Extract from ABC News
Stephen Miller is considered one of the most powerful advisers in Donald Trump's inner circle. (ABC News: Kylie Silvester)
When Stephen Miller was in high school, his classmates made a short film about him and called it "Strange Times at Samohi".
At Santa Monica High, or Samohi, as it is known, Miller stood out as an outspoken teenager who forced his conservative views on his ardently liberal classmates.
He would go on to be Donald Trump's hype man at campaign rallies, his speechwriter and eventually the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security.
He is the architect of the Trump administration's hardline approach to immigration, but before he cracked Washington, Miller ran for student council.
And part of a pitch he made to his classmates was featured in the amateur documentary they made about him.
"I will say and I will do things that no-one else in their right mind would say or do," Miller said, riling up the crowd before him.
In this very early campaign, the platform he ran on was that students should not be required to pick up rubbish because "janitors are paid to do it for us".
Stephen Miller was campaigning in high school and was so provocative, his classmates made a documentary about him. (Supplied)
Miller knew he was different, but that only made him louder. Opinionated and forthright, the young firebrand borrowed a quote from Theodore Roosevelt for his high school yearbook.
"There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else," he wrote.
Miller waged war on what he considered to be "political correctness out of control" at his school. He thought it was a problem that the school communicated in Spanish to its large Latino cohort and, for him, the staff and students weren't patriotic enough.
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Miller challenged the school administration, accusing it of breaching the state code that required each public school to perform "appropriate patriotic exercises each day". He said it took months of campaigning, but the school did bring back the Pledge of Allegiance.
"Stephen made it his business at the school to be heard and be known. He was outspoken and a provocateur in every sense of the word," a former classmate told NPR years later.
The teenager even authored a now-famous letter to the editor at his local newspaper where he blasted his teachers, saying they would "denounce the US as wickedly imperialistic" and "insult and demean the president".
In the final line, he did what so many political operators do and launched a call to action: "If you feel, like me, that political correctness has crossed the line, call the school or the district. Ask them to leave their liberal agendas at the front gate. Enough politics, it's time for common sense."
A page from Stephen Miller's yearbook includes a quote about "100 per cent Americanism". (Supplied)
Even then, Miller was using populist language to rally for his cause.
By the age of 16, he had figured out these views could generate attention and attention might lead to power. On the airwaves, he tuned into the conservative Larry Elder Show and one day, he wrote the radio host a letter about his so-called unpatriotic school. Elder would later say he invited Miller on the show, where the teenager "just blew everybody away".
While some teenagers might stumble, Miller was confident and articulate and impressed Elder.
This would be a pivotal moment because it was this performance that lifted Miller from high school student to a regular on a nationally syndicated radio program where he could preach to a conservative crowd, gain experience, momentum and in Elder, a mentor.
By the time he finished high school, Miller had reportedly been on the show 70 times.
And by age 31, he was in Donald Trump's White House.
"The president loves Stephen," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the ABC. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Now, Stephen Miller holds an immense amount of power. He is one of Trump's most senior advisors and one of the few who fared well enough in his first term to be welcomed back for the second.
And for his undying loyalty to Trump, Miller's ideas have rocketed to the top of the agenda. He has seemingly unchecked scope and power to unleash those ideas on America, on the people within it who might never be citizens, and those who dare to try to cross its border.
Because within that teenager, out of place at his large, liberal public high school, were the seeds of the hardline immigration policy terrorising communities across the United States today.
From a family of migrants
Miller did not always go to a public high school. His family had once been able to afford to enrol him in private education but a series of financial misfortunes and legal woes beset the Miller family and their middle boy, Stephen, would have to go public.
He is reported to have grown up in a moderate household, with a family member telling the ABC that Miller's views are "self-made".
In speeches and public comments, Miller talks about "forces of wickedness and evil" that need to be defeated. He rallies crowds against the Democratic Party that he calls a "domestic extremist organisation". He talks about "enemies" and how determined he is to save "civilisation, to save the West".
Executing policies he has been instrumental in devising, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents have been patrolling US streets, have detained tens of thousands of people, and in violent clashes in Minnesapolis, have killed two American citizens.
The crackdown has also seen a five-year-old boy named Liam Ramos sent to a detention centre in Texas, thousands of kilometres from his home.
The United States has long known Miller was driving immigration policy, but as the crackdown across the country escalated, he became more resolute, more determined to prevail.
Miller's views and his fierce rhetoric sit very uncomfortably against his own family's story.
Through his mother, Miriam, Miller is a descendent of Wolf-Leib Glosser, who left a small Jewish village in what is now Belarus for the journey to New York City at the turn of the last century.
