The lawless tRump and criminal gang Gestapo thugs in ICE do not want to be held accountable. They are demanding they have the right to lie and you must believe it. They think they would be allowed to get away with everything and anything to harm and terrorize people if no can see what they do. So they try to convince you it is a crime to record them. It is not a crime. But remember how racist cops tried to do the same thing after the George Floyd murder? We must not let them take our rights away from us and we must fight against the tyrannical dictatorship of a lawless government ruling a powerless public. Hugs
The Trump Administration Says It’s Illegal To Record Videos of ICE. Here’s What the Law Says.
The Trump administration believes you don’t have the right to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in public. This stance is both factually wrong and an attempt to chill free speech by conflating it with violence.
At a July 2025 press conference in Tampa, Florida, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles.”
In September 2025, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online” a form of doxing. She added, “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”
These aren’t idle threats. The Trump administration strong-armed Apple into removing an app from its mobile store that tracked ICE activity and threatened criminal investigations into its creators.
The most aggressive application of this policy has come in Chicago under “Operation Midway Blitz,” where ICE officers have relentlessly targeted protesters, reporters, and clergy engaged in protected First Amendment activity.
In October, a group of journalists and protesters filed a lawsuit alleging “a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians.”
In court filings, the plaintiffs stated that federal officials’ own testimony illustrated their point. For example, when ICE field director Russell Hott was asked if he agreed “that it’s unconstitutional to arrest people for being opposed to Midway Blitz,” he answered “No.”
“Similarly, [U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Greg] Bovino testified that he has instructed his officers to arrest protesters who make hyperbolic comments in the heat of political demonstrations, even though such statements—which do not constitute true threats—are protected speech,” the motion argued. (Hott and Bovino’s depositions were filed under seal, and those comments were later redacted in a corrected filing by the lawsuit plaintiffs, but not before others took screenshots of them.)
Based on voluminous evidence that feds in Chicago ignored her previous orders to curb their use of force, U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis issued a preliminary injunction against DHS in early November 2025, saying the government’s conduct “shocked the conscience.”
Ellis found much of the officials’ testimony not credible. Bovino, for instance, testified that he never used force against a protester he was filmed tackling, and in another instance, Ellis said, he lied about being hit with a rock before firing tear gas at demonstrators. Nor did evidence support the government’s claims that federal officers issued warnings before firing less-than-lethal projectiles at those protesters.
“Describing rapid response networks and neighborhood moms as professional agitators shows just how out of touch these agents are, and how extreme their views are,” said Ellis.
The Trump administration responded by calling Ellis an “activist judge,” but it is squarely wrong when it comes to recording and protesting the police. Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson points out that, “While the Supreme Court itself hasn’t yet faced the issue squarely, the sevenfederalcircuitsthathavedoneso…all agree that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public.”
Likewise, federal circuits have upheld the right to use vulgar language to oppose police without fear of retaliation, and to warn others of nearby police checkpoints or speed traps.
As Olson writes, the administration’s “attempt to alter reality by establishing new legal facts on the ground” ultimately serves as a green light for informal repression. “If the agents come to believe that they have blanket immunity [for] whatever they do, or that citizens have no right to record them, they are more likely to take aggressive informal action, such as grabbing phones or taking news reporters into custody on charges of obstruction (perhaps later quietly dropped).”
It’s not hard to find examples of this rotten agency culture in practice. In late October 2025, ICE officers broke out the window of a U.S. citizen’s car and detained her for seven hours after she followed and photographed their unmarked vehicles. DHS accused her of reckless driving, attempting to block in officers with her car, and resisting arrest—all claims that she and her lawyer deny. Prosecutors did not charge the woman with a crime.
Recording government agents is one of the few tools citizens have to hold state power accountable. Any attempt to redefine observation as “violence” is not only unconstitutional—it’s authoritarian gaslighting. When a government fears cameras more than crimes, it isn’t protecting the rule of law. It’s protecting itself.
Paul Eaton in Baghdad in June 2004. Eaton spent 37 years in active service. Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, are mounting an aggressive push to politicise the top ranks of the US military – a push that smacks of Stalinism and could take years to repair, the former infantry chief who trained troops to invade Iraq has warned.
Maj Gen Paul Eaton has sounded the alarm, saying in an interview with the Guardian that the effort to bend the higher echelons of the military to the US president’s will was unparalleled in recent history and could have long-term dire consequences. He warned that both the reputation and efficiency of the world’s most powerful fighting force was in the balance.
“There is an active effort to politicise the armed forces,” Eaton said. “Once you infect the body, the cure may be very difficult and painful for presidents downstream.”
He added that the actions of Trump and his chosen head of the Pentagon were putting the standing of the military as an independent entity, free from party politics, at risk. “As the phrase goes, reputation is built a drop at a time and emptied in buckets.”
Eaton, 75, has spent his entire life in military circles, including 37 years in active service. His father was an air force pilot whose B-57 bomber was shot down over Laos in 1969, when Eaton was 18.
Air force Col Norman Eaton’s remains were found and identified in 2006.
Eaton himself trained at West Point, the US military academy in New York that trains commissioned officers, graduating soon after the end of the Vietnam war. He rose through the ranks of the US army to infantry chief and then, after the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 was completed, was sent to that country to rebuild the Iraqi armed forces.
In recent years Eaton has been a sharp critic of Trump’s manipulation of military structures. In the summer of 2024 he participated in war games conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice thinktank, that sought to anticipate the then Republican nominee Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian moves were he to return to the White House.
Many of the actions predicted in those tabletop exercises – including politicisation of the military and other key government institutions, and deployment of the national guard into Democratic-controlled cities – have already come to pass under Trump’s second presidency.
