Trump ready to name immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as policy leader in White House
President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly gearing up to name Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser and a hardliner on immigration, to serve as his deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reported.
Miller has long worked in Trumpworld, dating to the president-elect’s 2016 campaign as a speechwriter. He served as a senior adviser in the first Trump administration. In that capacity, he helped craft the “zero tolerance” policy that separated migrant children from their parents.
Miller also helped craft the Trump administration’s travel ban from majority-Muslim countries.
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt would neither confirm nor deny Miller’s appointment.
“President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon,” she told CNN, who first reported the appointment based on sources. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”
The move comes as Trump, who won a second term in the White House last week, has pledged to begin his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. The former president has also said there is “no price tag” for his plan.
The former aide to Jeff Sessions and Michele Bachmann has previously laid out plans for a potential Trump administration. During a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Miller described methods for enacting the policy.
“You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flights,” he said. “So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that's what the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to remove those illegals home.”
He also said at the conference that he would plan on deputizing the National Guard to go to the US-Mexico border with a mission to impede and deny people from coming to the United States.
“In other words, you reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don't have a right to enter into our sovereign territory to even request the asylum claim,’ he said. “The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border, and to say no one can cross here at all.”
On top of that, Miller delivered a speech at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden saying “America is for Americans and Americans only.” That statement drew comparisons on social media to lines used by Germany in World War II.
Trump made illegal immigration a core part of his re-election campaign, saying that the country was being overrun with migrants coming illegally and saying that they were “poisoning the blood of the country.”
On Sunday evening, Trump announced that Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would join his administration to focus on US borders.
“Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” he posted on Truth Social. “Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for job.”