Trump taps Jewish allies Stephen Miller, Lee Zeldin for top roles in administration
Immigration hardliner behind family separations and ‘Muslim travel ban’ to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy; ex-GOP lawmaker to head Environmental Protection Agency
Donald Trump has tapped Stephen Miller, one of his most prominent Jewish advisers and a force behind many of his most hardline immigration policies, to be deputy chief of staff as the former US president returns for a second term.
Miller will take his new position following a campaign during which Trump promised to make the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants one of his highest priorities. Miller has spoken extensively about how Trump could achieve that goal — one of his central campaign pledges — and told The New York Times last year that the president-elect will do “whatever it takes” to achieve it.
Trump has not yet publicly commented on Miller’s appointment since it was reported Monday morning by CNN, but Vice President-elect JD Vance praised the selection as “another fantastic pick by the president.”
During Trump’s first term, Miller, now 39, was credited with helping to mold some of his most controversial actions on immigration. That included the travel ban on a number of Muslim-majority countries, as well as his policy to separate the children of undocumented migrants from their parents. A broad spectrum of Jewish groups across the religious spectrum decried both policies. The family separation policy was one of several actions that inspired the formation of Never Again Action, a grassroots Jewish activist movement for undocumented immigrants.
Miller reportedly also hoped to eliminate all refugee admissions to the United States, dismantling a policy put in place in the wake of the Holocaust.
Since Trump left office, Miller has served as president of the conservative group America First Legal, which has tried to advance the same ideology via the court system.
Now, Miller is almost certain to play a significant role in any immigration policy Trump brings forward and has extensively discussed how he would take action on the issue. The president-elect has vowed to begin “the largest deportation effort in American history” immediately upon his return to the White House.
Miller has hinted the administration could take further unprecedented steps to enact those deportations, including deploying National Guard troops from red states to enter uncooperative blue states. He has also suggested putting detained migrants in “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” which have been described as camps. Miller told the Times such facilities would be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”
He has also used nativist rhetoric on the campaign trail. Last month, he spoke at a controversial Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden that drew comparisons to a pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939.
“Who’s going to stand up for the girls of America, the women of America, the families of America?” he said. “Who’s going to stand up and say, ‘The cartels are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only’?”
Miller, himself the descendant of Jewish immigrants, married Katie Waldman, who is also Jewish and took his last name, at the Trump DC hotel during the incoming president’s first term. The wedding was officiated by Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who played a role in the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords normalization agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors.
Katie Miller was a press secretary to Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, and to the Department of Homeland Security. It has not yet been announced whether she, too, would play a role in the next Trump term. At the height of the family separation policy, she visited detention centers at the border but said she felt no compassion for the migrants held there.
Miller has repeatedly attracted vocal opposition from Jewish organizational leaders and activists, many of them citing American Jews’ historical advocacy for immigrant rights. During Trump’s first term, an array of Jewish elected officials and groups, including the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements, called for Miller’s resignation owing to leaked emails in which he echoed white nationalist rhetoric.
Miller has also cited his Jewish identity to push back against his critics. In 2019 he told Fox News he was being targeted for being Jewish.
“It is an attempt on the part of the Democratic Party to attack and demonize a Jewish staffer,” he said at the time, referring to reports of his promotion of white nationalist talking points. “And make no mistake, there is a deep vein of antisemitism that is running through today’s Democratic Party.”
That hasn’t stopped his Jewish critics this year. Just before the election, a former rabbi of Miller’s also endorsed Trump’s Democratic rival Kamala Harris, declaring about Miller, “I felt embarrassed and ashamed that a Jew in a leadership role could give voice and support to such inhumanity.”
Zeldin for EPA
Also on Monday, Trump announced that Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, would become his second administration’s “border czar.” Homan, an enthusiastic proponent of Trump’s immigration crackdown, was berated by a Holocaust survivor during Trump’s first term.
Trump also announced Monday that he will appoint Jewish former GOP lawmaker Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
“He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump will likely look to reverse many rules administered by the EPA on the burning of fossil fuels, including one curbing carbon emissions from power plants and another slashing such emissions from vehicles.
“We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin wrote on X.
Zeldin represented New York’s 1st Congressional District in eastern Long Island from 2015 to 2023 and gained wider name recognition in 2022 by mounting a surprisingly competitive campaign for governor of New York State. He lost to Gov. Kathy Hochul by fewer than seven points, the closest a Republican has come to leading the state since Gov. George Pataki was reelected two decades ago.
During his 2022 election campaign, Zeldin leaned into his Jewish background to rally Orthodox communities, telling voters in Brooklyn about how his grandfather founded a synagogue and how his mother taught at a Brooklyn yeshiva. At the time, the yeshiva system was facing accusations from the media and activists that it was failing to meet the state’s secular education standards, which became a top issue for Orthodox voters.
Zeldin joined the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition shortly after the gubernatorial election.
Zeldin was an avid defender of Trump while in Congress, but kept a distance from Trump during the gubernatorial race in New York, where the former president was unpopular at the time.
