Stephen Miller, the arsonist who fuels Trump's incendiary streak

Washington"We are a superpower and we will behave like a superpower." In short. US Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, On Monday night, he shocked Europeans with even more inflammatory statements than those of Donald Trump himself. Don't let the drabness of the title fool you: this 40-year-old is an omnipresent figure in the halls of the White House, the president's most trusted enforcer and official arsonist.

The statements to CNN weren't a slip of the tongue, nor an escalation in Washington's hyperactive imperialist campaign; it was Stephen Miller being Stephen Miller: the same man who has portrayed the political opposition as the "forces of evil" threatening the lineage of a noble nation that dates back to the Romans; who called the Democratic Party an "extremist domestic organization"; who has advocated suspending the right tohabeas corpus For immigrants, he branded legal immigration as the "Somalification of America," and, obviously, he believes in an international order governed "by force" and "power" in which the weak have no choice but to bow their heads. And when he says all this, he says it because he truly believes it, while the rest of the government listens attentively. Including the commander in chief

There are times when even Trump finds his advisor's dogmatism too extreme. "I'd love for him to come here and tell us his true feelings, or maybe not his most genuine ones," the president joked in October during a briefing in the Oval Office. Trump believes Miller's ideas might be too strong for the public. But this hasn't stopped Miller from becoming one of the president's key advisors, consulting him on almost every policy decision.

One of Miller's strengths is that he's probably one of the few people in Trump's inner circle who speak their minds loud and clear. But what the president surely values most is his soldierly demeanor: even if he disagrees with a decision, if Trump gives an order, he carries it out with mechanical precision. This translates into tough orders and high expectations for everyone in the administration who reports to him. Besides being the White House deputy chief of staff, Miller is also the director of the National Security Council. This interagency task force, a vestige of the George W. Bush administration's war on terror, is the power base from which Miller has access to a large portion of the administration's law enforcement agencies: the FBI, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), CBP (the Border Patrol), and the like.

Immigration, an obsession

The ICE raids in Los Angeles in JuneThe arbitrary and violent arrests that sparked the protests in the city were a consequence of pressure from Miller, who saw that the deportation campaign was losing momentum. In May, just before the landing in the Californian city, he demanded that ICE arrest 3,000 immigrants per day. He is behind the recruitment campaign to grow the immigration force, which initially had about 20,000 agents. Under the banner of defending the nation from an "invasion," the goal had been set to recruit 10,000 new agents. In early January, the Department of Homeland Security announced with satisfaction that it had surpassed the minimum target with a total of 12,000 new agents.

The issue of immigration has always been Miller's great obsession, and he is also known for his sympathies with white supremacy. In 2019 the Southern Poverty Law Center He reported the leak of emails that Miller had sent to the conservative website Breitbart News, where he pressured them to spread ideas from the book. The camp of the saintsA 1970s novel popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

His fixation with immigrants goes beyond whether or not they have legal status in the country. It's a racial issue. That's why he has also pushed to hinder legal immigration programs, such as DACA. The acronym refers to the program created by Obama in 2012 to protect minors who have entered the US without papers, and is also used to describe this population group. Trump used to speak favorably of DACA, but recently his tone has changed.

Miller was the ideologue behind the policies of separating families during Trump's first term. Despite not being a legal expert, he was also the one who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, imaginatively reinterpreted a 1944 emergency authority to close the border and summarily expel migrants entering from Mexico. Back then, he was only an advisor to the president, and therefore didn't have as much power as he does now. But even so, it fueled the tycoon's heavy-handed approach against migrants.

The well-oiled machinery of the mass deportation campaign is working at full speed because Miller had been planning it for some time. The president's confidant is also one of the authors of Project 2025, the ultraconservative plan of the think tank Heritage Foundation, which outlined the main lines of the assault on the democratic system that Trump is carrying out.