Glosser, his family and his community were facing escalating violence from anti-Jewish pogroms and as the patriarch, he set sail in search of a safer, more prosperous life in America, arriving on Ellis Island in 1903.
That same year, in that same bay, the words of Emma Lazarus were cast into a bronze plaque and attached to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Whether he likes it or not, the story of how Stephen Miller came to be is partly an immigrant story. As his uncle has said, it is a "classically American tale".
Miller's ancestors settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and started a retail empire, including this Glosser Brothers store pictured in 1922. (Supplied: David Glosser/Johnstown Area Heritage Association)
Glosser's children and wife soon made the voyage across the Atlantic too, including the man who would become Miller's great-grandfather.
More than a century later, Miller has risen to the highest echelons of American power and is using that to carry out a fierce attack on immigration across the country that gave his family safe passage.
Miriam's brother, David Glosser, told the ABC he watched in horror as his nephew betrayed his family's history.
"It's a complete repudiation of pretty much everything that our family, our family history and our family's mores and principles has stood for," he told the ABC.
On the campaign trail, Miller has been dispatched to the small Pennsylvania town of Johnstown. It's here where the Glosser family settled and built a retail empire and on stage, Miller has been quick to claim that connection.
During the 2024 campaign, he told the crowd: "This city is in my blood, it is in my bones, it is in my veins. Generations of my family are buried in the soil here."
In Republican circles, he's widely considered to be a very effective and skilled political operator, be it making or writing speeches or taking Donald Trump's whims and turning them into real policy enacted on real people.
His language is acerbic and vitriolic, whether he's crossing into CNN or standing in front of a crowd of Trump faithful.
Stephen Miller opened for Donald Trump at Johnstown, where his family has very deep roots. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
In Johnstown, the big turnout ate up his promises about returning to the glory of the previous century before "globalists" choked the town.
He told them Johnstown needed to be saved, and that Donald J Trump could "reclaim America for American citizens."
David Glosser has taken issue with Miller's messages at Johnstown, watching on during a previous speech in Trump's first campaign.
"Stephen had the nerve to imply that my family would be supportive of the ideals that Trump was presenting," he said.
"You could hear my dad turning over in his grave as the speech was said and my mum was horrified. That's absolutely not who they were."
Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, visiting professor at the University of Southern California and immigration reporter, authored Hate Monger, a book that investigated the making of Miller.
"It's the machismo. That idea of brute force being the rule of the land: there's something about that that really appeals to Stephen that makes him be able to completely disregard everything else about what he learned from his ancestors," she said.
The ABC asked the White House and Miller about that apparent contradiction and his uncle's statements.
In response, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "Stephen Miller is one of President Trump's most trusted and longest-serving aides."
"The president loves Stephen."
The decision to change America
In the 1990s, California saw protests against anti-immigration moves made by the state. (Getty: Bruce Chambers)
It might be tempting to think of teenage Miller as a little red fish swimming against the current in the big blue pool of California, but the Golden State was different then.
For most of the 1990s, California had a Republican governor in Pete Wilson and anti-immigration sentiment was in the street and on the airwaves.
Some of the messages from that time are recognisable in the rhetoric Trump and Miller use today.
"California was experiencing a significant demographic shift. White people became the minority in the state for the first time," Guerrero said.
"And you had conservative politicians who were railing against what they called an invasion at the border."
Republican Pete Wilson was governor of California for most of the 1990s and championed Proposition 187, a state law designed to deny most social services to immigrants who did not have legal status. (Getty: James Leynse)
Among white conservative men, there was a fear "they were being overtaken and replaced", Guerrero said, and characters like Miller used that perceived victimhood "to transform conservative politics."
"It couldn't have come out of anywhere besides California in the 1990s, where, in fact, white conservative men were becoming a minority and they saw themselves as being under attack," she said.
In California, Miller slipped in social class. His family had come into hard times and as this was happening, society around him was changing.
He moved from high school, to college, to Washington DC. When he arrived in the capital, what he lacked in political experience, he made up for in conservative connections and a resume that included more spots in national media.
By this time, he had again gained attention, speaking on network television and writing scathing op eds about the "radical left" when three white lacrosse players from Duke University, where he was also a student, were found to have been wrongly accused of rape by a young black woman.
He had also arrived in Washington having been mentored by David Horowitz, one of the most prominent voices in conservative America, and he'd been noticed by Steve Bannon.
Guerrero said Miller had been "deeply, deeply influenced by white supremacists and white nationalist literature, ideologues and mentors".
By 22, he working for a congressional representative where his ideas started to become political speeches and eventually political policy.
Years later, when Miller was working for then-senator Jeff Sessions, he attended a dinner with his boss and Bannon and they decided to change America.
The Republican Party was at a crossroads and one faction believed it needed to become more inclusive and reach into marginalised communities, but at their dinner, the three men decided to take their party in the opposite direction.
