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.