POLITICS
Stephen Miller in Retreat
The once-powerful aide’s influence has quietly diminished.
By Michael Scherer and Nick Miroff
Just hours before Stephen miller arrived at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on New Year’s Eve—where he would welcome 2026 by dancing next to the soon-to-be-defenestrated homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as the 1990s cultural relic Vanilla Ice performed—he won a great, though ultimately fleeting, victory. The Labor Department’s Foreign Labor Certification office announced that the Trump administration would cut the number of approved visas for seasonal workers by about 50 percent. Miller had been trying since his days as a Senate aide to reduce reliance on visas granted annually to the hospitality, construction, and landscaping industries.
But the plan unraveled within weeks. After the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, President Trump reversed the visa cuts as part of a late-January retreat from Miller’s hard-edged goals. Miller was not involved in the walk-back, according to two people with knowledge of the process and who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Instead, Trump made the decision with the “border czar,” Tom Homan, and others after hearing about concerns from hospitality-industry employers, they said.
The reversal was one of the earliest signs that Miller’s influence is on the wane. Others have followed. The White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser designed Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. But weeks into the new year, the president dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had encouraged; turned on Noem, who had carried out Miller’s aggressive instructions; and handed control of the deportation program back to career law-enforcement officials.
White House insiders said that Miller remains a top adviser to the president, that he has a singular relationship to Trump built over the past decade, and that his job is not in jeopardy. Immigration enforcement remains a central theme of the administration and is expected to feature prominently in Trump’s midterm-election messaging. They said that Miller has always seen himself as a staffer who subordinates his own opinions on policy to the agenda of the president, even when it shifts. “The President loves Stephen,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”
But Trump, who has previously joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are so extreme that they should not be aired publicly, has also told others in recent weeks that he understands Miller sometimes goes too far, advisers told us. They said that Trump recognized immediately after the second killing in Minneapolis, of the protester Alex Pretti, that the policy needed to shift, and he did not embrace Miller’s public description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” The question now is how long Trump will hold Miller and his policy prescriptions at a distance.
“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told us. Another adviser described Trump’s view of Miller more bluntly: “The president knows who he is, period.”
The setback for miller is striking largely because his rise was so stunning. No White House official in recent history—since Vice President Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, perhaps—has had such a dramatic and direct impact on U.S. government policy and such operational sway over so many parts of government.
Miller oversaw the drafting and release of executive orders in the early days of Trump’s second term, sat at the table for early national-security decisions, and was the driving force behind legislation that awarded $175 billion in funding for immigration enforcement, allowing for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, detention centers, and deportation flights. It was Miller who set a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests a day to hit his target of 1 million deportations a year, matching the legislative goals that he helped draft. He instructed ICE officers to sweep through Home Depot parking lots to help meet that goal. When street clashes over enforcement started, he publicly declared that officers had “federal immunity” for their actions on the job, and he helped draft a national-security memorandum that told law enforcement to treat even peaceful anti-deportation protests and the release of personal details about government officials as telltale signs of potential “domestic terrorism” conspiracies.
But the second year of Trump’s second term is being directed by a new immigration-enforcement team. The new secretary of homeland security, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took over in late March with a mandate to get back to basics. Leaders of the department who had been sidelined by Noem, such as Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, suddenly found themselves empowered. Employees she had pushed out, such as former Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar and the CBP official Matt Eagan, were welcomed back. Andrew Block, a close ally of Miller who served as CBP’s chief counsel, was shown the door, according to two people briefed on the change. (Block did not respond to a request for comment.)
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Underlying all of the changes was a return to conventional ICE “targeted enforcement” tactics that prioritize immigrants with criminal records or pending deportation orders, and that seek to make arrests with less drama. The change in policy has shown up in the numbers. In March, ICE made about 30,000 arrests, down from 36,000 in January, the data show—well below Miller’s goal of 3,000 detentions a day. The drop is even more remarkable because it follows a hiring surge last fall—pushed by Miller—to add 12,000 ICE officers and agents. ICE also has fewer immigrants in its jails now, the latest statistics show. The number of detainees has dropped from about 70,000 in late January to roughly 60,000 late last month, according to the latest internal data.
The strategy, blessed by Trump, is a relief for Republican campaign strategists who watched with trepidation as the street battles in Minneapolis turned immigration, an issue that Trump had dominated in 2024, into a liability. Of all the standard policy-approval questions asked about presidents, immigration was the one that Trump came into office for his second term with the highest ratings on—a net positive of 7 percentage points, according to the polling average kept by Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver’s Substack. That fell to a negative-14-point rating in February 2026, before recovering to negative-10 points since then. Miller’s allies, for their part, blame the Department of Homeland Security for feeding the White House incorrect information after Pretti’s death that suggested that he was the aggressor.
