What we know and don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein, according to key victims’ attorney
The lawyer for hundreds of Epstein’s victims says he’s never seen a client list.
‘Chickens are coming home to roost’ for Trump and Epstein files: AttorneyFormer Palm Beach County, Florida, state attorney Dave Aronberg discusses the pushback from some Republicans on the Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein files.
Uma Sanghvi/The Palm Beach Post via AP
Brad Edwards knows that what you are about to read may be difficult for some to accept.
A victims’ rights lawyer from Florida, Edwards has been in pursuit of the truth about financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s life and crimes for nearly two decades. He would be the first to say that Epstein caused incalculable damage and trauma to hundreds of women and girls.
MORE: Trump blasts ‘stupid’ and ‘foolish’ Republicans amid calls to reveal more Epstein files
In fact, long before Epstein became known worldwide for his crimes, Edwards presciently told a federal judge, “Because of [Epstein’s] deviant appetite for young girls, combined with his extraordinary wealth and power, he may just be the most dangerous sexual predator in U.S. history.”
That was 17 years ago.
Back then, hardly anyone listened.
In the years since, Edwards and his co-counsel — on behalf of Epstein’s victims — have sued Epstein, his estate, the federal government and several financial institutions, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars for more than 200 survivors of Epstein’s sex abuse and trafficking. He knows the victims’ stories as well as anyone and, in the course of all the litigation, he has reviewed an expansive amount of non-public documents and evidence related to the late Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of minors.
Now, as the Trump administration finds itself in the midst of a firestorm over its decision not to release any additional investigative files on Epstein — after promising to produce a so-called “client list” of people connected to Epstein who may have participated in illegal acts — Edwards has decided it’s important to share what he’s learned about Epstein, much of which contradicts what many have come to believe about the case.
“Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client,” Edwards told ABC News. “Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual desires.”
Edwards describes the enigmatic Epstein as living, essentially, two separate lives: one in which he was sexually abusing women and girls “on a daily basis,” and another in which he associated with politicians, royalty, and titans of business, academia, and science.
“For the most part, those two worlds did not overlap. And where they overlapped, in the instances they overlapped, it seems to be a very small percentage,” Edwards said. “There were occasions where a select few of these men engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing — primarily girls who were over the age of 18.”
“That conduct was coercive, it was exploitative, and it was bad. But it’s a small fraction of the men he was associated with,” Edwards said. “And he was abusing hundreds of women, if not a thousand. And it’s a very small fraction of those women that he was sending to men. That conduct was secondary to his abusive conduct. [Epstein] abused all of these women.”
Edwards said he is bound by attorney-client privilege and cannot ethically reveal the names of any of Epstein’s alleged associates without permission from his clients. But he said he has seen no indication that Epstein kept a list of those men, or that he made it a practice to use those instances to blackmail or extort the men, even though those men may have been legitimately concerned that Epstein had compromising information that he could use against them.
MORE: What Trump has said about Jeffrey Epstein over the years, including on 2024 campaign trail
“It’s difficult to even discern, when he would send a woman to one of his friends, whether that was even a motivation. What he was not is a person on the top of a sex trafficking operation that was sending women to powerful people around the world so that he could make money. It was not a business,” Edwards said. “And I think the few examples that we have, the known examples, have led to this belief that he must have been doing that with all of the women that he was abusing. That must have just been his gig. But that wasn’t what he was doing on a daily basis. He’s a sexual abuser and predator himself.”
If Epstein kept a list of those men, Edwards said he’s not seen it.
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“Did Jeffrey write the names of these people down? I’ve never seen that. I only know of certain of these individuals because of representing clients,” Edwards said. “I’ve never seen a list of people that Jeffrey Epstein kept that would say, ‘Here’s a list of men that I’ve sent women to,’ or a mix-and-match where it’s like, ‘I sent this woman to this man.'”
“That’s just not something that he was keeping,” Edwards said. “And it would be highly, highly unlikely that Jeffrey Epstein would keep a list of the people that he sent these women to. I’d imagine he would just remember it. It isn’t that many women, and it isn’t that many men.”
