THE NEW YORK TIMES: What to Know About Stephen Miller, Trump’s New Chief of Staff

Stephen Miller is one of President Donald Trump’s longest-serving and most influential aides, and the architect of many of the President’s most aggressive border and immigration policies.

His rise to White House chief of staff elevates a hard-line policy adviser to a position of pre-eminent power and influence in Mr Trump’s inner circle.

An unabashed champion of Mr Trump and his agenda in high-profile media appearances, Mr Miller rose to become a public face of the Trump administration — and a perennial target of critics of Mr Trump, who have highlighted his right-wing views.

Mr Trump did not explain his decision to fire Susie Wiles, his current chief of staff, and replace her with Mr Miller, noting only that “Stephen’s been with me from the beginning” and was one of his most trusted advisers.

Mr Miller, 41, has advised Mr Trump for nearly a decade, and has either authored or significantly contributed to many of the President’s most high-profile moves.

Those include separation of migrant families at the border; the 2017 Muslim travel ban; directing the government to stifle critics of Mr Trump; the ending of nearly all US refugee programs; the widespread pressure campaign against American universities; extrajudicial boat strikes that have killed hundreds; and purges of officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr Trump.

But perhaps Mr Miller’s most wide-reaching influence can be seen in Mr Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which Mr Miller has overseen.

Mr Miller helped set in motion militarized operations on the streets of American cities, pitting masked, heavily armed immigration agents against residents of cities including Minneapolis and Chicago.

Many of those raids have targeted immigrant communities that Trump has denigrated, including Somalis.

Mr Miller has also fixated on accusations that Somali Americans have committed fraud and are spending public money on luxury cars, mansions and first-class travel.

Mr Miller has earned Mr Trump’s trust by validating the president’s impulses and his world view, particularly on immigration.

Mr Miller, once an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, an immigration hard-liner, was drawn to Mr Trump by his anti-immigrant rhetoric that dominated his 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr Trump, in turn, was impressed by his ideas on immigration policy and the fervour with which Mr Miller would rile up crowds during campaign rallies and defend Mr Trump in media appearances.

“I love watching him on television,” Mr Trump said of Mr Miller last year.

Republicans in Washington have said that they consider Mr Miller to be channelling the President when he speaks.

The two spent the four years that Mr Trump was out of power speaking on nearly a daily basis, “talking about what a second term agenda might look like before many of us even dreamed that there would be a second term,” said Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind.

Mr Miller, who has now amassed considerable power in the second Trump administration, has continued to serve as a fiery surrogate for the President’s most divisive moves.

Earlier this year, as Mr Trump publicly toyed with the idea of invading Greenland, Mr Miller laid out a vision of American imperialism in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was deemed in the national interest.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Mr Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN.

“But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said.

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Mr Miller has also echoed Mr Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the federal judiciary.

When judges blocked the President’s tariffs last year, Mr Miller attacked the decision as a “judicial coup” on social media.

He has also blasted other judges scrutinising Mr Trump administration policies as Marxists and “crazy” communists.