Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s nativist Prince of Darkness, must be a happy man these days. In August, ICE rounded up nearly 59,925 undocumented migrants for detention and deportation, following 50,208 in July. Chief strategist behind Trump’s mass deportation policy, Miller is gaining on his goals of 3,000 a day and 1 million in a year.
The August figures amount to nearly 2,000 a day, 2/3 of the way to the goal Miller has imposed on federal immigration agents and 720,000 for a year, 72% of Miller’s annual goal. This is an improvement (in his terms) from 1,200-1,500 a day the government was arresting before Miller ordered the higher goal in May 2025. If his goals were not met, he declared, top officials at ICE would be fired, as would agents scoring in the bottom 10% of arrests.
Deputy Chief of Staff in the Trump White House, Miller is the main non-Cabinet official to be profiled in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s best seller, Regime Change, and he comes across as Trump’s most loyal and ruthless aide and the one Trump trusts most. The authors say they share the “paranoid vision” of federal workers as “Trump haters and Marxists subverting America from within” and that Miller became Trump’s “hatchet man.”
Starting out as a speechwriter in Trump’s first term, Miller was a key player in transition planning for the second. Though he has a second-string-sounding title, his actual remit covers all domestic policy. So he may be pushing Trump’s other depredations, including revenge against his adversaries, crackdowns on universities and law firms and rewriting American history to sugarcoat slavery and racial discrimination.
But immigration has been his singular passion. In the first term, he was the author of the notorious family separation policy, which left some 1,300 children still not reunited with their families, so careless was the administration about its counting. In a 2024 campaign speech, he declared “America is for Americans—and Americans only.” And he thrilled when Trump characterized Mexicans as “rapists and murderers,” though independent researchers have calculated that crime rates are lower among immigrants than the native population.
Under Trump and Miller, ICE has more than doubled its personnel from 10,000 agents to 22,000, with plans to add another 10,000 by 2029. The total budget for immigration enforcement increased from $9.6 billion to $20.4 billion base funding, plus $429.5 billion to be spent by 2029. ICE has become the best-funded law enforcement agency in the US. Along with growth, the Trump/Miller policy includes deploying masked ICE and Border Patrol agents who are often ill-trained and badly vetted and who often use violence to apprehend suspected illegal immigrants. They’ve killed at least five this year alone.
They often arrest and deport immigrants with “administrative warrants” that allow for no judicial determination that they deserve the treatment they get, which may include transfer to a country they have no connection to, and/or a country with a recent history of extreme violence.
The administration has rescinded Temporary Protective Status for Haitians, with 350,000 beginning to be repatriated. Kristi Noem, former Secretary of Homeland Security, justified the TPS move on the grounds that the violent conditions that led to TPS no longer applied. In fact, gang violence in Haiti has displaced 1.5 million people, and 3,100 people have been killed during the first six months of 2026 alone. The State Department has issued its strongest “Do Not Travel” warnings about Haiti. Can it be that Stephen Miller is not aware of this history?
The Trump administration claims that it is ridding the US of “the worst of the worst”—violent criminals and gang members—but actually official government data show that only 14% of detainees have records for violent crime (independent agencies put the percentage at 5-7%.) Internal Department of Homeland Security data show that 40% of detainees have no criminal records except for civil immigration violations, but respected independent counters put the percentage as high as 73%. What’s happening here is a blatant program of ethnic cleansing, not crime control.
Under Miller’s supervision, the Trump administration has toughened its enforcement methods. Whereas ICE formerly did not make arrests at churches, schools, hospitals and courthouses, Trump & Co. rescinded that policy: any undocumented person is now subject to arrest anywhere—at home, at work, at school, filing legitimate legal papers at a courthouse, driving a vehicle, even in a campground in the North Cascades at midnight. US citizens and green card holders often are mistakenly arrested. And it’s a common practice for attorneys to win an immigrant’s release, only to have him or her re-arrested outside the courthouse and slated for expedited removal without due process.
On their way out of the US, persons slated for deportation are held in one of ICE’s 460 detention facilities, which currently house 60,000 to 70,000 persons. About 71% of the inmates have no criminal convictions. The Trump administration has committed $45 billion for detention expansion, aiming for 100,000 additional beds and 10,000 new detention officers.
The centers have a well-documented record of ill-treatment of detainees (including by DHS’s own inspector general): worm-infested or moldy food, contaminated water, extreme temperatures, overcrowding well beyond contracted capacity (one Florida facility held 1,806 detainees in a space rated for 611), inadequate medical care leading to the deaths of at least 52 inmates during Trump’s second term. Chief immigration czar Stephen Miller surely is aware of this cruelty and hasn’t stopped it.
The public certainly is becoming aware of it. Trump’s approval rating for handling immigration has dropped from 50% at the beginning of this term to an average of 39% now. Half of US adults say that Trump has “gone too far” in deporting people living illegally in the US. A Reuters poll taken just after two US protesters were killed in Minneapolis found that 58% said ICE was “going too far” in its crackdowns. Only 30% have a favorable view of ICE overall.
Seventy percent of Republicans have a favorable view of ICE vs 20% of independents. Eighty percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, which accounts for the GOP Congress’s repeatedly adding billions to ICE’s budget and voting down Democratic efforts to reform ICE.
The Economist magazine has editorialized that Trump immigration policy is damaging the US economy by depriving farmers, construction firms and hospitals, among other businesses, of workers who also pay taxes and contribute to Social Security, which is in danger of going broke.
So the only way that Americans can stop the immigration policies’ cruelty and stupidity and bring Trump and Miller to heel is to put Democrats in charge of both the House and Senate in the midterms where they can investigate and expose what’s been going on. Voter turnout has never been more important.
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