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JD Vance and Immigration Reformers Cheer Stephen Miller’s White House Power Surge

Posted By Talk Red On In News, Politics | No Comments

Vice President JD Vance and immigration reformers greeted Stephen Miller’s elevation to White House chief of staff as a major win for the administration’s populist immigration agenda. The move followed the post election wipeout of Susie Wiles and placed a leading immigration hawk in the West Wing’s top staff role.

Vance offered [1] an enthusiastic endorsement of Miller and his promotion. “Stephen Miller is an amazing patriot and will do great things,” Vance said. “Congrats to him on a well-deserved promotion!”

The appointment also represents welcome news for Vance as he looks toward a likely 2028 White House campaign. Such a campaign would need top level support from President Donald Trump and the president’s various allies.

Miller’s new position could also help counter pressure from Democrats seeking major policy concessions from Trump. That pressure is likely to include legal threats involving investigations and criminal charges after Trump’s retirement.

Miller has been a leading ideological advocate against mass migration and its effects on American workers. He played a critical role in defeating the Gang of Eight’s cheap labor amnesty bill in 2013 and helped persuade Trump to adopt a low migration economic strategy.

Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, connected the promotion both to the present administration and the next presidential contest. “It’s great news for today, and even better news for 2028,” Carl responded.

Carl also argued that Miller would provide an important check on whether campaign commitments become actual government policy. Miller “will ensure that the popular policies that the President campaigned on in 2024, the policies that won him the White House are actually implemented.”

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, predicted that Miller would remain able to oversee migration related policy engagement with Democrats despite the demands of his new job. Krikorian said immigration enforcement carries both political and policy importance.

Krikorian argued that the public broadly supports immigration control but dislikes seeing graphic images of enforcement. He proposed recalibrating the balance between visible enforcement and quieter administrative measures that could influence migrants to leave.

Among his proposals were more payroll audits, no match letters, debanking illegal aliens, and changing the Know Your Customer rule for banks. He described such approaches as less visually charged than police pursuits or images of people in shackles boarding a plane.

Krikorian also noted that Vance had expressed openness on Twitter to placing greater enforcement attention on employers. That approach would shift some of the focus from public street enforcement toward businesses and financial systems.

He further suggested that Trump’s team should talk with Democrats about a narrow agreement rather than another sweeping immigration package. His example involved targeted amnesty for people with Temporary Protected Status in exchange for ending future use of the program and restricting presidential authority to issue work permits to illegal aliens.

Krikorian argued that such a trade could avoid encouraging future illegal immigration because it would remove the policy vehicles used to obtain what he described as de facto amnesty. At the same time, he doubted Democrats would accept such an arrangement because they expect to win in 2028 and pursue the Democratic Socialists of America’s immigration policy.

Even without an agreement, Krikorian said the political presentation could benefit Republicans by showing that they heard voters in 2026. “The [political] benefit is that it shows the Republicans heard the [2026] voters,” he said.

Krikorian favored modest, step by step proposals designed to address public concerns and specific policy problems. If Democrats refused even to discuss those proposals, he argued, responsibility for the impasse would rest with them.

Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, who owns an auto sales business in Virginia, lamented Miller’s elevation. His reaction stood in sharp contrast to the applause from Vance, Carl, and immigration reformers who view Miller’s promotion as a chance to advance Trump’s immigration promises.