Trump poised to tap far-right figure for immigration crackdown
Washington: A far-right nationalist known for stoking racist conspiracy theories about white people being replaced by immigrants is set to be appointed by Donald Trump as his top aide overseeing policy.
As Trump moves to consolidate his power in Washington, the president-elect is expected to appoint his former immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, as his deputy chief of staff for policy, giving him an expanded role to carry out the Republican’s second-term agenda.
Donald Trump, speaking on the Mexico border in August, has vowed to deport millions of immigrants.Credit: AP
Earlier, Trump also named former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan as his “border tsar”, saying he would be “in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin”.
Miller is the lead architect of Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Both he and Homan are contributors to Project 2025, the 922-page presidential transition blueprint that Trump claimed he knew nothing about before the election.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during the debate against Kamala Harris in September.
“This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good, some bad, but it makes no difference. I have nothing to do [with it].”
Stephen Miller speaks at Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.Credit: AP
Miller, however, is the founder of the America First Legal Foundation, which is on the advisory board for Project 2025 and whose immigration stance is woven throughout the document.
According to a 2019 examination of Miller’s emails by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, Miller’s policy vision has been influenced by material from white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women and xenophobic conspiracy theories.
Along with Trump allies such as Tucker Carson and Steve Bannon, Miller has previously given credence to what’s known as the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which fosters the belief that leftist elites are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants.
“America is for Americans and Americans only!” he declared at Trump’s now infamous Madison Square Gardens rally last month.
“I want you to think for a minute about the decades of abuse that has been heaped on the good people of this nation: their jobs looted and stolen from them, and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries; the lives of their loved ones ripped away from them from illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country... With your vote, you can smash this broken establishment!”
Homan, meanwhile, is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that wrote the Project 2025 blueprint.
He worked for Trump’s first administration and was one of the top advocates of its controversial family separation policy, which saw more than 5500 children of immigrants separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018 under the shortlived “Zero Tolerance” policy.
Children listen to speakers during a protest against immigration family separation in Phoenix, Arizona in 2018. Credit: AP
According to the Department of Homeland Security, 1401 of those children had still not been reunited with their families as of April.
Homan’s areas of control will now include “the southern border, the northern border, all maritime, and aviation security”, Trump said in announcing his appointment on social media.
“There is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote.
The push to deport undocumented immigrants was Trump’s signature election policy, but implementing the policy is not expected to be easy.
Tom Homan: “It’s going to be a well-targeted, planned operation conducted by the men of ICE.”Credit: Bloomberg
America has 11 million undocumented immigrants: foreign-born people without a valid visa or other immigration documentation because they entered the US illegally, stayed longer than their temporary visa permitted, or otherwise violated the terms under which they were admitted.
Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric about “migrant crime”, the vast majority are not criminals, but rather, working in sectors such as agriculture, construction and hospitality, and adding to the economy as consumers and rent payers.
Many also have children and spouses who are US citizens, therefore large-scale deportations could result in family separations that would psychologically damage children.
As the incoming administration works out how to implement its policy, Homan said in an interview over the weekend that “families can be deported together”, suggesting children who are US citizens but with undocumented parents would have to go with them.
Months earlier, at the Republican National Convention, he said Trump would designate Mexican cartels a “terrorist organisation” for their role in smuggling fentanyl over the border, warning that: “He’s gonna wipe you off the face of the Earth.”
Miller has previously said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than one million a year. He also spoke about his vision of deportation at a Conservative Political Action Conference this year.
The first objective, he said, would be to “seal the border – no illegals in, everyone here goes out”. The second would involve establishing “large-scale staging grounds” where “you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to remove those illegals home”.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.