Over the last few months, as the controversy surrounding the on-again, off-again plan to disclose Epstein-related documents has dominated the news cycle, Edwards said he has heard from dozens of survivors concerned about the circus-like atmosphere that is forcing them to relive traumatic experiences and threatens to expose their identities, even if inadvertently. Any public release of information, Edwards said, should redact identifying information about Epstein’s victims.
“They would benefit from the story eventually dying off. But the story is not going to die off as long as there’s this lack of transparency that is allowing for conspiracy theories to continue to fester and get out of hand,” Edwards said. “So the best thing would be: Protect the victims’ names, release everything else, so that the world can see what is real, versus what is total fiction, and then everybody can move on.”
But the recent decision by the Trump administration to rule out further disclosures would seem to impact categories of material known to be in the possession of federal authorities, including Epstein’s financial records, details of his international travel, logs of boat trips to his U.S. Virgin Islands estate, and inventories of what was found in searches of his mansions in New York and elsewhere. And it raises questions whether those records, if made public, could finally lead to a better understanding of how a college dropout from Coney Island managed to accumulate astounding wealth and proximity to power — a transformation that has long defied ready explanation.
“It’s very strange to me that somebody who rarely leaves his house is somehow able to get meetings with people. And they will travel from literally all over the world to meet with him on his time, at his place, under his circumstances. Which only just leaves more questions than answers,” Edwards said. “And the fact that they’re not releasing anything is, I think, just kind of fanning the flames of the conspiracy theory that everybody that he was meeting with had something to do with illegal sex. And I know that’s not true.”
“We are all for transparency,” said Edwards. “I think the world needs to know who Epstein was, what he was doing, how he made his money, who he was meeting with, and how he might have operated in other areas of business and politics. And all of that could be done through the release of documents and knowledge that is currently within the Justice Department, with what they have. But now there’s this about-face where they were going to release everything and now all of a sudden they’re releasing nothing. I think there is a middle ground there that the public deserves.”
Edwards notes that the government’s files could also shed light on those who assisted or enabled Epstein to abuse so many women, and could finally answer speculation that Epstein was an intelligence asset of the U.S. or a foreign nation.
“[The government] should know whether or not he was an intelligence asset, whether he’s ever done work with the government, whether he’s ever had a deal with the government before,” Edwards said. “I would assume that that is also within the Epstein files. I don’t know that information. I would like to know.”
MORE: Trump says Bondi should release ‘whatever she thinks is credible’ on Epstein
But for Edwards, the primary concern should be for the survivors of Epstein’s abuse — and he worries that the victims are an afterthought in the ongoing Washington power struggle.
“I think some [victims] believe that the government protected him, and there’s this outrage because they believe that [Epstein] was always more important than they were, and that’s why this was allowed to go on for so long. So if there was evidence that his political or other connections assisted, I think that they would want to know it,” Edwards said. “But more so, they just want this to die off. And they see it’s not dying off because of the way that it’s being handled right now. In fact, somehow there’s more attention to it today than there was when he was abusing them.”
For the well-being of the survivors, Edwards is hopeful there will soon be a resolution that will allow the victims to move on.
“I just wish everybody would step back and remember real people were hurt here, and let’s try to do what’s in their best interest, as opposed to politicizing this whole thing and making it the right versus the left,” he said. “All of that is hurting the people who are already hurt.”
Your Friends & Neighbors Finale Reveals Who Killed Paul — Will You Come Back For Season 2?
Courtesy of Apple TV+
Your Friends & Neighbors wrapped up its freshman season by answering one big question — who killed Paul? — and left us pondering a few others.
Friday’s finale opens with Coop envisioning himself lying by the pool while Mel and his kids call him to come swimming. It was just a dream, though, and the cold, hard reality remains: He’s facing a murder charge and a possible sentence of life in prison after being found at the scene of Paul’s death. He can’t even take refuge in golf: The country club wants to suspend his membership until his “current difficulties” are cleared up. He signs over his half of the house to Mel just in case (which leaves her worried) and then spends the night with his kids and his sister Ali, whose acoustic performance leads to a rambling confession about her affair with her married ex Bruce. But hey, at least she got the crowd to chant “F–k Bruce.”
