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Stephen Miller, Who Once Reportedly Called to Drone-Strike Migrants, Is Leading Trump's Attacks on Venezuelan Boats
"For all intents and purposes, the most powerful person in the federal government is Stephen Miller," said one legal scholar.
Sep 29, 2025
The deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller—who once reportedly advocated for the US to launch drone strikes against unarmed migrants—has played a leading role in the US’s campaign of extrajudicial airstrikes on Venezuelan boats in recent weeks.
As The Guardian reported Monday, Miller has been heavily involved in directing the strikes, at times superseding the role of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These strikes have been orchestrated by the Homeland Security Council (HSC), which Miller leads as the president's homeland security adviser.
In a notable departure from previous administrations, Miller has turned HSC into an autonomous entity within the second Trump administration. During previous administrations, the HSC operated under the national security council umbrella and reported to the US national security adviser, who is also currently Rubio.
In recent weeks, Trump has carried out attacks on three boats in the Caribbean that the administration has alleged were carrying drugs. Legal experts from across the spectrum have contended that even if this were the case, such strikes—which have killed at least 17 people in total—are patently illegal.
The administration has provided no evidence to indicate that the people on these boats were smuggling drugs to the US. Meanwhile, one former senior law enforcement official with years of experience fighting cartels told the New York Times that the first boat struck in September—which killed 11 people—was more likely carrying migrants, since it is unusual for a drug smuggling operation to require so many people on board.
On Friday, it was reported that the US military was considering launching more strikes inside Venezuelan territory against alleged members and leaders of drug trafficking groups, as well as drug laboratories. Many commentators have said that such strikes would be an act of war and a potential prelude to a regime change operation.
That Miller is a driving force behind the boat attacks squares with previous reporting that, in 2018, while serving as one of Trump's top immigration advisers, Miller had allegedly advocated for the president to launch predator drones to blow up boats carrying unarmed migrants.
Those comments appeared in a book written by former Trump Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who said that Miller argued for the mass killing of civilians by suggesting that they were not protected under the US Constitution because they were in international waters. After it was initially reported by Rolling Stone in 2023, Miller denied having made the comment.
As The Guardian notes, "Miller’s role also opens a window into the dubious legal justification that has been advanced for the strikes." This rationale is centered around the Trump administration's designation of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a "terrorist" organization, which Miller has also used to justify the unlawful deportation of Venezuelans under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Miller has portrayed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the leader of the organization, suggesting—again with little evidence—that “it is not a government, it is a drug cartel, a narco-trafficking organization that is running Venezuela.”
As Common Dreams reported in May, a declassified memo showed that US intelligence agencies have rejected the Trump administration's claim that Tren de Aragua works with Maduro.
Miller's central role in the strikes carried out this past month is another sign of an outsized and growing role in the second Trump White House.
He has been a primary architect of Trump's "mass deportation" crusade, which has also involved carrying out extrajudicial deportations of Venezuelan nationals accused of membership in Tren de Aragua, often with little to no evidence.
In June, following a directive from Miller to reach a "quota" of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has overwhelmingly targeted undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions.
Miller is also leading the White House's efforts to label left-wing organizations in the US as "terrorist organizations" in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as part of efforts to "dismantle" the president's opposition.
Following the news of Miller's intimate involvement in the Venezuelan boat strikes, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick commented that, "For all intents and purposes, the most powerful person in the federal government is Stephen Miller, not Trump."
"He is dictating military strikes, overriding cabinet secretaries, running mass deportation, and more," he said, "all while Trump golfs and occasionally signs executive orders he hasn’t read.”
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All They Will Call You Will Be ‘Deportees’
A recording of an iconic Woody Guthrie folk song has resurfaced just as the Trump administration has unleashed another wave of deportations against immigrants it tries to keep nameless.
Jul 21, 2025
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”—“Deportees,(Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” Woody Guthrie, 1948
On January 28, 1948 a small plane transporting 28 migrants with three flight crew members and a guard departed Oakland bound for a deportation center in El Centro, California near the Mexican border. The aircraft, which had come from Burbank, however, had been switched in Oakland to a smaller aircraft. It was now loaded with more passengers than outfitted for, and overdue for a required safety inspection. It never reached El Centro.
Near Coalinga, California in Fresno County, the airplane caught fire in midair, and fell to Earth, “crashing in a spectacular fireball” in Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard. The crash was reported in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and other outlets, with the names of the crew and guard. The others who horribly died were identified only, as the Times put it, as Mexican nationals who entered the United States Illegally (though one was actually a Spaniard and another Filipino, as author-artist Tim Hernandez told National Public Radio 60 years later).
Or as legendary folk singer and social activist Woody Guthrie, who was moved to honor the migrants left nameless in one of the most iconic protest songs in U.S. history, put it: “Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, "They are just deportees.”
On multiple levels, the haunting words and tones of “Deportee” have even more resonance today.