In Eaton’s analysis, Trump’s first step towards compromising military independence was the act of appointing Hegseth as secretary of defense. The former Fox & Friends host had been an adviser to Trump and had supported his first presidential run in 2016.
“Hegseth not only swears loyalty to Trump, he swears fealty to Trump – whereas the military swears an oath to the constitution,” Eaton said.
Soon after Hegseth was ensconced in the Pentagon the firings began. Within a week of Trump’s inauguration the military inspector general who acted as an independent watchdog was dismissed, followed by the top military lawyers (judge advocates general) who advise on the laws of armed conflict.
Out, too, went the top officers. Charles Brown, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, was ousted in February and replaced by Lt Gen Dan Caine who Trump claimed had express his love for the president and would “kill for him” (Caine denied ever saying such things). The top officers in the navy and air force were ditched in quick succession.
The Pentagon purge sent a clear and chilling message that reverberated throughout the military services, Eaton said. “Toe the line, or we will fire you. You’re in a different world now. This is Trump’s world, and by God, this is what we’re going to do.”
The dismissals also sowed doubt throughout the ranks. Would senior officers kowtow to Trump and his defense secretary? Or would they stand up for following the military rules of engagement?
Eaton said the effect reminded him of Joseph Stalin’s 1940s purges of the top officers in Soviet forces. “Stalin killed a lot of the best and brightest of the military leadership, and then inserted political commissars into the units. The doubt that swept the armed forces of the Soviet Union is reminiscent of today – they are not killing these men and women, but they are removing them from positions of authority with similar impact.”
The end result, Eaton said, was that “you’ve got a 1940s Stalin problem inside the American military right now”.
The furor over the lethal US military strikes on boats in Latin American waters is for Eaton a sign of the damage that is being wrought. The administration claims the strikes have been targeted on “narco-terrorists” who are in “armed conflict” with the US by bringing illegal drugs into the country.
The first of more than 20 strikes that have occurred took place on 2 September. It involved a controversial second strike that killed two survivors who had been clinging to the bombed wreck of the boat.
The Washington Post revealed that Hegseth had given an order to “kill everybody”. Under the Department of Defense manual on the laws of war, it is forbidden to order that every combatant must be killed irrespective of whether they pose a threat.
Eaton has no doubts about the illegality of the 2 September second strike. “It was either a war crime or a murder. So we have a real problem here. This decision looks a whole lot like a U-boat commander machine gunning victims in the water during world war two.”
Hegseth sought to drive home the new way of doing things in a bizarre summit in September in which he gathered military commanders to Quantico in Virginia. He berated them about so-called wokeness, liberal thinking, and the presence of “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”.
For Eaton, the meeting was “disgusting” and “antithetical to the US military. The senior leadership of our armed forces are sober people who do not speak in terms of fatness or ‘kill them all’ or ‘the gloves are off’.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Eaton is profoundly concerned that the violations of rules of war that have arguably been committed by the Pentagon outside US territory might soon become a reality domestically. The Trump administration has federalised national guard troops and sent them into numerous cities against the wishes of Democratic mayors and state governors.
The presence of national guard soldiers in Los Angeles, Washington DC, the Chicago area and other locations has been challenged in federal courts, where cases continue to play out.
In October Eaton took part in a delegation that included the organisation Vote Vets, to which he acts as an adviser, to see the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker. The retired two-star general said they counseled Pritzker to stand firm in countering troop deployment to Chicago.
“We told him: you have a requirement to protect your citizens from federal assault.”
Eaton’s biggest fear is at some point a dramatic clash of forces might take place, with the federalised national guard facing off against state and local police. He conjured up the imaginary scenario of the Texas national guard being federalised – ie ordered out of state control into national control – and imported into Baltimore, Maryland, contrary to the city and state’s wishes.
“What could go wrong?” Eaton said. “You can very easily see an escalation in which both sides think they are right, obeying orders that they believe were given legally.”
Sooner or later, he warned, a “memorable event” was likely to take place. “There are going to be people getting hurt who really don’t need to get hurt.”
tRump is using the people’s house, the house for the president while he is in office as if it was one of his own properties. Like he was always going to stay there. He is acting like the White House should be a palace like the Saudi royalty or the English kings / queens. He wants the place to be spectacle and pomp instead of what it really is for, a work place for the president to live and work. He also spends the public treasury paid for by the taxpayer as his own private checking account when the laws say that is illegal. Congress approves the budget not the president, but the republicans in congress are too afraid of him to even say anything. I bet you they find their voice if a democrat wins the presidency. Hugs.
President Donald Trump is continuing his renovations of the White House with potential new additions to the West Wing.
After demolishing the White House’s East Wing to make way for a new ballroom in 2025, Trump is now setting his sights on the colonnade linking the West Wing to the executive residence, where he wants to add a second level.
The administration unveiled the plan during a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington this week.
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email.
Why It Matters
The White House announced the East Wing ballroom project in late July, with demolition beginning in October, when workers were seen tearing it down.
The White House has said the project will be funded by private donations and no taxpayer burden, though the projected cost has increased from an estimate of $200 million to $400 million.
New Renovation Plans
In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said he was calling the project the “Upper West Wing.” He said it was still in the design phase and that the space could be used for additional West Wing offices or serve as “first ladies’ offices for future first ladies.” These were previously in the East Wing.
The project’s architect, Shalom Baranes, said the White House was weighing up the one-story addition to the West Wing to restore what he described as the complex’s “symmetry” once the East Wing ballroom was finished.