Coop gently nudges Ali to get back on her meds, since he might not be around to keep her in line, and he gives a pricey watch of his to his son Hunter. His daughter Tori gives him the cold shoulder at first, but eventually cuddles up with him to watch a movie, sobbing on his chest. Coop asks his lawyer Kat about a plea deal, and she thinks she can get his charges down to manslaughter, and he’d serve six years. He’s furious that he’d have to go away that long for something he didn’t do, but considering the alternative, he agrees to make a deal. When Mel notices Coop’s watch on her son’s wrist, she marches over to Coop’s and confronts him: “If you ever loved me, don’t bulls–t me right now.” He admits he’s contemplating a plea deal, and she begs him not to, imploring him to try harder to save himself than he did to save their marriage.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
So Coop tells his lawyer Kat he’s not taking the deal: “I am guilty of a lot of things, but I am not guilty of this.” He wants the cops to look into Sam again, and Kat points out that her phone records prove she was in Boston — but Coop doesn’t see his number anywhere in the records. They figure out she had a burner phone, but the cops say they can’t do anything unless they physically have the phone. So Coop enlists his old partner in crime Elena to volunteer her housekeeping services to Sam, and when Sam leaves to run errands, Elena lets Coop in to snoop for the burner phone. Meanwhile, the cops get a new report from the medical examiner: Two of Paul’s three gunshot wounds came after he died. Hmmm…
Elena doesn’t find the phone — but she does find something else. When Sam gets home, Coop is waiting to confront her: “Nobody killed Paul. He shot himself.” He lays out how Sam shot her ex-husband’s dead body to make it look like a murder, because she wouldn’t be able to cash his lucrative insurance policy if he took his own life. He also shows her what Elena found hidden away: Paul’s bloody suicide note. Sam fesses up, explaining how Paul called her on FaceTime and shot himself right in front of her. She rushed home, leaving her primary phone with her parents in Boston, and staged the scene to look like a murder. And why did she frame Coop? “You should’ve been kinder to me,” she tells him — and when he tries to walk away, she pulls a gun on him. He doesn’t flinch, though: “You’re not a killer either,” he says as he calls her bluff and walks away.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
In the end, Sam gets arrested, but Paul was already dead, and she never filed the insurance claim, so she’ll likely only get a slap on the wrist. Coop has a warm reunion with Mel and his kids, and his old boss Jack asks him to come back to work, even offering him a fat profit share to seal the deal. Coop attends a swanky fundraiser gala, and everyone welcomes him back into high society with open arms. (“Nothing like beating a murder rap to give you a social boost,” Coop quips.) As Coop slow-dances with Tori, Mel watches from afar, and Nick says he blames himself for their split: “I fell in love with a woman who was in love with someone else.” Mel then joins Coop for a slow dance, and they both pledge to stay single for a while. He doesn’t hold a grudge against Sam, and Mel wonders how he can forgive her so quickly. “I wasn’t in love with her,” he points out, giving her a knowing smile. Oh!
As Coop leaves the fundraiser, he stops a mom named Jules and hints that he knows about her SAT cheat sheets — and warns her not to send her daughter to Princeton to compete with Tori. And while Jack and Liv wait for Coop to join them on a private jet to meet a client (and Ali spray-paints “F–k Bruce” on Bruce’s garage door), Coop instead heads to Jack’s empty house and robs it, noting: “It’s time to get back to work.”
Your Friends & Neighbors is already renewed for Season 2 — will you return for another season? Give the finale, and Season 1 as a whole, a grade in our polls, and hit the comments to share your thoughts in full.
Read More: https://www.tvline.com/recaps/your-friends-and-neighbors-season-1-finale-recap-ending-1235454646/
Inside Stephen Miller’s Reign of Terror
Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Miller’s republic of fear
By
Asawin Suebsaeng, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Andrew Perez
Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ
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It was after 3 a.m. on Nov. 6 last year, and nobody on the planet was happier than a balding, slender man standing near the reception desk of the Hilton West Palm Beach.
Donald Trump had just finished hosting his 2024 election watch party at the adjacent Florida convention center, declaring victory in a speech eloquently touting “the most incredible political thing.” Jubilant Republican donors, campaign staff, future government officials, and attendees (of course, Jon Voight) flooded over to the luxury hotel to celebrate.
At the front of the lobby stood Stephen Miller, the man Trump would soon tap as his White House’s undisputed orchestrator of policies and executive authority.
Miller had been one of the first Trump administration’s key policy drivers, particularly when it came to the president’s throttling of legal immigration. Senior officials in President Joe Biden’s administration will tell you the country is still living with the damage Miller did to immigration during Trump’s first term, and that the Biden team was unable, or unwilling, to undo much of it with their four years in power.
But that night in Florida, something was different for the then-39-year-old Miller. A universe of possibilities was unfurling before him.
Amid the revelry, Miller huddled with other high-ranking Trump personnel and said his thank you’s to the ad hoc procession of euphoric conservative voters and GOP bigwigs who congratulated him over and over. They all could see it wasn’t just Trump’s victory that night — it was Miller’s, and many felt obliged to kiss his Trump-endowed ring.
To see the expression of unbridled joy written across Miller’s face at that moment of Trump’s restoration was to stare into the eyes of someone who could see the future: Trump’s top adviser, his most faithful believer, the one close aide who had somehow survived the countless purges of MAGA officials in the first term, knew the country was now his.
Speaking to one overjoyed woman, Miller said, “It’s gonna be great.”
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More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful unelected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.
All of it bears Trump’s signature, but the president is not the one spending his nights writing executive orders and bending legal theory to his will; nearly all of this bears the authorship (or, at least, co-authorship) of Miller. Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller’s republic of fear.
Under Miller’s guiding hand, the government can deport (or kidnap and rendition) you or your spouse, without due process, to a foreign gulag, if the president feels like it. The White House can repeatedly threaten to take away the most basic of constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus. The president can launch Justice Department criminal investigations against his enemies who, by all known accounts, did nothing wrong except annoy the commander-in-chief, or refuse to help him steal an election. The president and his lieutenants can arrest you at a routine courthouse check-in, at your church, outside your kid’s school, even if you have no criminal record. They’ve instituted a heavily draconian system of immigration arrest “quotas,” ensuring a regime not mainly of mass deportation, but of mass disappearances and indefinite detention in jails and newly erected camps.
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They’ve quickly turned much of federal law enforcement into the masked, nameless, unaccountable secret police, working at the whims of the president and his staff. The president can deploy armed National Guard troops, and even U.S. Marines, to the streets of an American city any time he wants — and deem it enemy territory. The administration has made censoring media organizations, comedians, and aging rock stars a policy priority, in an anti-free-speech crusade waged from the West Wing to the Federal Communications Commission.
“Shadow Sec Def.”
“Prime Minister Miller.”
“The REAL Attorney General.”
“The DHS boss.”
“President Miller.”
Trump administration officials and other Republicans close to the president and this White House are paranoid that Miller will one day hear them gossiping about him behind his back — but they still whisper the unofficial titles and nicknames that they bestow onto the White House deputy chief of staff.
When Rolling Stone asks one senior administration official about former Fox News star and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this source says, unprompted, that “he does what Stephen wants him to do.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell says that Hegseth “enjoys a great working relationship with Stephen Miller. They are completely aligned on carrying out President Trump’s America First agenda.”
‘One Intense Motherfucker’
As a teenager in Santa Monica, California, Miller craved nothing more than triggering the good-looking kids in school who wanted nothing to do with him.
Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan). That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. “One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,” Islas recalls.
In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow — except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is “inaccurate and baseless gossip.”) The staffers at the time never dreamed that he’d ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington’s most feverish swamps.
Even today, not much has changed. As the president’s policy architect and enforcer, he is obsessed, according to three Trump advisers, with deploying the might of the government to stamp out what he deems “anti-white hatred” and “anti-white racism” and “anti-white discrimination” — no matter the cost.
Miller speaks almost exclusively in apocalyptic terms, in the caricatured language of military combat, forever war, and invasion against the culture and the homeland.
He’s yearned to erect a vast hyper-militarized network of what he’s dubbed “camps” for detention and mass deportation — a network he hopes will change the American political and physical landscape forever.
