About
Stephen Miller, who worked as a congressional staffer for several years before being recruited by Steve Bannon for the 2016 Trump campaign, is among the most extreme of the extremists to serve as a senior policy advisor to Trump during his first term. In 2025 he returned to the White House as the president’s homeland security advisor and deputy chief of staff—not to mention as “one of the most powerful unelected people in America,” according to The New York Times.
With strong backing from white supremacists and nationalists, Miller has returned as the driving force behind Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies. His xenophobia and unrelenting demonization of immigrants made him the focus of the 2020 book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda. In 2024 he was still stirring up fear and hatred with the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that continues to motivate the MAGA base.
As a member of the administration when Trump lost the 2020 election, Miller helped spread the Big Lie and played a key role in trying to overturn the results through the fake electors scheme, a plan he vigorously embraced and defended well after all states certified their results and determined that Biden had won the election.
After exiting the White House with Trump, Miller launched America First Legal (AFL), billing it as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” It is an offshoot of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), considered to be the “nerve center” of the MAGA movement. Between 2021 and 2024, AFL waged ongoing legal battles against almost every proposal made by the Biden administration. It defended Trump’s brazen claims of immunity from all prosecution, organized the Republican Attorneys General Association (MAGA RAGA) to fight the Biden agenda, and filed countless Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits against “woke” government and educational institutions. AFL has also partnered with CPI and Turning Point USA to create the Center for Legal Equality, with a mission “to defeat the bureaucrats who weaponize ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ offices to impose a radical, discriminatory, and illegal ideology.”
When President Biden held office, Miller “spent more time than any close Trump adviser mapping out a second-term playbook,” according to The New York Times. In addition to his efforts through AFL, he strengthened his relationships with members of Congress and influential right-wing media figures, and “quietly cultivated a relationship with the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.”
In 2021 Miller began advising Musk on his political donations. During the 2022 midterm elections, a nonprofit called Citizens for Sanity, which tax filings show is closely connected to AFL, raised $94 million for ads attacking Democrats’ policies on transgender youth—$50 million of which was from an outside group that Musk had been donating to, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Prior to returning to the West Wing, Miller also led an effort to “identify and assemble a list of lawyers” who will “aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney” who challenges the constitutionality of their plans, as Axios reported. According to former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb, they were “looking for lawyers who worship Trump and will do his bidding. Trump is looking to Miller to pick people who will be more loyal to Trump than [to] the rule of law.”
The Big Lie
- Miller has long pushed the lie that noncitizens vote in presidential elections, upholding Trump’s widely debunked claim that as many as 5 million noncitizens voted illegally in the 2016 election, as Time reported in 2017. “We know for a fact you have massive numbers of noncitizens registered to vote in this country,” he insisted on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.”
- On December 14, 2020, Miller appeared on Fox & Friends to tout the fake electors scheme. “We have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner,” he claimed. “As we speak (today), an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote, and we’re going to send those results up to Congress.” Miller’s appearance showed there was “still a way for Trump to steal the election,” Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent observed at the time.
- On April 11, 2023, the grand jury working with Special Counsel Jack Smith on the Department of Justice investigation of the insurrection again questioned Miller about his conversations with Trump, but as during his previous appearance before the grand jury, he refused to answer, citing Trump’s executive privilege.
- During the 2024 campaign, Miller continued to push debunked claims of election fraud, including asserting that noncitizens would vote. He also continued to promote and defend Trump, accusing the Biden administration of working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to manufacture the classified documents case against him. Miller also dismissed the New York case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsified business records as a “communist show trial.”
- In 2024 Miller’s anti-immigrant vitriol was a driving force behind the most recent iteration of the GOPs “Big Lie”—namely that if Trump were to lose again in November, it would be because Democrats stole the election by allowing noncitizens to vote.
Election Subversion
- In terms of elections, Miller’s AFL challenged election and voting policies in Arizona and Pennsylvania—two key swing states that were essential to winning the White House in 2024. In Pennsylvania, the group filed lawsuits in 2022 challenging the use of drop boxes in Chester and Lehigh counties. Although both lawsuits were ultimately dismissed, they illustrate just how AFL was able to continue to cast doubt on the integrity of elections in the U.S. and legally disrupt the voting process.
- In Arizona, AFL challenged election administration procedures in three key counties: Coconino, Maricopa, and Yavapai. The lawsuit alleged that election officials in all three counties violated numerous state laws and regulations concerning signature verification, voter registration cancellation and drop boxes, among other alleged election administration infringements.