Architect Shalom Baranes shows elevation drawings for a new $400 million ballroom at the White House to members of the National Capital Planning Commi… | Chip Somodevilla/Getty
“I did mention the potential for a future addition, a one-story addition to the West Wing,” Baranes told the commission. “The reason to think about that is so that we would reinstate symmetry along the central pavilion of the White House.”
He made the remarks after unveiling plans for a two-story colonnade that would link the East Room to the new ballroom. The ballroom is set to be about 22,000 square feet and designed to accommodate 1,000 seated guests.
In a statement released in July, the White House said the “much-needed and exquisite addition” would add “approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people—a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”
Backlash
The overall renovation plans have been met with some backlash in recent months.
In December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit to stop the East Wing project, saying the administration had dodged a required review process for federal projects. During a hearing in the case, the administration told a federal judge it would submit the project’s plans to the appropriate federal oversight bodies. The judge said he would schedule a follow-up hearing in January to review the White House’s process and declined to halt construction in the meantime.
The trust said following the meeting on Thursday: “Today’s NCPC informational presentation about the White House ballroom was a good and necessary first step. The National Trust continues to urge the Administration to comply with all legally required review and approval processes before commencing construction, including the NCPC, the Commission of Fine Arts, compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, and approval by Congress.”
It added that it looked “forward to the American people having a voice in the process moving forward.”
From coast to coast, Americans are being harassed, assaulted, injured, and even murdered by sneering masked thugs hired to attack their countrymen as part of a vengeance presidency that is obsessed with hurting people for sport.
Portland Avenue and 34th Street in South Minneapolis where City of Minneapolis officials have confirmed an ICE agent shot an observer. A neighbor who saw what happened told local MPR news: “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” (Photo: Chad Davis)
Under wannabe dictator Donald Trump, the federal agencies of the United States tasked with keeping the nation safe are rapidly becoming a grave threat to the physical safety of the American people, as trigger-happy officers open fire on those they’re supposed to be protecting with increasing frequency in communities across the country.
Then, on October 5th, 2025, agents shot thirty-one-year-old Marimar Martinezin Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. Martinez was not seriously injured and was thus able to drive away. Although she committed no crime, Trump’s minions charged her and a companion for assault and attempted murder. But prosecutors were forced to drop all charges against both of them only a few weeks later, with her attorney stating: “These agents jumped out and shot Ms. Martinez, a U.S. citizen, whose only crime was warning her fellow community members that ICE was in the neighborhood… That is not a crime. She didn’t deserve to be shot.”
Today, officials at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis said that “armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.” MPR News spoke to a school official about the incident, who related on condition of anonymity: “The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down… They don’t care. They’re just animals… I’ve never seen people behave like this.”
Also today, right here in the Pacific Northwest, CBP agents opened fire on a man and woman believed to be a married couple in the parking lot of Adventist Medical Center Pavilion in southeast Portland. Here’s more from The New York Times: “The driver of the vehicle that federal officials fired into drove off after the shooting, local officials said, and the victims were found by the police more than two miles away, with gunshot wounds. Emergency medical technicians who rushed the victims to hospitals described both as Spanish speakers in conversations captured by emergency radio broadcasts. The woman had a gunshot wound to the chest, an E.M.T. told a dispatcher. The man was described as having two gunshot wounds.
Details about this latest shooting in Portland are still coming into focus. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) posted a statement to Twitter about the shooting which was subsequently deleted — and that leads us to worry that the investigation may already have been compromised by political interference from Trump’s regime.
“This violence in our community is devastating,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said. “These are not statistics. These are human beings. Portland is not a training ground for militarized agents. When the administration talks about using ‘full force,’ we are seeing what that means on our streets. The consequences are not abstract. They are felt in hospital rooms, in living rooms, in the quiet moments when families try to make sense of what happened. We know what the federal government says happened here. There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time is long past.”
“That is why we are calling on ICE to halt all operations in Portland until a full and independent investigation can take place. Our community deserves answers. Our community deserves accountability. And most of all, our community deserves peace.”
“We are all shaken and outraged by another terrible, unnecessary violent event instigated by the reckless agenda of the Trump administration, this time in our own state, in our largest city, coming just one day after the tragedy in Minnesota,” said Governor Tina Kotek, the chief executive of Oregon.
“While details remain limited, one thing is clear: when a president endorses tearing families apart, and attempts to govern through fear and hate rather than shared values, he fosters an environment of lawlessness and recklessness.”
“I am aligned with Mayor Wilson: the priority right now is a full, completed investigation, not more detentions,” the governor added. “The Attorney General, district attorneys, and I have been clear about our concerns with the excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland, and today’s incident only heightens the need for transparency and accountability. Oregonians deserve clear answers.”
“There are those who want to cause chaos. But Oregonians know how to stand up and speak out, peacefully. We must remain united in peaceful opposition to efforts to tear our communities apart and turn against one another. We will not take the bait.”
“I am grateful to the first responders who have been on the frontline of today’s events. The state will continue to support Portland, and stand united with Minnesota.”
“Huge concern about a reported shooting of two individuals by federal agents outside Portland Adventist Hospital,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Oregon’s junior United States Senator. “My team and I are closely monitoring this situation and are working hard to get answers. I will share any updates as I learn more.”
The Preamble to the United States Constitutions explicitly refers to “domestic tranquility.” That’s how important it was to the Framers that the people of this country be able to live peacefully and prosperously, without fear of social disorder or unrest. Domestic tranquility is a key objective of our plan of government, and the federal government is supposed to meet that objective by enforcing the laws with great care and discretion.
Obviously, that’s not happening right now.
And that’s fine with the people who worship Trump.