Miller, who is Jewish, has been denounced by his own uncle as a one-man betrayal of Jewish moral and political values. Miller has long held the deepest admiration for the Immigration Act of 1924, and wishes to bring America back to those days. The law is notorious for making the Holocaust deadlier for Jews who tried to flee the Nazis, only to be denied safe passage to the U.S.
Immediately after election night 2024 was called, human rights groups and pro-immigration advocates could not help but consider that they were not prepared for the onrush that Miller was about to unleash. Of all of the Trump appointees, he was the one who kept them up at night. For all of incoming Trump “border czar” Tom Homan’s big talk on mass deportations, he was nothing compared to Miller. To those familiar with Homan’s work, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could recognize, occasionally, that there were some rules and restrictions, here and there. For a guy like Miller, the only laws that mattered were the ones he and Trump could pervert.
Miller may be the avatar of the anonymous racist internet troll brought to agonizing life and imbued with power. But that does not mean he doesn’t thoroughly believe in the righteousness of the ideology he’s selling. In his mind, he’s the triumphant hero — a one-man antidote to effete liberalism, and a holy warrior against the permissive legal and illegal immigration that has left him and his peers feeling mugged by pluralistic reality.
Talk to Republicans operating at the highest levels of Trumpville and you get a unique mix of admiration and unease when you ask them what they think about Miller. “One intense motherfucker,” a longtime Trump adviser notes.
Even attempts by his friends to make him sound gentler, kinder, or funnier often fall flat, making him seem like a crank or the meanest dork you’ve ever met. For instance, multiple longtime Miller associates say that the top White House aide is one of the most “MAHA” people you’ll ever meet, and has plunged headlong into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style food and health (or anti-health) agitprop. Accounts of his social life make him sound, to put it gently, tedious.
One conversational victim of his recounts to Rolling Stone what it was like to get hit on by a premarital Miller, circa 2017, at a bar not far from Dupont Circle. The story involves being grilled about which country was named on the collar of her clothing (don’t say China), and getting accused of being a “globalist” because she wasn’t the right kind of conservative.
Female strangers aren’t the only ones in Washington who think he’s weird. Over the years of their close working relationship, President Trump — ever the gossipy Mean Girl with a nuclear arsenal — has not shied away from insulting Miller behind his back. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Trump has commented to others in the past about Miller’s intense, awkward, and at times off-putting demeanor.
But to Trump, Miller is a useful battering ram, the policy answer to his lingering question of “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
“Stephen Miller has been one of President Trump’s longest serving and most trusted advisers for nearly a decade, and I can personally attest to the respect the president has for Stephen because I witness it every day,” says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “That’s why Stephen serves as the deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, because the president has the utmost faith in him and his proven leadership abilities. In addition to being extremely effective at his jobs, Stephen is a loyal colleague and friend. Any suggestion otherwise is false gossip from people who don’t actually know him.”
In addition to the press secretary’s statement, the Trump White House sent Rolling Stone a lengthy list of testimonials — resembling an extremely MAGA LinkedIn endorsements section — from Republican lawmakers to prove that people like Stephen Miller personally.
Sen. Josh Hawley, for instance, says he’s glad to call Miller “a friend,” adding that “he cares deeply about helping create a future where American families can thrive.”
“Stephen Miller is bright, thoughtful, takes the time to listen to our members and their concerns, and has always been easy to work with,” says House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, adding: “I am proud to call Stephen Miller a close friend.”
The White House provided similar statements from Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, with a spokesperson saying they expected that all of the lawmakers’ praise for Miller would be included in this story.
‘Get It Done’
Nowadays, according to various sources working in and close to the Trump West Wing, the president’s lieutenant is technically a deputy White House chief of staff, but he far outpaces the actual White House chief of staff — Trump’s former 2024 campaign co-chief Susie Wiles — as Trump’s primary chief of administration policy.
Miller touches virtually every policy and executive action (especially as it relates to domestic initiatives), effectively all documents, Trump directives, constitutionally dubious orders, and memos. The architecture of Trump’s military crackdowns (in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and coming to a Democratic-dominant city near you) is in part a product of Miller’s vision for dominating liberal strongholds he despises.
“It’s a blast for Stephen,” says another fellow Trump adviser, in describing Miller’s role in orchestrating the domestic deployments of U.S. armed forces.
