Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Effort to Exploit the Anti-Immigrant Judicial Pipeline
Last year, the Public Notice newsletter cautioned that America First Legal, a Trump-aligned outfit founded by former officials Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton, shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed despite the weird figures within its ranks and token obsessions (as evidenced by the “woke corporations” section on their website.)
“In a world where Trump hadn’t been the vehicle for conservatives to capture the federal courts, America First’s efforts might be viewed as quixotic or comical, a set of right-wing obsessions going nowhere,” Lisa Needham wrote at Public Notice in November 2023. “But now, Miller has a whole host of judges who share his views, and America First Legal keeps racking up wins.” Democracy Docker summarized just a handful of the more than 100 actions that American First Legal has launched as of March:
In the last three years, Miller and AFL have made good on their promise to wage a legal war against all things progressive: the group has filed dozens of legal actions against “woke corporations,” civil rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights and just about any other cause championed by the left. These include a myriad of lawsuits against some of the world’s biggest corporations — like their lawsuit against Nike that alleges the company discriminates against white males, or their Mattel lawsuit that accuses the massive toy company of “promoting a radical LGBT+ agenda” — whose success rate is hard to measure. As the New York Times put it in a recent profile of the group, “assessing its success rate is more complicated, partly because many of the group’s cases are still pending, while the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] does not publicize which complaints it investigates.”
The slew of actions attempting to block policies that might improve the everyday lives of working Americans, including queer people and folks of color, has been good for America First Legal’s pockets. The organization’s revenue skyrocketed from just over $6 million in 2021 to more than $38 million the following year, according to tax documents reviewed by Accountable.US. Miller got a raise of nearly $80,000, while tens of thousands went to America First Legal allies like the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the Republican Attorneys General Association fundraising arm “that drew controversy for its robocalls urging people to march on the Capitol Building the day before the January 6 insurrection,” where rioters beat up cops and attempted to block certification of the rightful results of the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, Miller has blown a gasket when asked for proof to back up his claims about so-called “criminal migrants.”
Most recently, Miller and Hamilton tapped into the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline to score a ruling that has since blocked the Biden administration from processing applications for its program protecting the long-settled undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. America First Legal represented Texas and 15 other states in this baseless lawsuit seeking to make American families deportable. Some of these families had eagerly sent paperwork to be a part of the “Keeping Families Together” process as soon as it opened for applications. But they are now trapped in a “cycle of fear and uncertainty,”
While sound-minded legal experts agreed that “Keeping Families Together” is based on existing law, these far-right conservative judges were selected not for their thinking but because corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his allies knew they were a slam-dunk for the anti-immigrant movement. Paxton would certainly know where to make his nativist case, having been no stranger to courtrooms himself. And, Miller and Hamilton are more than willing partners. Prior to forming America First Legal in April 2021, both served as key architects of the Trump administration’s most inhumane and cruel anti-immigrant policies.
Miller, now President of America First Legal, was responsible for the attempt to end the popular and successful DACA program as well as the early implementation of the traumatic “zero tolerance” policy, which ultimately resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of 5,500 children from their parents at the southern border. Behind the scenes, Miller reportedly pushed for the separation of as many as 25,000 kids. Hamilton, America First Legal Executive Director, was Miller’s partner in his cruel endeavors, authoring key memos, including on family separation, as a top aide to then-Trump Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
So it was only natural that America First Legal endorsed Project 2025, which supports ending DACA and making Dreamers deportable, carrying out mass raids at schools, hospitals, and houses of worship, and unleashing family separation from coast to coast, among its horrific policies on immigration. America Legal First was also on the plan’s advisory board, while Miller appeared in a recruitment video for the initiative and Hamilton authored its chapter on the Justice Department. During a Congressional hearing, Hamilton boasted that he and his colleagues “are proud contributors to Project 2025.”