Since 1948, Woody’s plaintive song has been recorded by scores of legendary musicians and featured in a book by Hernandez. What brought it back to life this week was the announcement July 14, Woody’s 113th birthday, of the release of an unearthed collection of home recordings made available now through the use of new equipment and software. The newly released tapes would be his last due to his early signs of Huntington’s disease. Woody never studio recorded “Deportee,” it was “lost to history, until now,” as the Rolling Stone notes.
Introducing disclosure of the 20 newfound gems, including home recordings of many of his classics, The New York Times reports that his estate and record company fittingly chose to publicly release one particular song, “Deportee.”
It was a decision surely reflective of the politics of a songwriter whose guitar was famously adorned, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And whose working-class politics are beautifully delineated by this nugget in the Times report: “‘Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,’ a parable about two characters trekking toward heaven. The bum has practical skills—building a fire, cooking a stew—while the landlord weighs himself down with gold, expecting to buy his way into salvation. In a Woody Guthrie song, that doesn’t happen.”
Though not mentioned by Times, the selection of “Deportee” is highlighted in a Rolling Stone headline as “an Ode to Deported Workers, [That] Has Never Been More Relevant.” On multiple levels, the haunting words and tones of “Deportee” have even more resonance today.
For a nation of immigrants—none of us are native, save Indigenous peoples—immigration has long been controversial, especially of those less desired due to race or ethnicity, other than enslaved people dragged in by chains. Restrictive immigration laws date to as early as a 1790 act which required immigrants to be “free white persons.” Similar racist intent characterized the notorious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which gave special preference to white immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.
But the nation has also long depended on the hard labor—from the fields to transcontinental railroads to garment factories, construction, and meat processing plants of today—of immigrants of color who could be exploited with low wages, harsh living conditions, and coercive threats of deportation.
Unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Miller and his fellow immigrant haters have adopted the most racist and militaristic practices of the past, and the same disregard to who is rounded up.
Mass deportations are sadly not new either. They include a large early 1930s Depression expulsion of migrants of Mexican descent, though 60% were American citizens. Until now the most notorious mass expulsions occurred in 1953-54 under the racist title of “Operation Wetback,” estimated to seize as many as 1.3 million low-income migrant workers. “Tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats, and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives,” writes Erin Blakemore.
“In Chicago,” she continues, “three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25% of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease, and other causes while in custody.”
“The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United State,” notes Blakemore. It has no doubt served as a model and inspiration to Stephen Miller, the fanatical architect of today’s mass deportation crusade.
Unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Miller and his fellow immigrant haters have adopted the most racist and militaristic practices of the past, and the same disregard to who is rounded up. They have escalated the mass deportations to new depths, flagrantly flaunting court orders, with masked secret agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people and terrorizing immigrants and communities of color.
Their campaign was kicked off with the mid-March dispatch of three planeloads of hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men, only 32 with criminal accusations, renditioned in secret, with no notice to their families or attorneys and with no due process to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.
As with the Los Gatos Canyon deportees, none had their names disclosed. But within days, court filings revealed that at least one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been mistakenly deported. By April, about 90% were shown to have no criminal record. They included gay makeup artist Andry Hérnandez, Venezuelan professional soccer player Jerce Reyes, baker Neri Alvarado whose alleged “gang” tattoo was actually an autism awareness image honoring his brother, and Frengel Reyes, all ultimately identified by family members, careful legal work, and media investigative research.
Unlike the 1948 crash, or the 1930s and 1950s mass deportations, most of their names eventually became known due to the rise of multiple immigrant legal rights groups and sleuthing of investigative reporters and families. After months of legal work and public protests, 250 of the Venezuelans have been finally released from the Salvadoran prison and flown to Venezuela. It’s an alarming prospect for anyone who came to the U.S. for legal protection due to credible security concerns in their native country.
Subsequently, the Trump administration doubled down with other renditions of immigrants to foreign, often failed and dangerous countries, where the deportees may not speak the language or have any resources. When Trump and Miller realized dispatching alleged gang members and undocumented people already in prisons was not generating the numbers they desired, they turned to setting arbitrary quotas of 3,000 abductees a day.
That led to the daily Gestapo-style raids of farms, factories, construction sites, Home Depot parking lots, and courthouses where immigrants have gone to fulfill their legal obligations. The raids have targeted mostly brown and Black people, whether legal immigrants, people with temporary protected legal status, even citizens. And, as reports have found, most with no criminal record. The draconian crusade has engendered a fierce backlash by other Americans that has led to plummeting poll support for Trump’s signature issue of immigration policy.
As Woody sang:
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Most of those being seized today are regular working people—day laborers, restaurant and hotel employees, meat processing workers, janitors, landscapers, and farm workers. Though it takes family members, immigrant rights attorneys, and activists to find them, they now have names—and often videos of brutal assaults while being grabbed by masked secret agents—widely circulated so others can recognize what their neighbors are enduring and demand justice.
