Stephen Miller, Trinity ‘07 and former Chronicle opinion columnist, was reportedly tapped Monday morning to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
Trump is expected to formally announce the appointment sometime in the next two days. The news was first reported by CNN.
A longtime adviser to Trump, Miller began working for the then-candidate as a speechwriter in his 2016 presidential campaign. He later became a senior adviser in Trump’s first presidential administration and was involved in many of his hardline immigration policies, most notably the 2018 move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence strategy.
Trump’s current immigration platform is similarly restrictive. The president-elect has advocated for mass deportations, deploying federal troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, strengthening U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and cutting funding to “sanctuary cities.”
According to CNN, Miller is a “lead architect” of Trump’s new immigration agenda and has said that the administration “would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than 1 million per year.” ICE was responsible for over 142,000 deportations in fiscal year 2023, compared to roughly 72,000 the previous year.
Miller also played a role in designing the administration’s travel ban affecting several Muslim-majority countries.
Duke was among 31 universities that filed an amicus brief in 2017 opposing the travel ban, which asserted that the schools were “already feeling its damaging effects.”
The same year, nearly 3,000 of Miller’s classmates penned an “open letter” condemning his policy stances as insensitive and hypocritical, writing that they found it “impossible to see in [his] words and actions any glimmer of the University values [they] so cherish, nor the slightest suggestion that [he] spent four of [his] most formative years at the same dynamic, diverse institution of higher education [they] did.”
Miller is currently the president of America First Legal, a legal advocacy group consisting of several former members of the Trump administration. The organization aims to “challenge the lawlessness” of the “radical left” and has filed over 100 lawsuits against “woke corporations.”
Miller received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences in 2007.
Throughout his two years as an opinion columnist for The Chronicle, he endeavored, in his own words, “to stand up for American values and expose those, such as the lacrosse persecutors, who hold them in contempt.” His conservative takes on topics such as campus culture, affirmative action and the 2006 lacrosse scandal made him “a controversial figure,” even among some members of his own party, who were stunned by the content of his column over a decade later.
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Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.