Stephen Miller’s Selective American Dream

 

In August 2018, Stephen Miller’s uncle, a retired neuropsychologist who had been affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine, published an opinion piece in Politico. “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

The Trump administration was implementing its family separation policy during Donald Trump’s first administration, a policy that Miller’s political mentor and ticket into the Trump administration, Jeff Sessions, ardently supported, as did Miller.

Miller’s Jewish ancestors fled from what was then called the Russian Empire, modern-day Belarus, shortly after the start of the 20th century. Their story parallels my own family history. I have always been acutely aware that because my great-grandmother, Rose Rubenstein, had the courage to demand that the family immigrate, I am here. Had she not, it’s uncertain they would have survived the violence in the shtetl they lived in, in the Pale. And if they had, they would likely have perished in the Holocaust.

As Miller’s uncle writes, “The Glossers [Their ancestors] came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the ‘America first’ nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib [their ancestor] waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol.”

Now Stephen Miller is going to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff in the waning days of his administration, when Trump is likely to become ever more dangerous as his power seeps away. Glosser, Miller’s uncle, objected to his immigration policies, writing that Miller and Trump had become “numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions.” He points out that Trump, too, has an immigrant family story, one from Germany, where his grandfather reportedly fled conscription into the army.

Stephen Miller is not a lawyer. I suppose that makes it easy to ignore the law and to misrepresent how it works and what it requires of this administration, like all others. But Miller has never hesitated to espouse views suggesting that the law, far from protecting immigrants, permits the administration to treat them like damaged goods that inflict further harm.

Here are just a few of the times he’s been willing to bypass the rule of law to do Trump’s bidding, or, when it comes to immigration, it’s his own. Earlier this year, Forbes called him “the primary architect, strategist, and enforcer of the Trump administration's immigration agenda, operating with Donald Trump's backing rather than independently or in contradiction to him.”

Miller has suggested that Trump could suspend habeas corpus, the fundamental mechanism people in government custody use to challenge the legality of their detention. Miller has publicly discussed suspending it in connection with immigration enforcement, but the Suspension Clause (Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution) provides that habeas cannot be suspended except during rebellion or invasion when public safety requires it.

In May 2025, he said that habeas “can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at.” What invasion? The faux one used to justify sending people to a torture prison in El Salvador and killing people on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Suspension is up to Congress, not the president; Trump and Miller’s assessment was that an invasion was happening notwithstanding. Yet these are the lengths Miller is willing to stoop to back Trump’s immigration policy, suggesting habeas could be suspended to permit the administration to deport migrants.

Miller has supported Trump’s view that federal judges should be impeached if he doesn’t like their decisions. In February 2025, we discussed the early trend among Trump influencers to seek impeachment of judges who didn’t bend the knee to the administration’s moves. More recently, in this piece, Judges Aren’t Supposed to Please Presidents, we took the topic up again. I noted that “Judicial independence is at the heart of American democracy. It’s what’s keeping us afloat right now.” That independence has made the judiciary a target of Miller and other Trump allies, including in February 2025, when Miller joined others in attacking federal judges with a tweet.

Miller continued to advance the administration’s position on birthright citizenship as the correct one, even after the Supreme Court rejected it. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara, and held that the Fourteenth Amendment conveys citizenship at birth to children born in the United States, even when their parents are unlawfully present. 

But Miller made remarks on August 6, 2026, in which he continued to discuss excluding categories of people from birthright citizenship through new executive orders issued by Trump, even though the Supreme Court had firmly rejected the constitutionality of doing so.

These examples barely scratch the surface of Miller’s contempt for the law and the judges who administer it. But they demonstrate his determination to bend the law to his and the administration’s will, instead of following it, which the oath that both he and Trump took requires.

Miller’s uncle ended his Politico piece with the following words: “Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me.”

It is so much worse now than it was in 2018. We watched as Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and now still more people, have been shot dead on American streets by American law enforcement officers, supposedly public servants who are sworn to serve and protect, during the second Trump administration. We know of the horrors of places like Alligator Alcatraz and other “detention centers” and have read recent stories about people who have disappeared in them. It is inhumane and intolerable to treat people like this. It is unconstitutional. And Stephen Miller shows no signs of caring.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance