Mastermind of immigration crackdown Stephen Miller named Trump chief of staff

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Friday he will elevate Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff, the first shake-up of his administration officials since Democrats trounced Republicans in the midterms.

Former Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will move to the “Trump Political Operation,” the president announced in an afternoon post on his Truth Social platform.

Trump said Miller, a key figure behind the administration’s aggressive mass deportation campaign, is “one of my most trusted advisors.” 

The president told reporters outside the White House that he wants Miller to “just run things well.”

“Stephen’s been with me from the beginning. He gets it, very good politically, and he’s a very good manager. He’ll do a great job,” he said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries slammed the move, writing on X Friday that Miller “is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands.”

“His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today,” Jeffries, who is poised to become House speaker in January, wrote on X.

Blue wave

The move comes after voters rebuked Trump Tuesday, giving Democrats sizable majorities in both the House and Senate this coming Congress. In a backlash to Trump, Hispanics who voted for the president in 2024 shunned him in the midterms.

Every voter demographic sharply swung toward Democrats, but Latinos shifted sharply, by 21 points, according to an analysis by NPR, and a separate analysis by The Associated Press.

Miller has been a proponent of the Trump administration’s campaign against birthright citizenship, which it lost in a major case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an interview with Fox News host Will Cain in December 2025, Miller described birthright citizenship as “the greatest scam in history.”

“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. Again, Somalia is a clear example here,” he said. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

The claim that immigrants commit more crimes than other demographics in the United States is unfounded, according to several studies of national crime statistics compiled by the Migration Policy Institute. The institute found that immigrants in the U.S. commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population.

The New York Times, reporting those comments by Miller, said that studies have documented the upward mobility of immigrant children and that experts questioned his underlying arguments.

The liberal-leaning Brookings Institution has reported that “immigrants are a fiscal boon to the U.S.” and that “Empirical evidence indicates that immigrants have historically contributed more in tax revenue than they receive in public benefits, creating a substantial fiscal surplus for the U.S. government over time.”

During that same interview, Miller blamed immigrants in the United States for low test scores and healthcare costs, among other issues.

2026 deadly surge

Miller also advocated for the surge of immigration agents into mostly Democrat-led American cities throughout 2026, and did not back down after extreme instances of violence. 

In January after federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minnesota, Miller reposted a video of the killing posted by the Democratic National Committee on X with the comments: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”

Miller steered immigration policies during Trump’s first term.

He has been a fixture of Trump’s political apparatus for a decade, and played a role in Trump’s successful presidential campaign beginning in 2015.