Miller HAD been out of the spotlight for a while….
But we have a fresh revelation of the efforts of the Trump aides’ hardline immigration actions , even against kids by gaming the system AGAINST them often ignoring legal rules…..
Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.
As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.
He is directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children. Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country.
Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the US by immigration judges since Trump returned to the White House, a doubling of such court orders since January 2025, according to analysis of data from the Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) conducted by the California-based advocacy Mobile Pathways and shared with the Guardian. The advocacy group has focused its numbers on children appearing in immigration court, regardless of whether they arrived in the US alone or with family, and believes the total to be an undercount.
Miller has harnessed personnel and power for his task from at least five cabinet-level government departments, as described to the Guardian by several sources briefed on various initiatives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The departments include Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care of migrant children who are in the country without a parent or guardian; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are based; and the Department of Justice (DoJ), which houses the immigration courts – with the state department and the Department of Defense playing more subsidiary roles.
Miller frequently confers with subordinates, daily at times, pressing them to maximize removals of immigrant children from the US, according to a number of sources familiar with the White House plans.
“The folks that have to do the implementation are told, ‘These instructions came directly from the White House,’ or ‘These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,’ as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion and doing it in the way that they were instructed to do it,” one source said.
Sources warned of the White House pushing each department to boost efforts individually and by working together in new ways to speed up and expand the deportation of undocumented children – especially by dismantling inter-agency communication safeguards designed to protect children, and hurrying them in vast numbers, without lawyers, in front of asylum officers and immigration judges who are either inclined or are under pressure to take a hard line and get them out of the US…..
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The White House did not deny that Miller is orchestrating a multi-agency effort to speed up the removal of undocumented children but claimed the effort was not new….
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“The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” said White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.
The Homeland Security Council is a body which, under Trump, now answers directly to him within the executive office of the president of the United States and is led by Miller.
But there is no certainty that deported young people end up reunited with family and safe in their home countries, as many of them left in the first place because of threats to their wellbeing, including from their own family, or in order to reunite with parents in the US.
One source said: “This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them … they have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children’s safety as their priority.”….
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Of the more than 200,000 children in total that have been ordered removed under the second Trump administration, 70% were under the age of 13. The percentage of hearings ending in a removal order also more than doubled over the 20 months….
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Half a dozen experts and government staff have detailed, as one put it, “an unprecedented level of collaboration between agencies like USCIS, ORR and ICE and the immigration courts”.
Two sources described being briefed on the White House putting together a group of officials, known as “a tiger team” in government parlance, to coordinate policy around unaccompanied children, involving DHS, ORR, the DoJ and the state department.
The result is “coercive measure after coercive measure in trying to get kids to relinquish their rights”. Experts interviewed for this article describe many measures and the extent to which they required inter-agency collaboration which have not been previously reported, including….
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Sources said that federal rules prohibit ORR from sharing children’s welfare files with ICE and this wall had typically been effective but now was being routinely disregarded.
“They’re taking norms that no-one ever thought needed to be legislated … because there was at least a general understanding of how harmful it would be if they were undone. And this administration just doesn’t care about harm, right? The cruelty is the intent of this,” a source said.
A state department spokesperson said: “The United States expects every country to accept the return of its nationals expeditiously. The state department leads diplomatic efforts to ensure compliance with this basic responsibility.”
These practices are being implemented in tandem with other policies that are keeping children in foster homes, shelters or even secure lockups, away from family, for very long periods, where many lose hope and choose to self-deport. Hundreds of undocumented children are currently being sent to Texas, where it is easier to deport them.
Federal officials have also defunded over 20,000 unaccompanied children’s attorneys from nearly a hundred legal services organizations across the country, while approaching firms and anti-trafficking organizations with little immigration law experience but with ties to the administration or ICE to replace them…
“The erosion of due process, the dramatic attacks on both immigration courts and legal service providers, all of these feel like they are tools that are part of this larger project of essentially deporting these children by any means necessary,” said Azadeh Erfani, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC).
For some experts, Miller’s widely recognized leadership of the inter-agency effort is itself concerning because of his engagement with white nationalist ideology. Miller’s rhetoric frequently echoes the “great replacement theory”, a racist notion that nonwhite immigrants will overrun western civilization.
For his part, Trump has said that immigrants in the US from around the world are “poisoning the blood of our country” – a line that drew comparisons to Nazism.
“There is little doubt that Stephen Miller’s influence on these anti-children policies comes with racial bias,” said Erfani.
Another source added: “There’s some real animus towards the kids coming from Miller and his acolytes. And I think that it’s also very connected to the same reason that he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. It’s about demographics, right? And he sees the kids as, like, the future generation that will, you know, continue a multiracial, multicultural vision of this country.”…..
image….NY Times…..
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