Stephen Miller Jewish and Controversial (Put Mildly) Trump Administration Figure
Stephen Miller is a most controversial, to put it mildly, figure. At the end of last year, he was proclaimed by The New Republic magazine as its “2025 Scoundrel of the Year.”
In recent weeks, Miller, a key force behind the anti-immigrant stance and fierce actions of the Trump administration, has gotten more attention.
This week The New York Times featured a story headlined “Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World” with a subhead: “President Trump’s trusted advisor is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by ‘force.’”
The article by Times White House correspondent, Katie Rogers began: “Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship. Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.”
“Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.”
“About midway through his first term, the president began joking with his aides about his desire to buy Greenland for its natural resources, like coal and uranium. At the time, his advisers humored him with offers to investigate the possibility of buying the semiautonomous territory. They did not think Mr. Trump was serious, or that it could ever actually happen. Those advisers are gone.”
“Flash forward to the second term,” it went on. “Mr. Miller has the president’s complete trust, a staff of over 40 people, and several big jobs that include protecting the homeland and securing territories further afield. A first-term joke made in passing about purchasing Greenland for its natural resources is now a term-two presidential threat to attack and annex the Danish territory by force if necessary…”
The Atlantic magazine also this week published a piece headed “The Wrath of Stephen Miller” with a subhead: “The man who turns President’s Trump’s most incendiary impulses into policy.”
Authored by three Atlantic writers, it said: “Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy ruthlessly pursues the president’s vision, especially when it comes to pushing immigrants out of the country, and he runs a tight, efficient meeting. Consensus is not the goal. Instead, Miller demands progress reports on his mass-deportation campaign and issues orders to the full alphabet soup of federal enforcement agencies, including the FBI, CBP, ICE, HHS, and the DOD.”
“In May, Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that he wanted 3,000 immigration arrests a day, a nearly tenfold increase over the number they’d arrested on U.S. streets in 2024. He demands daily updates on the ICE surge too; the administration had pledged to deploy 10,000 new deportation officers by this month—more than doubling the agency’s workforce. And Miller expects regular updates on detention capacity, deportation flights and border crossings.”
“In Trump’s inner circle—even with the president himself—Miller is known as a dogmatic force whose ideas are sometimes too extreme for public consumption. ‘I’d love to have him come up and explain his true feelings—maybe not his truest feelings,’ the president joked at an Oval Office briefing in October,” the article continued. “But in Trump’s second term, Miller finds himself at the height of his powers—the pulsing human id of a president who is already almost pure id.”
“To critics,” it said, “Miller is the smirking embodiment of everything they view as dangerous and authoritarian about the Trump administration. He has been called a Nazi, a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, a kapo, and Lord Voldemort. Posters of Miller—pursed lips, furrowed brow—have been plastered around the nation’s capital, stamped with CREEP and FASCISM AIN’T PRETTY. His own uncle has denounced him, writing at one point that if Miller’s immigration policies had been implemented a century ago, their family—which fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe—“would have been wiped out.”
With Miller being Jewish, there have been explorations of his Jewish background in juxtaposition to his intense anti-immigrant activities.
The Guardian ran a piece in June 2025 by Robert Tait about Miller that stated: “The son of affluent Jewish parents, Miller’s evolution into a race-baiting provocateur took shape in the upscale suburb of Santa Monica, [California] where he gained notoriety as an incendiary agitator at the eponymous local high school.”
“Video footage purportedly from the period and circulated on social media shows a bearded Miller stridently voicing his disdainful view of school janitorial staff. ‘Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do this,’ he shouts into a microphone. The gross statement seems to have been representative of a broader canvas of toxic ideas, with racism at its core.”
The piece said that in the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, “to date the only biography published on Miller, author Jean Guerrero recounts one episode from the future political operative’s adolescence, when he suddenly ditched a close friend, Jason Islas, on the grounds of his ethnicity. ‘The conversation was remarkably calm,’ Islas, a Mexican American, is quoted saying. ‘He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.’”
“An article he wrote as a 16-year-old for a local website expresses contempt for fellow students of Hispanic origin. ‘When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills,’ Miller wrote. ‘There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.”
The story went on about how “Miller’s indulgence in far-right ideas continued during his college years at Duke University in North Carolina, where he associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups.”
The piece was headed: “The rise of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy.”
In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Miller’s uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote an article in Politico Magazine headed: “Primary Source. Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.” The subhead: “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
It starts: “Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.”
“It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus,” it went on. “Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebearers had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”
“He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants.”
“The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.”
“What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller?” asked Dr. Glosser. “Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister. I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country. I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so cooly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”
“The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the ‘America first’ nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol.”
“Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight fro war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.”
“Most damning,” said the piece, “is the administration’s evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country or origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts laws or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny.”
“Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America. Immigration reform is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion cannot be trusted to do so.”
Ancestors on his father’s side also emigrated from eastern Europe. They sold groceries and rolled cigars in Pittsburgh, according to a 2017 piece in the Jewish Journal. It identified his father, Michael Miller, as a “Stanford-trained lawyer who pivoted into real estate management.” Further, “the elder Miller…served in board posts for a number of philanthropic organizations, including on the national board of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion…and the board of directors of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.”
Interviewed in the piece was Rabbi Jeffrey Marx of Santa Monica Synagogue. The article related the rabbi saying its “members skew liberal, especially when it comes to immigration.” It quoted him as saying: “We certainly did our best here to teach him [Miller] the ethical standards of Judaism.”