The Trump administration’s sweeping clampdown on diversity programs, higher education, and free speech Trump does not care for is a direct expression of Miller’s ethos, bringing to life a long-held ambition of federalizing the conservative “culture war” in ways once thought uncouth. Trump’s sprawling immigration and border enforcement is just “The Stephen Miller Show,” brought to you by Stephen Miller Productions LLC, and personally stage-managed by Stephen Miller.
With each shred of paper that the president will sign to launch these domestic programs, the Trump lieutenant peruses it, sometimes marks it up with edits, and pushes other Trump officials across the federal apparatus to, in his words, “get it done.”
His berating of intra-departmental and agency officials has become the stuff of legend, if not waking nightmares. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, two sources who’ve worked in the federal government and have personally dealt with Miller tell Rolling Stone that his berating has made them each cry at work.
During intra-agency discussions, Miller has routinely name-called, yelled, threatened officials’ jobs or future in the party, and attempted to humiliate people in front of their colleagues. He becomes enraged if he feels the immigrant-arrest numbers aren’t padded enough, or if he believes Trump’s domestic agenda is being stalled, even slightly. He is known for working long hours and micromanaging the brutal policies coming out of the new administration. He has a longstanding reputation, dating back to 2017, in the Republican upper ranks as someone willing to say anything, do anything, and betray almost anyone, in the service of Trump and, more vitally, keeping his power and proximity to the president intact.
Within the highest levels of the Trump administration, the idea that Attorney General Pam Bondi runs the Justice Department or that Kristi Noem runs the Department of Homeland Security is woefully incomplete. Nominally independent departments are run by the West Wing of the White House — and therefore, largely, by Miller.
When some government personnel would note that Trump can deploy National Guard troops and armed U.S. Marines to Democratic-run urban areas, but that the troops can’t conduct traditional law enforcement, per se, Miller was the one telling administration lawyers and staff that Trump wanted them to figure out ways around that legal inconvenience, and to report back with whatever legal theories they’d produce.
Miller has made it a top priority for the opening months of this Trump term to normalize the deployment of U.S. troops on American soil — not for states of emergency, but for domestic political purposes. According to those who’ve spoken with them about it, Trump and Miller view those who object as “weak,” “cowards,” and “pro-crime.”
‘We Just Have to Follow Orders’
In the aftermath of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to assist with ICE operations in Los Angeles, Miller insisted that purging undocumented migrants from the city would create a utopia for the remaining residents.
“You have any idea how many resources will be opened up for Americans when the illegals are gone?” Miller told Fox News. “No more waiting in line at an emergency room, no more massive traffic in Los Angeles. Your health insurance premiums go down, your public-school classroom size will shrink … and if you do need to get support from the government, you’re not going to be in line behind millions of illegal aliens from the third world. This is going to be such a gift to the quality of life of everyday Americans.”
In July, when speaking to the press pool in front of the White House, Miller was asked if it was the best use of the administration’s resources to be going after “moms with young kids.” In return, he grilled the reporter on what percentage of undocumented migrants should be allowed to stay. “Do you think we have some sort of Magic 8 Ball to see which particular illegal aliens … are going to go on to commit a rape or murder?”
Miller has no legal background, but according to Trump officials, Miller was the mastermind behind Trump’s ploy to use the Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations without due process, a plot he detailed in 2023 during an interview with conservative radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.
Miller was also the first member of the administration to publicly suggest the suspension of habeas corpus, the core constitutional right of protection from arbitrary detention by the state. Speaking to reporters at the White House in May, Miller said, “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so I would say that is an option we’re actively looking at.” There is, of course, no invasion.
For those who want to grasp the true nature of Miller’s legacy and his role in our world, you have to look far beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. To understand Trump’s principal enforcer, you need to understand what he is doing to countless people, all over the country — and then you’d have to understand his personal, instinctive response when he hears about the stories of his victims.
Across the country there are thousands of families ripped apart by the Trump-Miller gang, and most of those stories you won’t read about or may never hear about. One of these was relayed earlier this year to Rolling Stone by an Ohio-based immigration lawyer. This magazine verified details of this account, and agreed to use pseudonyms for the wife, husband, and three-year-old daughter. The lawyer asked not to be identified, due to Miller’s and the Trump administration’s zeal for targeting pro bono immigration attorneys.