What happens when law enforcement officers attack the very people they’re supposed to protect? What then? People are trying to go about their lives in this country and they’re ending up killed or injured because trigger-happy agents full of testosterone have been told they can be as brutal, aggressive, and careless as they want to anyone they happen to come across — and they won’t be held accountable or punished.
This is not “law and order,” this is oppression and systemic violence. Trump has decreed it and Republicans at every level — federal, state, and local — are enabling it.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered on-camera. The footage is widely available. It’s ghastly and horrific. We can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears that we are being lied to on repeat about yesterday’s tragic events.
That’s exactly what Trump-controlled federal agencies are doing.
With Trump’s kakistocratic regime, no American is safe. This is a government of the least qualified and most unscrupulous individuals in the land. It’s the worst government in modern American history by a lot, and the terrible people who are in it seem determined to staking a claim to being the very worst government of all time.
It is our patriotic duty and moral responsibility — all of us who are loyal to the Constitution and to the values of freedom, inclusion, peace, and tolerance — to fiercely oppose this regime and all the evils it is trying to inflict on our country.
In memory of Silvero Villegas-Gonzalez and Renee Nicole Good and everyone else who has died at the hands of the thugs working for Donald Trump, we will carry on.
The report / written article has several sections with different versions. But it seems clear that Gestapo leader Stephen Miller is pushing everyone to send the message to ICE thugs and all right wing news media that the government would shield ICE gang thugs as long as they kept the harassment and terrorizing the brown people. The goal of ICE is to make brown people too scared for their lives to stay in the country or come here. The goal of the government is to force the public into instant obedience and to never protest anything the tRump people do or demand no matter how illegal, abusive, or scamming. Hugs
A third officer, positioned in front of her car on the left, drew his gun and fired three times while jumping back, with the last shots aimed through the driver’s window after the car’s bumper appeared to have cleared his body.
The video did not appear to show contact and the officer stayed on his feet, though Ms Noem said he was taken to a hospital and released.
US Vice-President JD Vance says an ICE officer was clearly justified in shooting a woman during an immigration enforcement surge.
Minnesota authorities have accused the FBI of seeking to block their access to an investigation into the death of Renee Nicole Good, 37.
What’s next?
Protesters have taken to the streets and some local schools have cancelled classes for the day.
US Vice-President JD Vance has defended the immigration agent who shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman amid tensions between state and federal officials.
Renee Nicole Good was shot in the head in front of a family member on Wednesday, local time, during an immigration enforcement surge.
Mr Vance said the shooting was justified and that Ms Good was a “victim of left-wing ideology”.
“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognising that it is a tragedy of her own making,” he said.
Mr Vance said the officer was clearly acting in self-defence.
There has been an outpouring of grief and anger in the community following the shooting. (AP: Mike Householder)
FBI ‘reversed course’ over joint probe
Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said it had been blocked by the FBI from taking part in a joint investigation into the shooting.
Following the shooting, the BCA initially said it had agreed to jointly investigate the shooting with the FBI.
But on Thursday, a day after the shooting, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said the federal agency had “reversed course” and taken sole control over the probe.
He said that step meant the state bureau would no longer have access to the scene evidence, case materials or interviews.
“As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation,” Superintendent Evans said.
The FBI and the office of US Attorney Daniel Rosen, the chief federal prosecutor in Minneapolis, did not immediately respond to questions about the BCA statement.
Keith Ellison, the state’s Democratic attorney general, told CNN the FBI’s decision was “deeply disturbing” and said state authorities could investigate with or without the cooperation of the federal government.
Renee Nicole Good was shot inside her car on Wednesday, local time. (Reuters: Tim Evans)
Ms Good’s death has left Minneapolis on edge, with protesters taking to the streets in anger and schools cancelling classes as a precaution on Thursday.
Minnesota and Trump administration officials have offered starkly different accounts of the shooting, with US President Donald Trump describing the slain woman as a “professional agitator”.
Democratic politicians and protesters have contested that claim, with the Minneapolis City Council saying she was “out caring for her neighbours” and died “at the hands of the federal government”.
Vance says officer deserves gratitude
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday, local time, that the officer who shot Ms Good had been “dragged” by a vehicle during a previous incident in June.
According to court documents, the officer was part of a team trying to apprehend a man in the country illegally.
JD Vance defended the shooting as self-defence during a press conference on Thursday. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
He broke a window and reached into the vehicle, attempting to open the door when the driver sped off, dragging the officer the length of a football field in 12 seconds.
The officer’s right arm was bleeding, and an FBI agent applied a tourniquet.
He was transported to a hospital, where he received more than 50 stitches.
Prosecutors said he had “suffered multiple large cuts and abrasions to his knee, elbow, and face”.
Mr Vance said the ICE officer “deserves a debt of gratitude”.
“This is a guy who’s actually done a very, very important job for the United States of America,” he said.
“He’s been assaulted. He’s been attacked. He’s been injured because of it.”
City and state officials blame immigration surge for shooting
Federal authorities in Minneapolis used chemical agents on protesters during democrations on Thursday, a day after the shooting. (AP: Tom Baker)
The agent was among 2,000 federal officers that the Trump administration had announced it was deploying to the Minneapolis area in what the Department of Homeland Security described as the “largest DHS operation ever”.
But Wednesday’s shooting drew immediate condemnation from city and state officials who blamed Mr Trump’s immigration enforcement surge for sowing chaos in the city’s streets.
DHS officials, including Ms Noem, defended the shooting as self-defence and accused the woman of trying to ram agents in an act of “domestic terrorism”.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, called that assertion “bulls**t” and “garbage” based on bystander videos taken of the incident that appeared to contradict the government’s account.
