Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Advicor (their spelling mistake not ours)
If you look at immigration policy these days—and who can’t, what with the attendant virus of raids and racism—you must take a painful look at the present architect, one Mr. Stephen Miller.
He currently reigns as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and immigration czar. Can’t say for sure but he might have been the genius who demanded that the border wall be painted black so immigrant hands would sizzle with heat from the day-time broiling sun if attempting to clamber over.
But likely the idea was a photo op stunt cooked up by Most Popular Girl in the Administration and Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. It all kinds of a blunder. Most people cross at night and the migra team, including Kristi, painted the wall black, in order to make it too hot to touch during the day.
But it cools down at night. And Kristi and team migra painted it black on the US side. For the New Mexicans trying to jump the border? Confusing! So instead of migrants scorching their hands, Noem got roasted—so to speak—in the media and on line for the stunt.
But back to Stephen Miller, migra MAGA-in-chief, and one architect of the current anti-immigrant crusade.
Here’s how he got that spot.
For starters, take a look at Miller’s profile on America First Legal, a right-wing think tank in Washington DC which, according to the website, he co-founded. It explains that he’s Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advicor.
That’s not a Latinopia typo there–that’s the way “advisor” is spelled on the America First Legal’s website. It’s taken from the source.
Clearly an error. But maybe it’s a thing like painting the border wall black on the US side. Whatever these rightwing operations do is apparently alright, however sloppy and wrong.
Stephen Miller watches as Trump signs an executive order. (That’s it, sir: “It’s i before e except after C”)
Stephen Miller worked in the White House during the first Trump Administration and is evidently really spoiling to roll out a crackdown this time around. And he certainly is doing so.
He’s harbored that ambition for years.
If you can locate the fascinating article in the New Yorker from July 2024 about Project 2025 , read it. (Can’t guarantee this link will open but maybe it will help you to track it down.) The piece by Jonathan Blitzer is, of course, researched to a fare-thee-well New Yorker-style and lays out the plan behind Project 2025.
That’s the thing you never read leading up to the 2024 election even though all your friends sent it to you as a warning.
Project 2025 is the brain-child of the Heritage Foundation, a powerful right-wing outfit which has been rumbling around and building mojo since the Reagan Administration. It was financed at birth by avowed conservatives Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, an American billionaire and a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune who always dished out change in support conservative causes.
The Heritage Foundation remains wonderfully well-funded and very dedicated to shoving the US in their desired rightward direction.
The New Yorker article outlines precisely the way a host of right-wing think tanks were created in the 1980s and ‘90s and how they organized a plan to roll out the right-wing agenda we see now.
America First Legal, a conservative think tank, was co-founded by Stephen Miller.
America First Legal is one of the conservative think tank cohort and was co-founded by Stephen Miller. It’s one of those think tanks putting immigration high on the list of policies that needed fixing—but not exactly in a way that smooths out an orderly immigration process.
Immigration and stopping it was tops on Project 2025 priority list. The website VisaVerge sums the immigration policy goals up nicely here.
The masked panzones ICE guys you see on news reports or, alas, maybe in your neighborhood, have narrowed down their protocol to methods akin to shooting fish in a barrel by raiding car washes and Home Depots and picking up street vendors just to keep their numbers up.
But the overall plan is less crude and more detailed than that and was mapped out long ago. And it is now orchestrated by Deputy Chief of Staff to the President, Stephen Miller.
The migra methods are so cruel and ham-handed—picking people up people who are checking in at immigration court hearings, ICE rolling up on street vendors, showing up at schools, terrorizing people to the point that they afraid to leave their homes to pick up groceries.
It’s a kind of cruelty that makes you wonder—who comes up with this?
Who IS Stephen Miller.? And how did he come by all his meaness–and what is up with his beef with Mexicans?
Stephen, point to where the bad Mexican man hurt you.
To unpack this a little, let’s start with Miller’s childhood in Santa Monica, California among the uptrodden, in the well-heeled coastal town that’s part of greater Los Angeles.
In her book Hate Monger, Jean Guerrero details Miller’s childhood.
In her book Hate Monger, Jean Guerrero details it beautifully, outlining his family background and how his dad’s real estate investment business hit a few slides and the family had to move to—gasp!—south of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
Now, if you’ve been to Santa Monica you know that the neighborhood south of Montana is not exactly Siberia—it’s pleasant, you can jog to the beach, and, if you’re Stephen Miller, you can attend Santa Monica High School, which he did.
But the move evidently left a gouge in young Stephen’s psyche. North of Montana signals that you have enough bank to not even think about bills; south of Montana suggests you’re part of Those People.
Back to Miller and Latinos. In middle school Miller was close friends with Jason Islas, whose family was Mexican and certainly not of Miller’s family’s means. In Guerrero’s book, Islas relates that when he was a child, he and his family used to drive through the north-of-Montana neighborhood—probably when Miller still lived there but long before the two students met– and pretend to pick out the houses they would buy that they of course would never be able to afford.
Islas and Miller met in middle school, They were close friends and Star Trek nerds together during those years. Islas went to Miller’s bar mitzvah celebration at a restaurant on the beach in Malibu (after Islas’s mother scraped together the price of a Nordstrom suit.)
The summer after middle school, Islas called Miller a few times, hoping to maintain their friendship as they transitioned to high school. But for weeks Islas got no return call.
Until he did.
The call as Islas relates it tells you all you need to know about the mind and psyche of the man who is crafting immigration policy and operations in the US.
“Miller launched into a speech that would remain seared in Islas’s memory,” Guerrero writes. They couldn’t be friends anymore because of Islas’s Latino family and heritage, and Miller rolled out a list of other things that made Islas not friend-worthy.
But the most telling part of the story that sums up the cruelty of Miller’s modus operandi was how Miller delivered the friendship break-off message.
“It was the opposite of empathy, where you’re able to tune into someone’s emotional space and then hurt them because you’re emotionally aware enough to know what hurts them,” Islas recalls.
Miller’s enthusiasm for immigration raids was shaped when he was in high school.
During the friend-dumping call, Miller dished out all the insecurities that Islas had confided to him during their friendship —Islas’s doubts about his 5’4 height, his lack of confidence, even skin blemishes.
“And then he topped it off with the whole Latino thing” Islas says. The delivery, he describes, was all calm and cool.
Sounds like it might even have been a little ice-y.
Later in high school, Miller really launched his rightward trajectory. He became acquainted with right-wing thought leader David Horowitz , who mentored the blossoming conservative. At the same time, Miller developed ties with the ultra-conservative talk show commentator Larry Elder of The Larry Elder Show, and was an occasional guest on the show.
And here we are now, with Miller a top White House advisor and rip roaring to go on further crackdowns and deportations with the support of Steve Bannon, formerly of the vigorously conservative Breitbart News and, for one brief shining moment for Bannon, six months as a first term Trump adviser.
Breitbart gave Miller many a platform as he clambered his way toward his current White House duties. And there he is.
They’ve been brewing this evil a long time and we can see it’s going to take a while to get rid of it.
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Copyright 2025 by Bobbi Murray. Hate Monger book cover used under the “fair use” proviso of the copyright law. All other images are in the public domain.