Is Stephen Miller’s Time at White House Finally Coming to an End?

The architect of Donald Trump’s second-term immigration agenda is losing his influence.

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has aimed to rewrite U.S. immigration policy since his early days in Washington as a Senate aide. But even atop his perch within the Trump administration, Miller’s schemes have experienced myriad setbacks.

Thus far, the president has dismantled the Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had campaigned for, turned on former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for effectively following Miller’s orders, and handed the reins of America’s deportation program back to law enforcement officials, reported The Atlantic Monday.

The White House insists that Miller’s place within Trump’s entourage has not changed, and that he remains a steadfast and widely respected adviser to the president.

“The President loves Stephen,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”

But behind the scenes, Trump’s language about the immigration aide is changing. The president has privately joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are too extreme for the public, and reportedly thinks that sometimes Miller takes things too far, according to presidential advisers that spoke with the magazine.

Trump reportedly disagreed with Miller’s description of Alex Pretti—one of two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this winter—as a “domestic terrorist,” and acknowledged afterward that U.S. policy needed to shift as a result.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. He has leveraged his position within the administration to advance American warmongering abroad, pushing the White House to bomb boats in the Caribbean when a plan to invade Mexico fell through.

What is not clear is how long Trump will keep Miller, and his violent ideologies, around. Miller’s influence on his pet project, immigration, is already waning.

“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. Another adviser was more blunt: “The president knows who he is, period.”

Since Noem was ousted, the power structure has shifted, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and border czar Tom Homan taking the lead on U.S. immigration policy in Miller’s place.

“The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and [Border Protection Commissioner] Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told The Atlantic. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”

Without Noem to muck up the agenda, Miller’s direct involvement with the agency no longer seems necessary.

“The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” one White House official said.

Under President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policies, immigrants who call 911 are being detained, and those who are too afraid to call are dying as a result.

In December, Axel Sanchez Toledo was violently arrested by police officers after he called 911 to request a welfare check on his 4-year-old daughter after hearing she’d fallen sick while staying with his ex-girlfriend, The Marshall Project reported Monday.

Sanchez Toledo greeted two officers from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office with his girlfriend and their infant son. One of the officers took Sanchez Toledo’s ID and retreated back to the patrol car. When he returned, he accused Sanchez Toledo of being undocumented, and said he was being detained for ICE.

Police body camera footage obtained by The Marshall Project showed Sanchez Toledo take off running. The two deputies pursued him, shocking him with a Taser, and kicking and tackling him while his girlfriend sobbed. As Sanchez Toledo was pinned to the ground, he moaned: “Please, guys, I’m not a criminal,” insisting he had documentation. (His lawyer confirmed to The Marshall Project that he had a pending asylum case.) “I don’t want to go,” he begged.

“Too fucking bad now!” one deputy screamed.

Sanchez Toledo was charged with resisting arrest. Those charges were dropped on April 29. He currently remains in ICE custody.

The officers who arrested Sanchez Toledo were part of the sheriff’s office 287(g) Task Force, through an agreement that grants state and local law enforcement to operate with federal immigration powers in return for reimbursements and other incentives.

Of the 1,500 officers at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, only 150 are deputized to make immigration arrests. But between September 2025 and March, they have been responsible for arresting 60 immigrants per month, the highest arrest rate in the state, and have received almost $1 million for their work, according to The Marshall Project. More than 1,100 law enforcement agencies across the country have signed 287(g) agreements.

These bleeding boundaries between state and local enforcement, combined with Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, are actively putting people in danger.

The family of a Virginia woman who died after she was allegedly assaulted by her partner are claiming the woman was afraid to report her domestic abuse to the police over concerns she’d be detained over her immigration status, according to NBC Washington. The Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that supports immigrants fleeing gender-based violence, told the outlet that 76 percent of its clients were afraid to go to the police.

Law enforcement’s collaboration with federal immigration enforcement has eroded many immigrants’ sense of safety and their reliance on the police. In another story, one asylum-seeker told The Washington Post she’d been contacted by a man who assaulted her at a previous job. But since immigration agents had raided her workplace and started sweeping up neighbors, she said she wouldn’t consider calling law enforcement if anything happened to her.

President Trump has once again appeared to doze off on camera in the middle of a White House event, this time, just seconds after he spoke.