Videos showed two masked officers approaching Ms Good’s car, which was stopped at a perpendicular angle on a Minneapolis street.
As one officer ordered Ms Good out of the car and grabbed at her door handle, the car briefly reversed and then began driving forward, turning to the right in an apparent attempt to leave the scene.
A third officer, positioned in front of her car on the left, drew his gun and fired three times while jumping back, with the last shots aimed through the driver’s window after the car’s bumper appeared to have cleared his body.
The video did not appear to show contact and the officer stayed on his feet, though Ms Noem said he was taken to a hospital and released.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Demetrius Freeman / The Washington Post / Getty; Kayla Bartkowski / Getty; Samuel Corum / Sipa / Bloomberg / Getty.
January 7, 2026
Stephen Miller runs his daily 10 a.m. conference calls—yes, even on Saturdays—less like a government adviser and more like a wartime general. His is the dominant voice, as he plays the role of browbeater, inquisitor, and bully. He accepts no excuses, entertains no dissent.
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. One senior official who has participated in the calls told us that the intensity and urgency often veer into hectoring. “He pushes everybody to the absolute limit because he knows that the clock is ticking,” this person said. “He gets on the phone and he yells at everybody. Nobody is spared from his wrath.”
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 hiring 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.
Miller publicly shames bureaucrats he feels are falling short or resisting orders. “If there’s a problem and you’re the owner, you have to fix it quickly,” another frequent conference-call participant told us. “It’s not a place where you can say, ‘I have to get back to you.’”
A third official told us that the calls are unlike any other government meetings they’ve attended. “If you say something stupid, he’ll tell you to your face. You are expected to perform at a certain level, and there’s no excuse for not meeting those expectations,” this person said.
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. 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.
Miller has tried to recast the nation’s partisan political disagreements as an existential conflict, a battle pitting “forces of wickedness and evil” against the nation’s noble, virtuous people—a mostly native-born crowd that traces its lineage and legacy “back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.” He accuses federal judges of “legal insurrection” for ruling against Trump’s policies, describes the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization,” and dismisses the results of even legal immigration programs as “the Somalification of America.” And he has declared an end to the post–World War II order of “international niceties” in favor of a world that rebukes the weak, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as he put it this week when discussing recent military action against Venezuela.
Along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Miller was the chief force behind Trump’s decision to capture the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. “We are a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, articulating a worldview that started with the fear of immigration but has gradually expanded to a broader national-security and rule-of-law argument. (In this Darwinian vein, Miller also declared that the U.S. military could seize Greenland without a fight, echoing a social-media post that his wife, Katie Miller, had made two days earlier, showing an American flag superimposed on a map of the icy landmass alongside the word: SOON. NATO leaders have nervously affirmed Denmark’s claim to the territory.)
Miller’s official titles—he is also the director of the interagency Homeland Security Council—understate the full sweep of his purview. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and a Miller ally, describes him as Trump’s “prime minister.” Miller has a role in nearly every area about which he cares deeply: immigration and border security, yes, but also national security, foreign policy, trade, military action, and policing. He may draft a flurry of executive orders one day, lead a meeting on lowering domestic beef prices the next, and travel to deliver a fiery speech of his own—think Trump at his angriest and most dystopian, without any of the president’s impish humor—the following week. (Miller declined to comment for this story.)
Early in Trump’s second term, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to treat migrants as part of a foreign invasion, directed Congress to pass $150 billion in new funding for homeland-security enforcement, and captained the administration’s assault on elite universities such as Harvard and Columbia. Late last year, he helped orchestrate Trump’s authorization of military strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, setting the stage for the military operation against Maduro.
The force behind Miller’s directives became clear during Signalgate—in which the Trump administration accidentally included The Atlantic’seditor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on a private Signal chat about a bombing campaign in Yemen. It was Miller—not Trump’s national security adviser, Pentagon chief, or even vice president—who ended the debate and directed the group to move forward with the strikes. Trump has described Miller as sitting “at the top of the totem pole” inside the White House.
“He oversees every policy the administration touches,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us. “I can’t tell you the number of times a policy matter is discussed in the Oval and Trump will say, ‘Where’s Stephen? Tell him to get that done.’”
To critics, 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.”
Yet if Miller has internalized any of the criticism, or acknowledged the parallels to his own lineage, he has not shown it, even among friends or colleagues. Miller is now acting as an accelerant for the president’s most incendiary impulses and shaping the lives of individual Americans in nearly every realm. He has demonstrated neither the interest nor the ability to moderate his views—even for tactical purposes. He is apt to overreach. And he has shown that he’s not afraid to use the power of the government to go after those who try to stand in his way—even his liberal neighbors, whom he has accused of threatening his family.
During Trump’s first term, Miller pushed the family-separation policy at the southern border, a measure long considered too extreme to implement. It triggered such a massive backlash that Trump’s wife and eldest daughter urged him to stop it. The separations became the defining immigration policy of Trump’s first term, undermining his ability to run on the issue in 2020. Now that he’s back in office, the latest polling shows eroding support for the president’s immigration crackdown, especially among the Latino voters who helped carry him to victory in 2024.
But Miller has continued to push not just for the deportation of people in the country illegally but also for narrowing or closing legal immigration pathways, especially for people from poor, not-majority-white, non-Christian nations. His actions have struck many Americans as racist and xenophobic. (In 2019, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on leaked emails in which Miller urged the conservative Breitbart News to promote ideas from The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 French novel popular in white-nationalist and neo-Nazi circles.) Colleagues who have worked with him for years say they have never heard him utter a racist slur, even in private. His devotion is not to white supremacy per se, they insist, but to the political and intellectual thesis he has been pushing since before he arrived in Washington. He wants to halt and reverse America’s post-1960s immigration boom, and he pursues that goal with a fervor that has made him the public face of Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies.
