When Stephen Miller took to the podium at the memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk this month, he issued a stark warning to the leftwing forces he believes were responsible for the assassination.
“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” he said, addressing his ideological enemies. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilisation, to save the west, to save this republic.”
Other eulogies that day also blamed the Trump administration’s political opponents for Kirk’s death. But Miller’s words carry real weight. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has the power to transform conservative rage over the killing into what he calls “a righteous thunder of action”.
The left has good reason to fear his retribution.
Stephen Miller speaks at the memorial for Charlie Kirk in Arizona © Reuters
Miller is America’s most powerful unelected bureaucrat. As Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff and adviser on homeland security, he is the architect of the president’s plan to remake America.
“He’s prime minister,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his first term. “I don’t think there’s an aspect of domestic policy — outside of some areas of national security and treasury functions and finance and things like that — that he’s not intimately involved in.”
He is also a man long accused by critics of autocratic tendencies. Last month he labelled the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”. In May he talked of suspending the writ of habeas corpus — the constitutional right to due process.
Former colleagues are not surprised at his influence. “I always knew that if Trump came back into power it would be the Stephen Miller show, and that’s exactly what we have today,” said Olivia Troye, a former national security official who interacted with Miller while working in the first Trump White House.
“There’s nobody there to counterbalance him,” she said. “That’s why you’re seeing a lot of the more extreme things happen.”
Miller, the only high-level White House member of staff to stay close to Trump after his first term and then follow him back into the Oval Office in January, has become closely associated with some of the president’s most controversial policies.
The arrests of undocumented immigrants at routine courthouse hearings, the push to abolish birthright citizenship and the decision to deploy armed National Guard troops and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles all bear his imprimatur.
But his interests extend far beyond immigration and security. Miller has also been linked to Trump’s assault on universities, legal firms, cultural institutions and the media.
“This has all been Stephen, connecting the dots,” said one person familiar with Trump’s thinking. “He’s got his hand in all of that.”
Miller has also tended to push boundaries, justifying radical policies with tenuous legal arguments that some judges have condemned as unlawful.
“The extremism and over-reach that we’ve seen, with suggestions that somehow the administration doesn’t have to follow court orders, or that people’s constitutional rights can be weaponised against them, we see a lot of Stephen Miller’s fingerprints on that,” said Skye Perryman, head of Democracy Forward, a group that has challenged hundreds of Trump’s executive actions since he re-entered the White House.
But to his allies, Miller personifies an administration that is exercising the full panoply of presidential powers to implement a set of policies they insist a majority of Americans support.
“Miller has an understanding and control of the policy apparatus, not just in the White House but the entire executive branch,” said one Trump-connected lobbyist. “And he has shown the administration how you can use every lever of power to achieve a result.”
Miller declined a request for an interview. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described him in a statement as “one of President Trump’s longest serving and most trusted advisers for nearly a decade”.
“I can personally attest to the respect that President Trump has for Stephen because I witness it every day,” she said.
Trump had “the utmost faith in him and his proven leadership abilities”, she added. As well as being “extremely effective at his jobs” he was a “loyal colleague and friend”.
Critics fear Miller will now use Kirk’s killing as a pretext to crack down on the left and stifle dissent. Speaking on a podcast with vice-president JD Vance, he said the administration would channel anger over the activist’s death to “uproot and dismantle . . . terrorist networks”. He did not specify which ones.
In his remarks at the Kirk memorial, Miller had harsh words for Maga’s enemies. “You are nothing,” he said. “You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing.”
The crowd’s lukewarm reaction to Miller’s rhetoric paled in comparison with the tearful ovation for Erika Kirk, the slain influencer’s widow, when she said she forgave her husband’s killer.
“The answer to hate is not hate,” she said, in what sounded like a rebuke to Miller’s wrath-filled harangue.
From an early age, Miller, the son of Jewish Democrats who grew up in a wealthy neighbourhood of Santa Monica, California, had strong views on immigration.
Jason Islas, who was friends with him in middle school, said the two of them shared an interest in space travel, history and Frank Sinatra. Then one day in eighth grade Miller told him the friendship was over.
“He gave a list of reasons,” Islas told the Financial Times. “And my Latino heritage was on the list . . . It was a little sadistic.”
Miller became interested in politics in high school, becoming a fan of rightwing broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, the Black host of a call-in radio show popular with conservatives in LA. He became a regular on Elder’s show, appearing 69 times.
While still at secondary school he gained a reputation as a provocateur, berating Latino students for speaking Spanish rather than English. In her 2020 biography of Miller, Hatemonger, Jean Guerrero described how he told his fellow pupils to deliberately drop rubbish for the cleaners to pick up.
“Am I the only one here who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he said in a speech at a school event.
He had his breakthrough moment in the national media while still a student at Duke University, appearing on Fox News to defend the college’s white lacrosse players who had been accused — falsely, it later turned out — of raping a Black woman.
In the 2010s he worked as an aide to Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama, devoting his energies to killing a bipartisan effort to reform America’s broken immigration system.