In 2020, “Richard” (as we’ll call him) fled his Latin American home country to seek asylum in the U.S. As Richard will tell you, he had served in the military in his home country, but had grown fearful of what might happen to him if he remained, citing corruption and powerful organized crime.
By 2025, he had already made a life for himself in the United States. He had a wife — “Ellen” — and a small daughter, “Jessica,” and they were living in Columbus, Ohio. He worked to support the family, and Ellen stayed home with Jessica. There is no known history of petty or violent crime or any criminal record between them. However, in early 2024, the couple showed up for one of their scheduled hearings and left without actually attending it, but only because somebody at the check-in desk erroneously told them they were not on the schedule that day. That one mishap — which by all accounts, was not their fault — was enough to doom their family under Trump’s second administration.
This past June, Richard received a text message from ICE asking that he appear for a check-in at the local ICE office. Due to the Trump administration’s barrage of new policies and arrest quotas pushed by Miller and Trump, his lawyer was suspicious. Still, Richard had faith in this great country. He wanted to show he was no criminal, that he wanted to come here the right way, and that he had nothing to hide.
The Ohio-based attorney met the family of three at the federal check-in outside of Columbus, with all of them waiting in line to get into the building. Jessica and Ellen were wearing matching attire — Jessica’s hair in pigtails with ribbons, wearing a pink dress. The lawyer recalls the daughter and father laughing as Jessica played with her dad’s cheeks, which he blew up as if to mimic a puffer fish.
After they passed the waiting area, two armed ICE officers would soon flank them, and one of them told the attorney and the family that the officers had no choice. ICE had its directive “from Washington,” the officer said, which had been issued after Trump’s inauguration in January — new standards and demands for higher arrest and deportation numbers (regardless of any existing criminal record) that were directly authored by Miller.
The officer said they had to put the father in handcuffs right then and there, and take him away. “We just have to follow orders,” the ICE officer said.
At first, the Spanish-speaking family did not know what was happening. The lawyer had to translate all of this, back and forth, as the couple and their legal representative pleaded with the ICE officers to allow them to self-deport as a family. Surely doing so would save the American taxpayer money.
The ICE officer apologized. There was nothing anyone, apparently, could do.
The officers were courteous enough to offer to allow Ellen and Jessica to leave the room, so the child did not have to see them handcuffing her dad. The father squatted low to pick up Jessica and hug her goodbye. Jessica, confused and sobbing, would not let go, wrapping her arms around her father’s neck and her legs around his body.
One of the two ICE officers informed the family they needed to get things moving along, just as Ellen had her hands around Jessica’s waist, unable — at first — to pry the preschool-age girl off her dad. One ICE officer had his hand on the father’s shoulder, while the other officer hovered over the family.
“Daddy!” the girl screamed in Spanish. “I want Daddy! I want my daddy!”
Ellen was finally able to remove a hysterical Jessica from the room, and as the ICE officers took Richard, she kept yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, Noooooooooo!!!!” As they walked back to the waiting room, the lawyer could see the faces of the immigrants and others who were sitting in the waiting area, looking on in confused horror at what must have been waiting for them on the other side of that door. Months later, the attorney tells Rolling Stone, “I can still hear the little girl’s screams.”
Ellen and Jessica would pack up and leave for Richard’s home country. The two expected to reunite with him there within days. Instead, to their terror, the Trump administration disappeared him into a Louisiana detention facility for nearly two months. They have since been reunited, but the scars have yet to heal. The lawyer says that Jessica still wakes up in the middle of the night, shouting for “Daddy.”
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Under every modern president there is harsh immigration enforcement, and heartbreaking decisions are made. But this story is only happening because the Trump White House and Miller are leaning on agencies to crack down in every state, just so Miller can run up the scoreboard on arrests.
To you, this may seem sad, even appalling. To Miller, he thinks your outrage is very funny. In private conversations this year, the top Trump adviser has said that liberals promoting immigrant families’ “sob stories” are engaging in emotional “blackmail” that Miller and the government simply will not fall for. He laughs it off, before getting back to work creating more horror stories.