Miller had with him analysis that said in the previous midterm election, there was a "missing white voter", Guerrero explained.
"They decided that they were going to try to create a political movement, a populist movement that was going to double down on bringing those white voters out by using immigration to court white fear and white rage," she said.
Stephen Miller and right-wing political operative Steve Bannon worked together in the first Trump administration. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Miller is on record in 2014 as saying of Trump, "I wish he'd run for president" and that name, that was spelt out in gaudy gold letters on the side of some Manhattan buildings, was being thrown around as a possibility.
So when Trump confirmed he would run, Miller signed up, believing he had found a vehicle for his immigration overhaul.
"Trump was initially focused on targeting criminals and rapists, … keeping out cartels. And then when Stephen Miller came to the table, they transformed it into a platform that was going to radically transform and strangle legal pathways into the country," Guerrero said.
"Because for him, it wasn't about law and order. It was not about national security. It was about preserving some core whiteness that he saw as being essential to the character of the United States."
In his first term, Trump built some of his promised border wall, he used executive orders to issue travel bans and visa restrictions for people from a list of mostly Muslim countries and, for a time, he ordered the separation of children from their families as they tried to cross into the United States.
By the time Trump left office in 2021, more than 5,000 children had been separated from their families, according to official government data.
Some research puts the number of immigration-related actions undertaken by the executive branch during this time at more than 470, in moves that dramatically "dismantled and reconstructed" the US immigration system.
Donald Trump faced harsh and sustained criticism over his first-term policy that separated migrant children from their families. (Reuters: Jose Luis Gonzalez)
After Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office, Miller founded a legal firm designed to go up against the Americal Civil Liberties Union, calling it America First Legal.
When Trump returned to office in 2025, he was ready with a slew of new immigration actions.
But as those domestic policies collide with the United States's aggressive foreign posturing, Guerrero says she has noticed a new item on Miller's agenda.
Miller's expanding presence
Immigration was Stephen Miller's gateway into MAGA and Trump's inner circle, but now he is being consulted across policy areas.
When Donald Trump was asked who exactly would be running Venezuela after a US mission snatched Nicolás Maduro and his wife from the presidential compound, he gestured to the line of men behind him.
On the end was Miller.
Stephen Miller is now regularly commenting on United States foreign policy. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Without ever being elected or tested and scrutinised by a confirmation process, Miller occupies a very big seat at the table.
Senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre Bruce Wolpe called Miller "formidable" and said he was the most powerful person on Trump's staff aside from chief of staff Susie Wiles.
"He has a commanding position over issues that Trump cares about very much, particularly immigration … and it's not just domestic policy," he said.
"He also travels with the president. He sits in on meetings in the Middle East. He is a constant spur to implement what Trump wants."
In a recent interview with CNN, Miller was speaking on US actions to capture Maduro and said: "We're a superpower and under President Trump, we're going to conduct ourselves as a superpower."
After a second American citizen was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Miller was quick to call the victim, Alex Pretti, a "would-be assassin."
After the death of right-wing political podcaster Charlie Kirk, Miller said the government was "going to use every resource we have" to "identify, disrupt and dismantle and destroy" what he refers to as "left-wing networks".
Both Wolpe and Guerrero said this language was very classic of Miller because it was warlike.
"That really set the frame as to their posture in American politics, which is, the left is the enemy, the Democrats are the left, we want them destroyed," Wolpe said.
After more than 10 years of being on the national political stage, Miller has more power than ever and with his absolute loyalty to Trump, he buys it in return.
As ICE faces intense criticism over the killing of two bystanders and American citizens in Minneapolis, Miller is able to deflect blame and remain very secure in his West Wing role.
At just 40 years of age, he is poised to impact conservative politics in the United States for a very long time, and his mission, according to Guerrero, appears to be evolving.
Guerrero said, "historically, it has been about race", for Miller, but as the US makes and threatens incursions into Latin America, another pattern has emerged.
She said the foreign policies being employed by Trump were "not actually going to decrease immigration" to the US, which was Miller's initial goal as he tried to "radically re-engineer the racial demographics of this country".
"Now I think it's becoming more about engineering a permanent underclass for elites in the United States and across the Americas,"Guerrero said
"Because what they're doing is, they're fuelling the conditions that are displacing people in their home countries.
"And long-term, what that's going to do is … create new waves of mass migration that are going to replace the people who are currently being deported."
And the people who are at risk of deportation now are those "who've been here for a very long time and have homes, jobs and citizen children and therefore more political power than some elites are comfortable with".
That teenager who found more friends among radio hosts and conservative provocateurs than his classmates has ascended above them all and now sits comfortably close to power with every intention of using it.
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