For the deportees honored by Woody Guthrie, it took author Hernandez and another “son of a migrant farm worker, just like myself” years later to find a list of the names in “annals of the Fresno County Hall of Records,” he explained to NPR in 2013, and their burial site in a mass Fresno grave marked with a headstone from an anonymous donor that just reads, "28 Mexican Nationals Who Died In A Plane Crash Are Buried Here." Hernandez gave “these 28 passengers what every human being is afforded, and that’s the right to have their name. Our names are really what represent who we are.”
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Does the Working Class Support Trump's Attack on Migrant Workers? No!
Trump’s getting away with this even though nearly two-thirds of the public doesn’t agree with him on deporting hard-working immigrants. Where are the Democrats on this issue?
Jun 11, 2025
As Trump stokes conflict at immigration demonstrations, will the public side with Trump or the demonstrators?
Attacks on immigrant workers are accelerating as ICE zeros in on sites where immigrants gather to find work, and outside courts where immigrants go because their legal status requires it. The demonstrations erupted in Los Angeles as ICE arrested day-laborers who lined up at Home Depot waiting to be selected by contractors. ICE is also aggressively sweeping LA garment shops dependent on immigrant workers. Trump and ICE claim they are only seeking to deport violent criminals. But this flimsy excuse collapses against the reality of hundreds of undocumented workers, most with no prior contact with law enforcement, caught up in these raids, torn away from their families and friends.
Does the public at large endorse these arrests? Don’t working-class people in general want these undocumented workers deported to alleviate job competition? That apparently reasonable commonsense claim turns out to be wrong. according to recent survey data.
I reviewed this data in a recent Substack, but it bears repeating because it is so important to clearly understand what working people actually support.
The Cooperative Election Study (CES), with more than 500,000 respondents, asked the following question repeatedly from 2010 to 2020.
“Are you in favor of granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.”
There are approximately one million undocumented workers in the LA area that fit this description. They are hard-working neighbors, families, and friends, not violent criminals. Clearly, they have wide-spread support withing the vast LA Hispanic community. But do Anglo workers support them?
I tackled that question in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, by sorting the CES data to include only white respondents without four-year college degrees, who are also in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.
The data show that our commonsense understanding about white working-class resentment towards immigrants was justified in 2010 when only 32 percent supported the statement that granted legal status, but by 2020, white working-class support for legalization jumped to 62 percent.
But that was way back in 2020, long before the Biden immigration surge. Have working-class sentiments about immigrants changed since 2020? Trump’s incessant pounding away at undocumented immigrants and his successful campaign in 2024 would suggest they would have.
We tested the exact same CES question again in a YouGov survey (April 2025) designed by the Labor Institute, the Center for Working Class Politics and the Rutgers Labor Education Action Research Network. The survey included 3,000 respondents from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely white working-class states.
Before the survey, I was certain that support had plummeted, given the rise of job insecurity and inflation during the last four years. I expected that more voters in those Rust Belt states would be worried about losing their jobs to low-wage immigrants and would therefore be more open to Trump’s deportation campaign. But I was mistaken.
In these four states, 63 percent of the respondents supported “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.” Only 34 percent opposed the statement.
I’ve heard activists say that black voters are more hostile to immigrant workers, because many work in lower-wage jobs that face competition from undocumented workers. Wrong again: 77 percent of the black respondents in these four states favored the proposal. In every demographic and income category strong majorities favored “granting legal status” to these “illegal” hard-working immigrants.
Are the Democrats sleep-walking through this crisis?
Given this survey data, as well as just plain decency, the Democratic Party should be all over this issue. Democratic leaders of all ideological shades should be marching together arm-in-arm with the protestors, demanding a path to citizenship for hard-working, law-abiding undocumented workers. Why isn’t the Democratic leadership taking the lead?
I really don’t know. But I do know that their abdication leaves the field to Trump, who is doing all he can to provoke confrontations between the demonstrators and police, confrontations that play to his base’s fears and strengthens him. That would be much harder to do if Democratic elected officials were on the front lines. Trump’s getting away with this even though nearly two-thirds of the public doesn’t agree with him on deporting hard-working immigrants. That’s Democratic political malpractice.
If you step back and look at the broader picture, it sure seems like the Democrats have given up on bold support for working people. Yes, they will talk about the illegality of sending in the National Guard, they decry the blatant violations of habeas corpus, and they express concerns about Trump-the-Oligarch’s threat to democracy. But full-throated support for bringing immigrant workers out of the shadows and into citizenship? Radio silence.
It’s time to figure out, I think, how to create a new party of working people. As it turns out, I’m not alone. Nearly sixty percent of Rust Belt voters support that too! (More on that when we release our complete survey results, coming soon.)
Meanwhile, let’s hope that some Democrats join the activists on the frontlines, coming to the defense of working people in dire need of support. Is that really too much to ask of the one-time party of working people?
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