Stephen Miller

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Stephen Miller grew up in an affluent Santa Monica neighborhood, the second of three children born to Miriam (née Glosser) and Michael Miller. His family is of Eastern European Jewish descent on both sides, descended from Jews who escaped the Russian pogroms; his great-grandfather Wolf-Leib Glosser arrived at Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name, and the family later built Glosser’s department store in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Miller’s politics took shape early: at Santa Monica High School he opposed the campus MEChA chapter and brought conservative radio host Larry Elder to speak; at Duke University he ran the Duke Conservative Union and the local chapter of David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom. White nationalist Richard Spencer, who overlapped with Miller at Duke, later described them as “thick as thieves” and said Miller had “always been on the edge of the far right.”

After college, Miller worked as a congressional press aide and then spent seven formative years (2009-2016) as communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions, an anti-immigration hardliner; the two worked together to defeat the bipartisan 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration bill. In the first Trump administration (2017-2021), Miller became the dominant policy voice on immigration, helping create the 2017 travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries — later found by two federal courts to be a “Muslim ban” — and the 2018 “zero tolerance” policy that separated nearly 3,000 children from their families at the border. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which analyzed Miller’s 2015-2016 emails to Breitbart News, characterized them as “open white nationalism,” noting his promotion of The Camp of the Saints, a novel associated with “great replacement” ideology. Over 100 members of Congress called for his resignation after the emails were published. His own uncle, retired neuropsychologist David Glosser, publicly called him an “immigration hypocrite” who had become “the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

Between Trump terms, Miller founded and led America First Legal (2021-2024), positioned as a conservative counterpart to the ACLU, which filed dozens of lawsuits against Biden-administration policies, corporate diversity programs, and progressive causes. Its revenue grew from roughly $6 million in 2021 to over $44 million in 2022 (per the organization’s reporting cited in the research profile), including a reported $27 million from the Bradley Impact Fund.

Returning to power in 2025 as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, Miller was the principal author of the day-one cascade of executive orders, covering a southern-border national-emergency declaration, a challenge to birthright citizenship, revival of “Schedule F” (which reclassified federal workers to make them subject to political removal, in coordination with OMB Director Russell Vought), and the dismantling of federal diversity programs. In a May 21, 2025 meeting at ICE headquarters, Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pressed agents to make 3,000 arrests per day — far above the 700-900 daily figure at the end of the Biden term — with Miller reportedly telling officials it was “now about quantity over quality” and threatening to fire the bottom 10% of performers. NBC News had earlier described him as the “lone survivor” of the first administration’s Homeland Security turnover; CNN reported in 2025 that he had become “more powerful in the White House than ever.”

Sources

1. “Stephen Miller” — Southern Poverty Law Center, Extremist Files — https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/
2. “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle” — David Glosser, HIAS Pennsylvania — https://hiaspa.org/recommendation/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle/
3. “Stephen Miller” — Wikipedia (political advisor) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)
4. “Who is Stephen Miller, Trump’s Jewish adviser and White House deputy chief of staff?” — The Forward, 2024 — https://forward.com/fast-forward/673888/stephen-miller-jewish-trump-deputy-chief-of-staff/
5. “Stephen Miller-led group emerges as top legal foe of Biden initiatives” — CNN Politics, 2022 — https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/politics/stephen-miller-america-first-legal-biden-initiatives/index.html
6. “From immigration to DOGE, Stephen Miller is more powerful in the White House than ever” — CNN Politics, 2025 — https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/politics/stephen-miller-white-house