During debate prep for the 2024 campaign, Miller found himself in a contentious back-and-forth over immigration with a more moderate Trump ally. Finally, a frustrated Trump interrupted the two men: Stephen,he said, if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you, someone familiar with the exchange told us.
“That’s correct,” Miller said, before turning back to continue sparring.
The nexus of Miller’s power is a vestige of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush established the Homeland Security Council to coordinate the government’s domestic response to the new threats from abroad. More than two and a half decades later, Miller has attached that rubric of national emergency to a new target, turning the council into a daily war room to track and fine-tune Trump’s campaign to deport 1 million people a year.
The September murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who was close to many in the administration, including Miller, plunged Trump’s already single-minded martinet into a maximalist frenzy. A portrait of Ronald Reagan hangs prominently in the Oval Office—just over Trump’s left shoulder when he’s seated at the Resolute Desk—but Miller has made it abundantly clear that this is no longer Reagan’s Republican Party.
Former Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who retired during Trump’s first term, told us that he has noticed a clear shift from one Trump administration to the next. “Before, it was more subtle, more nuanced, but now it’s pretty plain. He wants to see more immigration from the Nordic countries, and not so much from the Third World countries. It’s just a clear break from the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” said Flake, who, as a senator, worked unsuccessfully to pass a bipartisan immigration overhaul. “It’s not the Reagan vision. It’s not the traditional Republican vision.”
Flake said that although the immigration system has serious problems, Trump and Miller’s goal seems to be “to change the nature of who we are as a country.”
Beyond immigration, Miller specializes in turning the president’s whims and rantings into government policy. As Trump griped about the homeless encampments near the State Department one day, Leavitt recalled that he turned to Miller and said: “Get it done.” “And within six hours,” she said, “I looked at Twitter, and there were cranes cleaning them up.”
“Stephen is the most effective political aide of this generation—and probably since James Baker,” the former Trump adviser Cliff Sims told us in a text. “No one is more deft at moving the levers of government to turn the President’s policies into action.”
May Mailman, who last year worked closely with Miller to punish elite universities that the administration claims are rife with anti-Semitism and “woke” ideology, explained to us how Miller approaches a problem. In March, for instance, upset with Columbia University for several reasons—including prominent pro-Palestinian protests on campus—Trump posted a message on social media that began, “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.” Miller told Mailman to come up with some options, but, with Trump’s buy-in, Miller was ultimately the one who approved pulling federal funding from the school.
Then he carefully watched for the reaction. “If taking money from Columbia was a bad idea and backfired in some way, then Stephen would be the one to demand a course correction,” said Mailman, who first worked with Miller during Trump’s first term. “But because that worked out pretty well, he then tries to figure out: How can we use that tool in other areas?”
Close observers of Miller say that his total command is a marked contrast to his role during the first Trump term, when, despite being a senior adviser, he was limited in his ability to direct others. David Lapan, a retired Marine Corps colonel and aide to former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, told us that he remembers attending a 2017 meeting at which Miller urged officials to send him examples of crimes committed by immigrants so he could publicize them. The difference then, Lapan said, is that Miller had an advisory role, and the other meeting attendees could disregard requests that they felt were too outlandish. “We came out of that meeting and said, Yeah, we’re not doing that,” Lapan recalled. “We knew that Kelly would cover for us.”
“Are there stories like that out there? Sure,” Lapan said. “But they’re the exception, not the rule. Cherry-picking a few bad cases to paint all immigrants in a negative light is not something that we were willing to do.”
Although Miller views himself as the president’s loyal servant, Trump’s stances appear to have shifted under Miller’s direction. The president used to speak favorably about certain immigrant groups he liked, such as DACA recipients and the employees at his golf resorts. But lately, his occasional pro-immigrant chatter has quieted. “‘America First’ is becoming ‘Americans Only,’” Lapan said.
Illustration by Ben Kothe. Sources: Getty; Jim Watson / AFP / Getty.
Miller turned 40 in August and celebrated with a surprise party at the Ned, a chic members-only club blocks from the White House. The president did not show up, but just about everyone else did: White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, House Speaker Mike Johnson, conservative influencers, nearly every Cabinet secretary. Miller did not have a speech prepared but spoke self-deprecatingly, thanking Wiles for putting up with his ideas and suggestions. The turnout was a show of not just Miller’s immense power but also his popularity in an administration that has been rife with infighting and backstabbing, especially during Trump’s first term.
The gleeful brawler Miller plays on TV is no act, his colleagues told us, and he behaves similarly in private (although often with a dash of deadpan humor). Several people told us that they appreciate how dogmatic he is, for a possibly surprising reason: They always know where he stands on the issues, and where they stand with him. As Trump’s speechwriter during the first administration, he built goodwill with colleagues by warning them when the president was about to say something contrary to their plans, so they had time to try to convince him otherwise.
“The lazy and clearly false hit on him is to call him these disgusting names,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us, about the accusations that Miller is a Nazi or a fascist. “If you dig deeper and aren’t suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, he’s not what the media portrays him as. He’s actually a very nice and cordial person who cares about this country and wants to do a good job. He’s very easy to work with. I’ve been in Trump world a long time, and he’s probably the easiest to work with.”