That is, until more and more Americans began to find out the details about Project 2025 (thank you, Taraji P. Henson). What followed was a failed PR strategy that sought to create public distance between Miller’s group and Project 2025, including a public denial from Miller. In further proof of the toxic unpopularity of this agenda (Project 2025 has actually polled worse than tech billionaire Elon Musk, who funneled millions into flop anti-immigrant ads in 2022), Miller also asked to be removed from Project 2025’s advisory board – after two years of membership. Nice try, Stephen.
But Miller, in particular, also sees his nativist obsessions as a means to achieve authoritarian control under a potential second Trump administration. Having already pushed voting lies to argue for the seating of fraudulent, pro-Trump electors in order to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election, Miller’s America First Legal is a key player in the Bie Lie 2.0, which uses the lie that undocumented immigrants are voting in order to justify purges of eligible U.S. voters, intimidate those trying to help people register, create new barriers to voting and lay the groundwork for again contesting the results if Republicans don’t win. Last month, Reuters reported on America First Legal’s involvement in the Big Lie 2.0 in “Republicans lay legal groundwork for election challenges”:
In Arizona, one of seven competitive U.S. states that are expected to decide the 2024 presidential election, an advocacy group founded by Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller is advancing a bold legal theory: that judges can throw out election results over "failures or irregularities" by local officials.
The lawsuit by the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, says the court in such cases should be able to toss the election results and order new rounds of voting in two counties in Arizona, where Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris is leading Trump in the polls by a razor-thin margin.
“While the Arizona case is likely a long shot, legal experts say it fits with a pattern of Republican-backed lawsuits that appear aimed at sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the election before it occurs and providing fodder for challenging the results after the fact,” Reuters notes. “This is part of creating the narrative that there will be irregularities that will require outside intervention," Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault told the outlet.
Miller and the Trump campaign have been aided in promoting this false narrative through the quiet and not-so-quiet efforts of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has relentlessly promoted the Big Lie 2.0 to his hundreds of millions of followers on the platform formerly known as Twitter. While the one-man Trump Super PAC embarrassingly jumped for joy at a recent Trump rally, Musk also quietly gave $50 million to a Miller-affiliated group that ran some of the most despicable nativist ads of 2022.
And while Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance refuse to provide details behind the signature campaign promise of 2024 – mass deportation – Miller has been frighteningly clear about the plans should he return to the White House come January 2025, down to the ICE flight schedules.
“Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are our flights back to the Northern Triangle. Every Tuesday and Thursday are our flights to South America. Every Saturday and Sunday are our flights to Africa. Right once a week we do a flight to India. Once a week we do a flight to China, so on and so forth,” Miller told a right-wing podcast last year. In his piece, “Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps,” Huff Post’s Matt Shuham writes Miller has “gleefully” described these deportation flights, along with mass camps where immigrants and possibly U.S. citizens will be jailed before they’re deported, as “greater than any national infrastructure project” our nation has ever seen. Miller doesn’t intend on foiling this plan by repeating the same mistakes that previously blocked his efforts to fully implement his agenda during Trump’s first presidency. It’s just one reason why he’s signed on to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, which in part seeks to purge government employees who have been deemed disloyal to MAGA.
Miller is hell-bent on carrying out these promises. Ahead of Trump taking to the stage to spew fascistic rhetoric at a rally in Aurora, Miller went on a wildly racist tirade in front of blown-up photos of Latino men purported to be gang members. “Stephen Miller is pointing at photos of Hispanics and getting Trump fans in Aurora to boo and yell at them,” Aaron Rupar observed. “Are these the kids you grew up with?” Miller asked. “Are the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city?” Miller was not subtle in his underlying message: brown people are a foreign enemy, brown people are to be feared, and brown people do not belong here. This is the vicious and vile closing argument of a white nationalist who has been bullying people of color since his youth, as Univision reported in 2017. “Univision Noticias spoke with several classmates who said Miller had few friends, none of them non-white. They said he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.”
The plans are out there, and the intensity to which Miller, Hamilton, and their allies are clinging to the lie that immigrants who contribute to our nation are to blame for just about every trouble facing our nation and the reason why voters should abandon American democracy should concern us.