WASHINGTON — United States President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap immigration adviser Stephen Miller as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reported on Monday in what would place the architect of Trump’s restrictive first-term immigration agenda in a top position.
Miller’s appointment would join that of new “border czar” Tom Homan, the former acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, who Trump said would be tasked with “Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
US Vice President-elect JD Vance appeared to confirm Miller’s appointment in a post on X, saying “This is another fantastic pick by the president. Congrats @StephenM!”
Trump was elected to a second term after promising to deport record numbers of immigrants in the United States illegally, an effort that is expected to draw resources from across the US government but which critics say would be inhumane, costly and ineffective.
Miller was a White House senior adviser for policy during Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency and the driving force behind the Republican’s wide-ranging immigration crackdown. Policies included construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, banning people from certain Muslim-majority nations and elsewhere, and a contentious 2018 border policy that separated thousands of migrant families.
US Border Patrol agents, front, speak with migrants seeking asylum, mainly from Colombia, China and Ecuador, in a makeshift, mountainous campsite after crossing the border between Mexico and the United States, February 2, 2024, near Jacumba, California. (AP/Gregory Bull)
Both Miller and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had been put in charge of immigration policy, reportedly leading to some confusion given Miller’s hardline and Kushner’s more pragmatic approach. With Kushner having confirmed he will not join Trump’s second administration, Miller’s appointment could signal that his approach will be more prominent when the Republican returns to the Oval Office.
Since leaving the White House, Miller has directed America First Legal, a non-profit dedicated to litigation against “the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police and anti-American crusade.”
He has come under criticism from some of his Jewish compatriates — including his uncle and childhood rabbi — for his hardline views on immigration.
David Glosser, Miller’s maternal uncle and a longtime volunteer for the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, wrote in Politico in August 2018 that his nephew is an “immigration hypocrite for supporting policies that would have condemned his own Jewish family to death if they had been enacted a century ago.”
Illustrative: Jewish immigrants arriving at the immigration office in Ellis Island in New York c. 1910 (Photo by Apic/Getty Images via JTA)
Glosser explained that Miller’s great-great-grandfather Wolf-Leib Glosser fled the Belarusian shtetl of Antopol, arriving in the United States in 1903 “with $8 to his name,” and raising a family that “emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.”
In a 2018 Rosh Hashana sermon, Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels of Los Angeles’s Beth Shir Shalom congregation — which Miller attended with his family in 1999-2003 — said Miller’s recommendations to Trump “make it obvious to me that you didn’t get my, or our, Jewish message.”
Also on Monday, Trump announced that he will appoint Jewish former GOP lawmaker Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
“He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump will likely look to reverse many rules administered by the EPA on the burning of fossil fuels, including one curbing carbon emissions from power plants and another slashing such emissions from vehicles.
“We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin wrote on X.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
