Three days after voters took away his majority in Congress, President Donald Trump gave the White House to the man who built his deportation machine. Trump announced Friday on Truth Social that Stephen Miller, now deputy chief of staff, will become chief of staff on Monday, Nov. 9, replacing Susie Wiles.
Wiles, who ran Trump’s 2024 campaign, moves to lead the Trump Political Operation. Trump called Miller “one of my most trusted advisors” and said Wiles “has done an outstanding job.” Miller has been the principal designer of the administration’s border and deportation programs, the issue Democrats ran against in the midterms.
For Black readers, this is not a Latino-only story. About one in 10 Black people living in the United States is an immigrant: 4.6 million in 2019, according to Pew Research Center figures, with Jamaica and Haiti the largest countries of origin and an African-born population that grew from 560,000 in 2000 to 1.9 million. Advocates have long said Black immigrants are the ones most likely to be left out of the immigration debate and most exposed to detention and deportation. This week’s news fits that: a federal judge ordered the government to bring back a Minnesota man ICE sent to the Central African Republic, a country he had never seen.
Miller’s record is the record of this administration’s enforcement. He and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the federal agents who killed Renee Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, on Jan. 24, and described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” Enforcement then spread from the border to parking lots and construction sites.
The Wall Street Journal reported, as Atlanta Black Star relayed, that Trump told aides Miller had pushed too far. By that account, what moved Trump was not the two killings but Melania Trump complaining that people she knew were being deported. The president’s own household heard the cost of the policy before the dead did.
Democrats, who take control of the House and Senate in January, have promised to investigate immigration enforcement. Putting Miller in the chief of staff’s office puts the man they want to question in charge of what gets turned over to them.
That is the choice Trump made after the vote: not a reset, but a promotion. Voters spoke on Tuesday, and the White House answered on Friday. What Congress does with its subpoena power starts in January.
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