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White House aide Stephen Miller has repeatedly branded the Los Angeles protests an “insurrection” after fierce backlash to immigration raids.
California’s leadership is now “siding with insurrectionist mobs,” and Democratic officials are “in open rebellion” against the government, according to Miller.
But the far-right architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda appears to have himself lit the fuse, after reportedly rallying Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.”
Late last month, Miller pressed ICE officials to ramp up arrests after following short of the president’s ambitions for record-breaking daily deportations, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Federal law enforcement officers needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, according to WSJ, citing people familiar with the meeting.
Rather than develop a list of targets for arrest, Miller told agents to raid Home Depot parking lots and 7-Eleven convenience stores, the newspaper reported.
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Miller “eviscerated everyone,” according to recent reporting from The Washington Examiner. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders,’” Miller reportedly said.
“He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” an official told the outlet.
Miller also allegedly bet that he and a handful of agents could arrest 30 people in the streets of Washington, D.C.
“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller reportedly said.
Days later, on June 6, ICE agents descended on a Home Depot in the predominantly Latino Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles — kicking off a weekend of protests centered around a federal detention center in the city’s downtown and in the nearby Paramount and Compton neighborhoods.
The next morning, Border Patrol agents gathered in a gated industrial office park in Paramount, while word spread on social media that raids were imminent at another nearby Home Depot.
Trump later signed a presidential memorandum deploying “at least” 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, with U.S. Marines standing by, despite objections from Governor Gavin Newsom, who joined officials and other critics sounding the alarm that the administration is needlessly escalating unrest.
Miller and Newsom have spent several days trading blows over X. In response to Newsom’s renewed lawsuit calling on a federal judge to block the “unnecessary militarization” of Los Angeles, Miller accused the governor of saying that ICE officers must withdraw from the state if they “don’t want to get assaulted or worse by insurrectionist migrant mobs.”
“The Governor’s position is that Stephen Miller has no peer when it comes to creating bulls****, strawmen arguments,” Newsom’s office replied.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
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Miller — who is from nearby Santa Monica — routinely characterizes the city and greater Los Angeles area as a “third-world nation” overrun by immigrants. “A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers,” he said this week.
“Los Angeles is all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies,” Miller said. “You can have all the other plans and budgets you want. If you don’t fix migration, then nothing else can be fixed — or saved.”
In recent days, he has repeatedly accused state officials of criminal activity for supporting immigrant communities, claiming that the entire state has “aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States” and is now supporting a “violent rebellion” against the federal government.
“Los Angeles and California are demanding the nullification of the election results, of federal law, of national sovereignty, and of the bedrock constitutional command of one national government,” Miller said.
Trump appointed Miller as a senior policy adviser during his first term, where he emerged as an influential driving force behind the several key policies, including a ban on travel to the United States from majority Muslim countries and a “zero tolerance” policy to separate migrant children from their parents or guardians.
After an election fueled by Trump’s pledge for the “largest deportation operation in American history,” Miller has become a fierce proponent of the administration’s agenda in media interviews and in volatile confrontations with reporters as the president advances a more robust anti-immigration campaign.
Miller has also endorsed the concept of “remigration,” or forcible removal of immigrants and their families that has taken hold among Europe’s far-right parties and emerged in the Trump administration’s reorganization of the State Department.
