President Donald Trump on Friday named Stephen Miller, the strategist behind his mass deportation campaign, as White House chief of staff, three days after voters handed Democrats commanding majorities in both chambers of Congress.
It is the first shake-up of Trump's senior team since the midterms. Susie Wiles, who held the post, will move over to Trump's political operation, the president said in a Truth Social post Friday afternoon.
Trump called Miller one of his most trusted advisers. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, he said he wants Miller to run things well, describing him as politically sharp, a strong manager and someone who has been with him from the start.
The promotion comes after an election in which Latino voters, many of whom backed Trump in 2024, turned away from him. Every demographic group swung toward Democrats, but Latinos moved 21 points, post-election analyses found.
Democrats promise scrutiny
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become speaker in January, wrote on X that Miller is a dangerous extremist with American blood on his hands and demanded that Trump fire him that day.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, expected to lead the House Oversight Committee next year, warned Miller to get a lawyer and promised to investigate his part in the deportation effort. Sen. Alex Padilla said Democrats would answer Trump's escalation with oversight, investigations, subpoenas and their leverage over federal funding.
That leverage has limits. Immigration enforcement agencies are flush with $70 billion in funding through 2029, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set to vastly expand its workforce, and arrests and detentions already stand at record highs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth congratulated Miller on social media, praising him as a true patriot who never retreats. Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of Raíces, a Texas-based immigration services nonprofit, said the move signals the administration is doubling down on its cruelest impulses.
Miller’s promotion guarantees an acceleration of mass deportations and of brute force unleashed within our neighborhoods.
Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of Raíces
Architect of the crackdown
Miller, 41, has steered Trump's immigration agenda since the first term. He devised the travel restrictions on Muslim-majority countries and designed the zero tolerance border policy, under which upward of 5,600 children ended up apart from the adults responsible for them.
In the second term, he built the legal case for using the Alien Enemies Act against Venezuelan immigrants, asylum seekers among them, by branding them as terrorists tied to the Tren de Aragua cartel. He also pushed surges of immigration agents into mostly Democratic-led cities throughout 2026 and championed the fight against birthright citizenship, which the administration lost at the Supreme Court.
After federal agents killed Alex Pretti, a nurse, during immigration raids in Minneapolis in January, Miller reshared video of the shooting, labeling Pretti a would-be assassin and accusing Democrats of siding with terrorists.
In a December 2025 television interview, Miller called birthright citizenship history's greatest scam and asserted that some immigrant groups show high rates of welfare use and crime across generations. Studies compiled by the Migration Policy Institute have found that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the U.S.
