In his words: Miller is an immigration hardliner and a bombastic critic of Democrats
President Donald Trump’s new White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is behind many of the administration’s signature domestic policy initiatives — especially its sweeping crackdown on immigration.
An outspoken defender of Trump’s most far-reaching goals to remake government going back to his 2016 run for president, Miller is known for his harsh language and unapologetic bombast, attracting outsized attention from supporters and critics alike. His record is likely to be scrutinized by Democrats in his powerful new role as he leads Trump’s White House through a difficult lame duck period after the Republican Party lost both houses of Congress.
Here are some memorable things Miller has said through the years:
On immigration: ‘We are being conquered’
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, commenting on the sharp rise. “We have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems.”
Miler also 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.”
He called a Minneapolis man killed by ICE a ‘domestic terrorist’
After federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during protests against the Trump’s administration’s hardline immigration policies in January, Miller posted on social media that the 37-year-old Minneapolis resident was a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” who had “tried to murder federal agents.”
Later, Miller said in a statement that the federal officers in Minneapolis “may not have been following” protocol.
America ‘created’ Venezuela’s oil industry and Greenland ‘obviously’ should be part of the US
In January, after a daring U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Miller used a lengthy post on X to decry “reverse colonization” in which he suggested that Western nations were sacrificing too much for the developing world and that such practice “has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.”
In another post, 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.”
He defended Trump’s assertion that the U.S. was now running Venezuela, by telling 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.”