“He was a lone voice in the wilderness,” said Matt Boyle, Washington bureau chief of rightwing news website Breitbart. But Miller’s hardline approach to immigration soon became Republican party orthodoxy. “He’s been ahead of the curve on every single major issue of the time,” Boyle added.
In 2016 Miller formally joined Trump’s first presidential campaign, as a speechwriter. “Stephen and the president clicked immediately,” said Bannon, who later oversaw Trump’s campaign. “I mean it was a mind meld.”
As soon as Miller joined, the quality of Trump’s speeches improved, taking on “a little more gravitas and substance”, according to Bannon. “Charisma can only get you so far,” he said. “Eventually you’re going to have to have some thought-through policy, and Stephen was the guy to do that.”
Stephen Miller spars with CNN reporter Jim Acosta over US immigration in 2017 © CNN
Hired as an adviser in the first Trump White House, Miller quickly put his stamp on immigration policy. He was one of the chief authors of the so-called Muslim travel ban, which imposed entry restrictions on the citizens of several Muslim-majority countries, and developed the “zero tolerance” policy that triggered family separations at the US-Mexico border in 2018.
But his initiatives were often blocked by the courts and encountered stiff resistance from within the federal bureaucracy itself.
Miller’s uncle was horrified. David Glosser, a neuropsychologist, called his nephew an “immigration hypocrite”, saying his own family would have “gone up the crematoria chimneys” if the US had pursued in the early 20th century the same policies that his nephew was proposing.
In a now notorious incident, Miller was asked in 2017 whether his policies restricting legal immigration contradicted the spirit of the poem “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . ” engraved inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Miller replied that the poem was “added later” and the statue actually had nothing to do with immigration.
Officials who interacted with Miller during Trump’s term were struck by his unusual way of working. He would eschew the normal policy process, in which lawyers and stakeholders were drafted in to ensure administration proposals were legally and ethically watertight, said one former official who dealt with him then.
“Stephen is ballsier — he didn’t want to wait for that stuff. He was like, ‘No, we’re just doing it.’ And that’s still his MO.”
Supporters see it differently. “It took him four years to figure out how to . . . knock out the career bureaucrats whose job is just to sit in meetings and tell you, ‘No, no, we can’t do this for 10 different reasons,’” said one former colleague of Miller’s. “Stephen was, like, tell me how we can get to ‘yes’ on that.”
But his obsession with undocumented immigrants often antagonised people. “Back then it was ‘Find stories about immigrants who’ve been in a drunk-driving incident, whether convicted or not,’” said one former homeland security official. “He said we need to paint this picture that immigrants are dangerous to Americans.” The official refused to comply with the request and left the department soon after.
Miller remained loyal to Trump after he lost the 2020 election, and spent much of the next four years working on policies that could be implemented if he regained the White House.
Despite his lack of legal training, he unearthed obscure laws that could justify his draconian policy proposals. In 2023 he told the conservative podcast hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton how the 1798 Alien Enemies Act could be used to conduct mass deportations without due process if there was a “predatory incursion” into the US — a ploy that Trump has used since regaining power to send Venezuelan people to El Salvador.
When Trump won the election, Miller was appointed his deputy chief of staff and it quickly became clear that he would enjoy broad powers to override the kind of bureaucratic resistance that he felt stymied him the first time round.
In an event that underscored his new authority, Miller and Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, summoned top immigration enforcement officials to Washington in May for a dressing-down over their supposedly poor performance in arresting undocumented migrants.
The reproachful tone was familiar to people who knew him during the first Trump term. “He berates people, he lectures and rants,” said Troye. “We walked on eggshells around him.”
Miller used the meeting to set a daily arrest quota of 3,000, a fourfold increase over the average during the first few months of Trump’s second term.
In the aftermath, videos went viral showing immigration agents seizing asylum-seekers at their courthouse hearings and swooping on Mexican day labourers waiting to pick up work at Home Depot parking lots.
As protests grew, Trump deployed the National Guard to quash the unrest. Miller took to social media platform X to justify the move, declaring that LA had become “occupied territory”. “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilisation. Anyone with eyes can see that now.”
Critics say Miller is a divisive figure who has spearheaded the Trump administration’s most legally questionable policies. But some former colleagues say many of the things he is pushing — including the crackdown on illegal immigration, the attacks on woke culture and on elite universities — are more popular than his enemies think.
“He has this uncanny ability to read the tea leaves on certain things and understand how the broader American electorate will respond,” said one former colleague from the first Trump White House. “Things like the assault on elite institutions actually poll very well across party lines.”
Despite that, Miller has had some setbacks. According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, during Trump’s first 100 days in office federal courts issued 25 nationwide injunctions against the federal government, compared with four under the Biden administration.
“It’s not surprising that the Trump administration is losing in court,” said Perryman. “It appears they are allowing someone to drive their legal strategy who is not a lawyer.”
Watching Miller’s rise to the heights of political power has been an unsettling experience for Islas. He initially saw his former school friend extreme views as a kind of adolescent pose, a way of rebelling against the liberal status quo that prevailed in Santa Monica in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But rather than dropping it as he grew older it has only become more intense.
“We don’t all become a deeper version of our childhood rebellions,” he said. “But that’s what it’s become for him. It’s all-consuming.”