Several people described Miller as an exacting boss, even a micromanager, but one who looks out for his team—including younger aides. In Trump’s first term, he was not yet married, and he spent many of his nights out, grabbing drinks or dinner with everyone from Cabinet secretaries to more junior staff, who were eager to get time with him. When Trump’s first term wound down, Miller helped ensure that everyone on his staff (and even some not on his team) had a job lined up.
Friends and colleagues say he has rarely seemed hurt by the criticism and caricatures. But he can be vain about his appearance; in Trump’s first term, he once showed up to Face the Nation with what was roundly mocked as spray-on hair. (In Trump’s second term, the hair is gone.) And after a recent Vanity Fair photo shoot of senior West Wing staff, the photographer—whose close-up, often unflattering photos went viral—recounted to The Washington Postthat Miller “was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session,” asking whether or not he should smile. Colleagues also describe a proud sartorialist who regularly debated fashion and traded menswear tips with another West Wing fashionista, Hogan Gidley, a deputy press secretary during Trump’s first term.
“We would talk about the difference in fabrics for seasons, and lapel size and width of ties and these types of things,” Gidley told us, before describing Miller’s style as “sophisticated and smart and chic but also daring at times.”
In a recently resurfaced 2003 video, a 17-year-old Miller—prominent sideburns and tightly coiled brown hair—sits in the back of a moving school bus, opining on the war in Iraq. In the video, Miller smirkily suggests that the “ideal solution” for “Saddam Hussein and his henchmen” would be “to cut off their fingers”; he argues that torture is the proper punishment in a nonbarbaric society. (In a barbaric society, he implies, death would be the appropriate punishment.) “Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity,” he continues, briefly unable to hide his delight as his latest outlandish proclamation illicits titters from his peers—his mouth widens into a toothy grin, and he emits an audible chuckle before taking a breath and continuing.
This is Miller the troll, who has confided in friends that he enjoys starting a fire, then dousing it with gasoline. But after more than two decades relishing his role as the gleeful contrarian, the persona has now become more true character than occasional outlandish caricature. “He has a flair for the dramatic, and you can tell that now with the way he comports himself on TV,” Bannon told us. “He plays the character well, knowing he always wants to have the libs’—the progressives’—heads blow up.”
After graduating from Duke in 2007—where he vigorously defended white lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape by a Black stripper—Miller landed a job with newly elected Republican Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. As young Capitol Hill aides, he and Sergio Gor—who recently became Trump’s ambassador to India—helped launch the supernova ambitions of Bachmann, a right-wing darling whose then-fringe ideology presaged the rise of MAGA. By the time Bachmann’s 2012 presidential bid flamed out, Miller was already firmly ensconced with then-Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who shared his hard-line obsession with immigration, and Bannon, who provided a broader nationalist, populist scaffolding.
As Sessions’s aide-de-camp, Miller helped his boss sabotage the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, which passed the Senate by a wide margin in 2013. At the time, a post-2012 Republican autopsy was calling for a gentler, more inclusive GOP, and the proposed immigration overhaul had the support of business and tech leaders, interest groups, and wealthy donors. But Miller was undaunted, buttonholing reporters in the hallways of Congress to press his anti-immigrant case, and calling them later at home to talk—for hours, if they’d let him—about the bill’s minutiae and why it would harm American workers. The bill died in the House, where it never came up for a vote.
Miller pushed colleagues to keep the same round-the-clock hours as he did, including calling meetings on Friday afternoons, when most Hill staffers were eager to skip out early to happy hours. Instead, Republican staffers sullenly reported to messaging meetings to talk about immigration.
Working with Bannon, Miller made Breitbart News the communications arm of his effort. And, understanding that data and statistics, however dubious, could lend their cause the sheen of legitimacy, they elevated obscure anti-immigration groups—the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA—into prominent sources. “The more outrageous the headline, the better,” Bannon said.
By the time Miller joined Trump’s 2016 campaign—officially launched with claims that Mexico was sending “rapists” and criminals across the border—his immigration bona fides were well established, and he learned to channel Trump’s voice into policy prescriptions. The baby-faced Miller quickly moved from the back of Trump’s plane to the inner circle at the front.
By March 2016, Miller was Trump’s opening act, riling up crowds across the country with an anti-immigrant, anti-Washington populism that sometimes threatened to overshadow Trump himself. “I said, ‘Listen, the point of an introduction is that Trump doesn’t have to top it,’” Bannon said. “He was so insane over-the-top. But of course the MAGA base can’t get enough of him.”
In Trump’s first White House, Miller made quick use of the various levers available to him, no matter how buried in the bureaucratic bowels. He took a particular interest in the office of the staff secretary, a little-known but powerful team that vets any memo or speech or policy before it reaches the president. Not a lawyer himself, he nevertheless leaned on creative and expansive interpretations of statutes to push the president’s agenda. In the early days of COVID, for instance, he successfully urged the administration to invoke a 1944 emergency public-health law to shut down the border and rapidly expel migrants to Mexico or their home country. In a White House staffed partly by amateurs, he also benefited from his deep understanding of policy issues, which he’d been honing since high school. He coached Trump and others into even more extreme immigration positions, explaining why, for instance, he believed that giving merit-based green cards to promising foreign students was problematic.
Even his allies find Miller to be something of an “acquired taste,” as one put it. Another quipped that he has the bedside manner of Heinrich Himmler, one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest followers and a key architect of the Holocaust. But Mailman said that Miller could be strategic when making a policy pitch. On immigration, he instinctively understood if someone was a “type person” (who cared about the type of immigrant coming to the country) or a “numbers person” (who cared simply about the sheer number of immigrants) and often tailored his message accordingly. “He thinks about the rationale of how someone is approaching something,” she said.
