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Donald Trump is to appoint Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy, putting the immigration hardliner in a top role in the White House.
During his election campaign the president-elect said that one of his immediate priorities once in the White House would be to usher in “mass deportations” of millions of people living in the US illegally.
Miller has for years been among the most vocal and influential immigration hawks in Trump’s inner circle. The appointment of the 39-year-old will put the conservative firebrand and longtime adviser at the heart of the president-elect’s effort to reduce illegal immigration.
JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, congratulated Miller in a post on X on Monday, calling his selection, which was first reported by CNN, “another fantastic pick by the president”.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Miller did not respond to a request for comment.
A junior Senate staffer who rose quickly through the ranks of the Republican party to become highly influential in Trump’s first administration, Miller was credited with writing some of his most incendiary speeches — including Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, in which he vowed to end what he described as “American carnage”, a dystopian view of an impoverished, crime-ridden country.
He also drafted many of Trump’s most polarising immigration policies, including the travel ban on visitors from Muslim-majority countries and the policy of separating migrant children from their parents.
Miller — who has been president of America First Legal, a non-profit conservative legal group, since Trump left office — has continued to espouse hardline views on immigration in particular.
American First Legal last week celebrated a Texas federal court judge’s ruling striking down the Biden administration’s effort to provide legal status for hundreds of thousands of undocumented spouses of US citizens.
At Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden last month, Miller said America was “for Americans and Americans only”.
In a further sign that the former president is doubling down on his campaign messages, Trump on Monday also appointed former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the US’s top environmental regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency. It is the first public confirmation that the new administration will tear up Biden-era rules aimed at reducing US carbon emissions.
In a statement that coincided with the meeting of almost 200 countries in Baku for the UN’s annual climate talks, Trump said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses” while maintaining “the cleanest air and water on the planet”.
News of the appointments came just one day after Trump said he had chosen Tom Homan as a so-called border tsar to implement his plans to crack down on undocumented immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border, and deport those already in the US.
Like Miller, Homan is a veteran of the first Trump administration: he was acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency when the president-elect was previously in the White House.
“Tom Homan will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (“The Border Czar”), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, on Sunday.
“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump added. “Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
Trump has moved quickly to make several high-profile appointments for his second administration since his overwhelming victory over Kamala Harris last week. The president-elect last week named Susie Wiles, his 2024 campaign manager, as his White House chief of staff, and on Monday separately confirmed he had chosen New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik to be the next US ambassador to the UN.
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington
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