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A pair of Trump officials have defended family separation and ramped-up deportations

SAN DIEGO — Donald Trump’s first picks for immigration policy jobs spent the last four years angling for this moment.

Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan had critical roles in the first Trump administration and are unapologetic defenders of its policies, which included separating thousands of parents from their children at the border to deter illegal crossings. With Trump promising sweeping action in a second term on illegal immigration, the two White House advisers will bring nuts-and-bolts knowledge, lessons from previous setbacks and personal views to help him carry out his wishes.

After Trump left office in 2021, Miller became president of America First Legal, a group that joined Republican state attorneys general to derail President Joe Biden’s border policies and plans. Homan, who worked decades in immigration enforcement, founded Border 911 Foundation Inc., a group that says it fights against “a border invasion” and held its inaugural gala in April at Trump’s Florida estate.

Homan “knows how the machine operates,” said Ronald Vitiello, a former Border Patrol chief and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director under Trump. “He did it as a front line, he did it as a supervisor, and he did it as the lead executive. He doesn’t have anything to learn on that side of the equation.”

Miller, he said, is deeply knowledgeable, has firm ideas about how the system should work, and has Trump’s confidence.

Trump has promised to stage the largest deportation operation in American history. There are an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally. Questions remain about how people in a mass raid would be identified and where they would be detained.

Miller and Homan portray illegal immigration as a black-and-white issue and applaud Trump’s policy of targeting everyone living in the country without status for deportation.

Trump frequently and sharply attacked illegal immigration during his campaign, linking a record spike in unauthorized border crossings to issues ranging from drug trafficking to high housing prices. The arrival of asylum-seekers and other migrants in cities and communities around the country has strained some budgets and broadly shifted political debate over immigration to the right, with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris during her campaign reversing several of her old positions questioning immigration enforcement.

Miller, 39, is a former Capitol Hill staffer who rose to prominence as a fiery Trump speechwriter and key architect of his immigration policies from 2017 to 2021. He has long espoused doomsday scenarios of how immigration threatens America, training his rhetoric on people in the country illegally but also advocating curbs on legal immigration.

Trump, Miller said at the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally last month, was fighting for “the right to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.”

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