Because Miller’s views—especially on immigration—were so well known, he earned Trump’s trust despite also, at times, vigorously disagreeing with him. “Miller is 100 percent firm in every conviction and feeling he has, and he just says it the way he believes it, and if it aligns with what the president wants to do, then great,” a first-term Trump aide told us. “And if it’s nuanced or different, then Miller stakes out his position—he doesn’t care if it’s different from what other people think or what the president wants—but then once the president makes his position clear, Miller executes on it, whether or not he agrees with it.”
Despite his years as Sessions’s protégé, Miller quickly distanced himself from his longtime mentor, several people told us, when Sessions, then Trump’s first attorney general, recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, angering the president. In fact, the rupture was more acute than was publicly known; Miller was enraged by what he viewed as Sessions’s unforgivable betrayal of Trump.
During the first term, Miller aligned himself with Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, once it became clear that they held tremendous sway with the president. The pairing was unusual, given that the president’s daughter and son-in-law were seen as misguided “globalists” by much of the far-right base. One person familiar with the dynamic described Miller spending hours with Ivanka Trump on her key initiatives—paid family leave and tax credits for parents. The charitable explanation, this person continued, is that Miller was being generous with his time and expertise; the more cynical one is that Miller understood that Ivanka Trump was less likely to complain to her father about Miller’s hard-line immigration policies if the two had a good relationship.
“He always understood where power lies,” Bannon said. “No matter what—he can be coaching a Little League team—Miller can very quickly analyze.”
Miller’s fealty to his boss was on display right up until the end of Trump’s first term. On January 6, 2021, Miller’s wife—who had worked as Vice President Mike Pence’s communications director—was on maternity leave but still employed by Pence. But when Trump called Miller that morning to discuss adding lines to his speech attacking Pence, Miller—ever the good soldier—did as he was told.
Later that day, angry Trump supporters marched to the Capitol, calling for the vice president to be hanged for treason.
The enemy arrived at the Millers’ doorstep on a warm September morning in the form of a retired gender and peace-studies professor in a loose striped dress. Barbara Wien, who had been protesting the family’s presence in Arlington, Virginia, pointed her index and middle fingers at her own eyes, then directed those fingers at Katie Miller, who was on the front porch.
Stephen Miller took the gesture at his wife, which was captured on video, as a call to violence—an offense that he uniquely had the power to punish.
The Millers had already felt under siege, facing threats and fearing that the entire family was being surveilled by sophisticated actors. A Rhode Island man had been indicted in August for publicly threatening to kill Miller and other officials. A law-enforcement official told us that Katie Miller had been surreptitiously photographed in her neighborhood—while going to the gym, and at least once while walking with her kids—and said that there was a “coordinated” and “malicious” effort to, at the very least, intimidate them. Someone had also posted flyers at neighborhood parks where their kids played, revealing their home address and calling him a Nazi. The Millers had stopped allowing their children to play in front of the house or in the backyard.
But they were not going to be intimidated by a 66-year-old activist.
“You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear,” Miller said days later, in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. He had gone on the program to discuss the federal response to Kirk’s recent assassination, but although he was focused on “domestic terrorists,” he included doxxing on the list of related offenses. For those familiar with the Millers’ personal lives, it sounded less like he was talking about Kirk’s assassin than about Wien, who’d distributed flyers with his address.
“You will live in exile,” he continued, “because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Miller set about drafting a series of executive orders, later signed by Trump, that directed federal law enforcement to refocus counterterrorism efforts on people with “anti-fascist” ideas, such as “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
This fall, Miller also began describing a central divide in the country, pitting “legitimate state power” against what he termed left-wing “street violence.” His definition of the latter was broad. He accused Democratic politicians who called him or Trump “authoritarian” of “inciting violence.” (Never mind that he had repeatedly called the Biden administration “fascist.”) He placed doxxing—what his family faced—on the continuum that leads to violence. (Also never mind that Vice President J. D. Vance encouraged calling out those who celebrated Kirk’s murder, including at their place of employment.)
As Miller announced federal policies aimed at combatting the threat, he was also fighting a private battle against the very enemy he described. In the weeks after Wien made her gesture in front of his wife, the Millers decided that they were no longer safe in their six-bedroom, roughly $3 million Northern Virginia home. They sought out military housing at a nearby base, arguing to friends and allies inside the administration that their safety depended on it.
But the legitimate powers of the state repeatedly declined to fully cooperate with the Millers’ attempt to turn their own situation into a catalyst for the sort of crackdown they claimed was necessary. The FBI was initially hesitant to take a major role in the investigation of Wien, prompting the Millers to demand its involvement, according to a person briefed on their efforts. A Democratic Virginia state prosecutor became concerned about the federal involvement in a search warrant on Wien, and sought to narrow its scope. A federal magistrate judge refused to approve federal search warrants, according to a report by Axios.
Katie Miller, who hosts her own podcast, recently appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show and accused a progressive guest, Cenk Uyger, of attacking her Jewish children by merely having a difference of opinion with her. She then offered a veiled threat to have Uyger’s citizenship revoked. (Uyger is a naturalized citizen; in a text message, he described Katie Miller’s threat as “not an attack on me as much as it’s an attack on America.”) When the investigation against Wien appeared to stall, Miller’s longtime ally Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chair, announced that he had opened an inquiry into the Democratic prosecutor in Virginia who had sought to narrow the search warrant and raised concerns about federal involvement.
“This is so cool,” Katie Miller said on social media. “Thank you.”
Days later, the prosecutor said that she would not cooperate with Jordan’s inquiry, because the investigation was ongoing and Congress lacked the ability to intervene in a state law-enforcement matter. There were still some powers of the state that Miller did not control.
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