Trump was joined by Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Oz, Republican Senator Katie Britt, philanthropist and maternal health advocate Olivia Walton, principal deputy assistant secretary for health Dr. Dorothy Fink, and others at the White House Monday morning to announce the “Moms.gov” website, a new tactic in the Trump administration’s campaign to convince American women to have more babies.

It was the president’s first public event of the day, beginning at 11 a.m, and he appeared to doze off with his eyes fully closed multiple times while the people behind him spoke. It is becoming a regular occurrence for the president to take a little nap during an event, the most recent instance being just last week.

This isn’t some late-night Situation Room meeting or some three-hour Cabinet meeting. This is the president’s first scheduled event of the day. Even if he’s not completely asleep, he certainly is not fully present. Capable presidents don’t fall asleep at 11:30 a.m.

The only Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission is warning Disney that the Trump administration is trying to censor ABC.

On Monday, Anna Gomez sent a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro warning that the TV network is under a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” from the White House, The Wall Street Journal reports. She added that FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has weaponized the agency to pressure “a free and independent press and all media into submission.”

Gomez’s letter said that the FCC’s recent demand that Disney apply to renew broadcast licenses for eight of the local TV stations it owns, its probe into the ABC talk show The View, and its decision to reopen a complaint into how ABC moderated a 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris were “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions.”

Under Carr, the FCC has also taken action against late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for making jokes about Charlie Kirk, the president, and first lady Melania Trump, which even forced Kimmel off the air for days last year. 

“The goal was clear: use regulatory pressure to force his removal from the air and send a message to every other broadcaster about the cost of critical coverage,” Gomez wrote in her letter. 

The FCC has been after Disney and ABC, among many other TV networks, as part of Trump’s vendetta against media outlets that criticize him. In December 2024, ABC paid Trump a $16 million settlement after he sued the network for defamation, and Gomez pointed out how Trump redoubled his attacks in the following months after  his second term as president began. 

“That settlement did not buy you peace,” Gomez wrote. She added that “you cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.” 

Gomez also wrote that she plans to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

Last week, Disney accused the FCC of violating its First Amendment rights, in a legal filing. The network has hired an experienced Supreme Court litigator, Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration. This suggests that it plans to fight back against Trump’s attacks. Judging by Gomez’s letter, other news networks need to follow suit in order to protect America’s free press. 

MAGA fans just got screwed, again.

Hundreds of thousands of people who bought into the Trump Organization’s “T1 phone” last summer are still waiting to receive their devices, with no refunds in sight.

The Trump-branded phone was launched in June 2025, promising early adopters that they would receive the gimmicky gadget by September that year for a $100 deposit. Yet eight months later, loyalists still have nothing to show for their blind faith in the Trump family business, with no advertised release date on the Trump Mobile website.

“Hey, Trump supporter here,” one man said in a viral TikTok video. “This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric … where the fuck’s my phone? I ordered three, no, four gold Trump phones in the summer.”

An estimated 590,000 buyers bought into the promise, supplying the Trump Organization with a cash influx of about $59 million total. But customers shouldn’t expect to get their money back anytime soon. After ordering a phone for tracking purposes, NBC News was met with various delays and excuses from the company’s customer support hotline when asking where it was. Though the company’s recently updated terms hints customers may be entitled to a refund, Popular Information reported that the hotline is unresponsive on the matter.

“600,000 people got the Trump phone. Scratch that. 600,000 people ordered the Trump phone, put $100 deposit down on it, and never got it,” posted an X user identified as MAGA Cult Slayer. “So where’s the $60 million Donnie?”

Interested buyers can still donate their hard-earned cash to the Trump family, however, as the Trump Mobile website is still accepting enrollees into their apparently nonexistent phone program.

It’s just the latest in a long string of controversies—and disappointments—surrounding the phone.

Originally, Donald Trump Jr. told podcaster Benny Johnson that the phones would be “built in the United States of America.”

“We have to bring manufacturing back here,” Don Jr. said at the time.

But within weeks of the site’s launch, all made-in-America language had been scrubbed from the product descriptions. Instead, the phone would be “designed with American values in mind,” and there would be “American hands behind every device”—strange marketing promises that could effectively mean anything.

The Verge found that the move away from American production wasn’t the only change made since the phone previewed last year: The advertised screen size of the Trump phone also dropped significantly, changing from a 6.78-inch screen to 6.25 inches, and initial advertisements listing the phone’s RAM at 12 gigabytes suddenly showed zero RAM specifications whatsoever.