Mullin, who has no prior federal-law-enforcement experience, is being mentored by Homan, a former acting director of ICE, who started working for the federal government in 1984. Homan gave a keynote speech at a border-security conference in Phoenix this week that was attended by top DHS officials, telling the audience that the mass-deportation plan remains on track. “You ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said, drawing cheers. His message was mostly aimed at critics on the right who say the administration is backing off.
Homan, who kept an arms-length relationship with Noem, has said that he speaks with Mullin “every day, several times a day.” Miller also speaks with Mullin regularly, a White House official told us. In a statement for this story, Mullin told us that he works closely with both Homan and Miller. “Everyone’s on the same page,” Mullin said.
But in contrast with the legislative negotiations over DHS funding last year, Homan and Mullin, not Miller, were the ones involved in talks on Capitol Hill to restore DHS funding this year, according to two DHS officials. Miller continues to conduct daily 10 a.m. conference calls with senior officials at the department and with other agencies involved in immigration enforcement, but the general tone has been less demanding in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the calls told us. And the power center has shifted. “The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told us. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”
Miller allies say that much of his direct involvement last year with the Department of Homeland Security was needed to help Noem, who regularly feuded with heads of other agencies, requiring Miller to play a more hands-on role. “The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” the White House official told us.
There have been no accounts of clashes or tension between Homan and Miller, and the former has even praised the latter as “one of the most brilliant people I’ve met in my entire life.” But from the start of the administration, they have advocated for different approaches to Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Miller has emphasized sheer numbers, and Homan prefers a quality-over-quantity approach that prioritizes immigrants with criminal records. “I have always worked, and continue to work closely, with Stephen and now Secretary Mullin to deliver on the President’s commitment to the American people,” Homan told us in a statement.
But Homan’s approach is the predominant one right now, and the department has been quietly reversing changes that Miller ordered. Miller had pushed aggressively to fast-track training for new ICE hires, slashing the academy course to about eight weeks. The accelerated schedule alarmed veteran ICE officers, and the hiring surge was marred by high dropout rates. In recent weeks, ICE reverted to a four-and-a-half-month training program similar to its former academy course, according to three officials who were not authorized to discuss the change.
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Miller has moved his focus to a new task force aimed at uncovering “fraud” among immigrant communities. He still posts regularly on social media about violent crime by undocumented migrants. He has stopped publicly railing against the domestic-terrorism threat of liberal activists, although a new counterterrorism strategy released this week still lists “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” (but not violent right-wing extremists) as a threat on par with narco- and Islamic terrorists. He has also begun to push for more radical congressional redistricting, arguing that Republicans could pick up 40 seats or more if they take advantage of the recent Supreme Court Voting Rights Act ruling, overhaul the Census, and persuade courts to exclude undocumented immigrants from population counts that determine how many seats are given to each state.
Several people we spoke with said that it is just a matter of time before Miller is able to reassert himself with new initiatives inside the administration. One former department official cautioned us against counting out Miller or predicting a long-term loss of influence on immigration policy. “In the end, Stephen is the one who comes up with new ideas,” the former official said. “As much as everyone loves Tom Homan, he’s not going to say ‘Here’s a unique authority we could use to do X, Y and Z.’ But the president likes Homan’s approach at the moment.”
This is not the first time Miller’s hard-line approach has hurt Trump politically. In the spring of 2018, Miller championed the policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border, saying at the time that he viewed it as an effective way of deterring migrants from attempting the journey in the first place. That backlash was bipartisan and intense, forcing Trump to reverse course within weeks. The episode became one of the most glaring missteps of Trump’s first term, and it galvanized Democrats, fueling the party’s midterm victories. Miller took the setback in stride, retreating to craft new restrictions on migration that used laws designed to protect the nation from disease to cut refugee admissions and block asylum seekers after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
But there are clear signs that Miller has not backed away from his own views on immigration—including on H-2B visas. As an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions in 2015, Miller helped oppose an effort by then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican, to raise the cap on the visas. (Sessions argued that temporary workers threatened “jobs and livelihoods of thousands of loyal Americans.”) In 2017, Miller emailed then–Labor Secretary Alex Acosta an article about rising wages in a Maine resort town after a shortage of H-2B visas. “Markets work,” was the subject line, according to a document obtained through a public-records request by American Oversight.
The day after the news broke this year that Trump had reversed his cuts to the H-2B visa program, Miller took to social media to broadly condemn any effort to experiment with “importing a foreign labor class.” “All visas,” he wrote, “are a bridge to citizenship.” It was as close as the staffer would get to criticizing his boss.
