As Trump’s deportation agenda escalates, the White House hardliner is pushing ideas that challenge birthright citizenship—and revive some of America’s darkest immigration theories
Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the architect of the administration’s hardline immigration strategy, is increasingly directing the federal crackdown toward a new and deeply consequential target: the children of immigrants, according to a new report by The New York Times.
Miller has long been one of the most influential figures behind Trump’s mass deportation agenda. But recent statements and legal moves suggest his ambitions go further—toward reshaping who is allowed to belong in the United States at all.
At the center of that effort is a sweeping attempt to dismantle birthright citizenship, a constitutional guarantee enshrined in the 14th Amendment that has defined American identity for more than 150 years.
A Push to Redefine Who Belongs
The Trump administration is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented parents—a move legal scholars widely describe as unconstitutional.
Miller’s public rhetoric offers a window into the worldview behind that push.
In a recent Fox News interview, Miller argued that immigrants—and even their U.S.-born children—represent a long-term burden on American society, claims that economists and immigration researchers have repeatedly debunked.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller said. “Again, Somalia is a clear example here. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation.”
He cited alleged high rates of welfare use, criminal activity, and failure to assimilate—assertions that conflict sharply with decades of economic and sociological data showing upward mobility among the children of immigrants, including refugees.
Experts Say the Data Tells a Different Story
Immigration scholars say Miller’s claims echo long-discredited theories used to justify exclusionary policies in earlier eras.
“This rhetoric is not new—and it has been wrong every time it’s been tested,” said an expert with the Migration Policy Institute, which has documented strong educational and economic gains among second-generation immigrants.
Study after study shows that children of immigrants outperform their parents economically, contribute more in taxes over their lifetimes than they consume in public benefits, and play a critical role in sustaining the U.S. workforce—particularly as the population ages.
Latino families, in particular, have been central to this pattern of intergenerational mobility, accounting for a large share of new entrepreneurs, service workers, and caregivers nationwide.
Historical Echoes—and a Legal Fight Ahead
Advocates warn that Miller’s framing closely mirrors early 20th-century nativist arguments that paved the way for the 1924 National Origins Act, which imposed racial and ethnic quotas to block immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and nearly all of Asia.
“He wants to unilaterally upend the idea that we are a nation where immigrants can ever become citizens with full and equal rights as native-born Americans,” said Andrea Flores, a former Biden White House official who worked on immigration policy.
As the birthright citizenship case advances toward the Supreme Court, the administration’s rhetoric has sharpened. Miller and Trump have repeatedly singled out immigrant communities—most recently the Somali community in Minnesota—using isolated criminal cases to paint entire populations as threats.
Nearly 60 individuals from that community have been convicted of fraud against social service programs, a fact Miller has used to generalize about immigrants as a whole, despite warnings from civil rights groups about collective blame.
“The Great Lie of Mass Migration”
In a social media post this year, Miller framed immigration not as individual movement, but as a civilizational threat.
“This is the great lie of mass migration,” he wrote. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies.”
Immigrant advocates say that framing is dangerous—especially when paired with policies that could strip citizenship from U.S.-born children and subject families to permanent instability.
For Latino and immigrant families across the country, the stakes are existential: whether children born on American soil will continue to be recognized as Americans—or treated as conditional residents in the only country they have ever known.
As courts weigh the legality of Trump’s executive order, Miller’s vision offers a stark preview of what could follow if the effort succeeds: a narrower definition of citizenship, rooted not in law or contribution, but in ideology.
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