies that employ unauthorized immigrants by conducting audits and compliance visits at worksites. Both steps could make a difference in achieving more removals and self-deportations, they believe.

“I think you loudly say [to businesses], ‘Get your affairs in order,’” Howell said on what he hopes to see from Miller, “because you know the worksite amnesty is over. We will be at the farms. We will be at the factories. We will be in the industrial hubs. We will be talking to DoorDash and Uber Eats.”

Krikorian said Miller’s elevation also provides an opportunity for the administration to marshal bureaucratic resources across the government to verify whether employees’ records match the list of people authorized to work and live in the United States. The administration had previously promised immigration hawks that it would pursue additional audits and reviews of employee authorizations.

“That’s the kind of stuff that’ll incentivize compliance and promote self deportation, if they do consistent nationwide paperwork enforcement,” he said.

Democrats and some Republicans, meanwhile, believe Trump is making a political mistake.

Miller’s promotion comes just days after a brutal wipeout for the GOP in the midterms — in large part driven by a swell of Latino voters swinging Democratic just two years after they helped send Trump to the White House. Among their top concerns were the sweeping immigration enforcement operations that reached a fever pitch earlier this year, which sparked protests across the country.

GOP operatives who had already begun privately absorbing the shattering loss of one of the biggest drivers of Trump’s MAGA coalition from 2024 expressed shock at Miller’s new role. “No lessons were learned,” one GOP operative who worked on House races this cycle texted POLITICO. “I guess there’s nothing left to lose.” (The person was granted anonymity to speak freely about the political fallout of Miller’s promotion.)

“Voters overwhelmingly rebuke his approach and then he names his most extreme adviser as chief of staff,” said Sarah Pierce, a former DHS official now at the center-left Third Way think tank in Washington.