Immigration hardliner Stephen Miller takes over as White House chief of staff

Stephen Miller, the influential architect of Donald Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown, is due to start as White House chief of staff today.

The 41-year-old has been with Trump since the beginning of the US president's political career, serving as a speechwriter during his 2016 presidential campaign.

His promotion has horrified many, handing even more power to the president's most controversial aide.

Long seen as a hardliner on the right, Miller was the driving force behind first-term Trump policies such as family separation at the US-Mexico border and the travel ban on people from many Muslim-majority countries.

"We are being conquered," Miller told Fox News in 2023. He said: "This is a complete resettlement of America in real time. It took hundreds of years, going back long even before our founding, to slowly build everything that we have. And now we have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems."

In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in 2018, Miller was asked about Trump's plan to abruptly pull troops out of Syria. He said: "Isis [Islamic State] has been defeated. But if Isis wants to retrench and regrow and reorganize, it's going to be up to those countries to defeat their enemy."

In January, Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who was observing immigration officers in Minneapolis, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents.

In a post on X, Miller described Pretti as "a domestic terrorist". In a separate post, responding to criticism of Pretti's killing, Miller wrote: "An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response."

His description is at odds with footage showing him being tackled and shot by border patrol officers.

On Greenland, Miller said: "The United States is the power of NATO. For the United States to secure the arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States."

Asked by CNN host Jake Tapper if he would rule out the US using force to seize Greenland, Miller said: "The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you are asking, of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the US militarily over the future of Greenland."

In June, the US Supreme Court blocked Trump's attempt to ban birthright citizenship — which asserts that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens. Miller called the ruling "a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic".

Miller told Fox News: "We have people from all over the world, from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel. And they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?"

In January the US attacked Venezuela and captured its long-serving president Nicolas Maduro, in an attack in which at least 40 people, including civilians and Venezuelan soldiers, died. Trump hailed the attack as "an assault like people have not seen since world war two".

Two weeks earlier Miller had posted on social media: "American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property."