Stephen Miller returning to Trump administration. What his time as a Duke student reveals

Republican President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy on Wednesday.

Miller is an alumnus of Trump’s first stint in the White House, in which he served as a speechwriter and senior adviser to the president and played a major role in the administration’s decisions to separate thousands of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border and to institute a ban on travel to the United States from some predominately Muslim countries.

In his new role, Miller is expected to construct a strict, hard-line approach to immigration that will likely involve mass deportations of immigrants in the country without legal authorization, a move that Miller told Fox News last week would “begin on Inauguration Day, as soon as [Trump] takes the oath of office.” CNN reported that Miller has said the second Trump administration could deport more than 1 million immigrants each year.

But Miller’s time working for Trump is hardly his first foray into politics — or controversy.

Almost 20 years ago, as a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, he became known for his political activism on campus and the controversial, conservative columns he wrote for the Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

In the more than two dozen Chronicle columns he wrote between 2005 and 2007, Miller railed against “political correctness,” feminism, the city of Durham, affirmative action and other topics.

Miller attended the university during the Duke lacrosse scandal, which became a recurring topic for some of his columns and subsequent appearances on cable news shows. Miller believed the three lacrosse players accused of raping a Black woman were innocent, which ended up being the case, with then-Attorney General Roy Cooper declaring the players innocent and the Durham County district attorney being disbarred as a result of misconduct in the case.

Miller generally framed his opinion on the case in the context of race, writing in one column that the lacrosse players “faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were white and their accuser black.” In a separate column about “racial paranoia,” Miller wrote that a fellow student who had called him racist had “a mental disease” in which she was “obsessed with race.”

In the years since he has risen to the national spotlight, Miller’s columns have gained more attention. In a 2020 interview about the book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” author and journalist Jean Guerrero mentioned the columns as an early platform in which he espoused “very offensive beliefs” on race.

Miller post-Duke

But even at the time he was writing his columns, Miller was apparently aware of how his fellow Duke students perceived him and his opinions.

“From the beginning, this column, along with my political activism, has made me a controversial figure,” Miller wrote in his final column for the paper in April 2007. “As a deeply committed conservative who considers it his responsibility to do battle with the left, this is not in the least surprising.”

And that perception has grown since Miller graduated from the university and joined Trump’s administration. Less than a month into his first stint working in the White House, several hundred Duke alumni, many from Miller’s class of 2007, published an online letter to Miller saying that his actions in the administration do not further “intellectual honesty, tolerance, diversity, and respect.”

The letter continued: “... we find it impossible to see in your words and actions any glimmer of the university values we so cherish, nor the slightest suggestion that you spent four of your most formative years at the same dynamic, diverse institution of higher education we did.”

A Duke spokesperson did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment about Miller’s pending appointment to Trump’s second administration.

In a 2017 News & Observer profile of Miller, former Duke administrator John Burness called Miller “the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered.”

“He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking,” Burness said. “Incredibly intolerant.”

The university in 2017 joined an amicus brief against the travel ban that targeted Muslim-majority countries.

In between Trump’s terms in the White House, Miller has served as president of America First Legal, a legal group that says it is “fighting back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.” In May, the law firm filed a lawsuit against Raleigh-based software company Red Hat, alleging the company exhibited “anti-white” and “anti-male” bias in terminating an employee.

Miller was recently in Greenville, North Carolina, campaigning for Trump prior to the Nov. 5 election. At that rally, Trump vowed to “launch the largest deportation program in American history.”

Stephen Miller’s Chronicle columns

Excerpts from Stephen Miller’s columns published in The Chronicle at Duke University:

▪ Jan. 11, 2006: “American cinema is being converted into a propaganda machine. For the doubters, let me flip it around. When was the last time you saw a conservative film? Maybe a movie about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism, even one about America as a force of good in the world? ... The Hollywood crowd feels sympathy for the terrorists, detests Republicans and sees America as an obstacle to a better world. ... Of course this is not limited to the silver screen. Shows like Queer As Folk, The ‘L’ Word, Will & Grace and Sex and the City, all do their part to promote alternative lifestyles and erode traditional values.”

▪ Feb. 8, 2006: “Islamic terrorists have declared holy war on the United States. They have declared a death sentence on every man, woman and child living in this country. They are actively seeking, with the assistance of radical Muslim despots, weapons that would permit them to execute hundreds of thousands of Americans in a single attack.”

▪ April 5, 2006: “The second question I’d ask is what people hope to gain from Duke students spending less time on campus and more time in Durham. I have nothing against the town, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as a rich treasure-trove of life and culture waiting to be discovered by the eager student. I would more accurately describe it as one of the last spots in America anyone would visit were it not for the presence of Duke University. ... Duke is, in fact, the only thing that keeps this city alive. As the number-one employer in Durham and the city’s only major draw, if we were to pull out, instead of worrying about town-gown relations, the city would have to be worry about becoming a ghost-town. Which it quickly would.”

▪ Aug. 28, 2006: “The more information that surfaces the more apparent it becomes to fair-minded observers that our lacrosse team was railroaded and that three of our fellow students are being put on trial not because of evidence but because of a DA’s incompetence and malice. ... Sadly, many in the community have shown that they are not fair minded but would rather hunt for witches than search for justice.”

▪ Sept. 11, 2006: “Why aren’t our airports, borders or ports secure? Why have not the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission been implemented? Why are there 3,000,000 people in the United States who have overstayed their visas? Why isn’t the murder of 3,000 people enough to shake us out of our apathy? ... Maybe, if more people researched the true story of Sept. 11, in all its horror, it won’t take another attack, and more untold devastation, to motivate us to fix the perilous status quo.”

▪ Oct. 11, 2006: “Reform the Program in Women’s Studies that now seems to be an effort to indoctrinate students in radical feminism (imagine the reaction to a degree-granting Duke program to indoctrinate students in conservatism or monarchism). A proper women’s studies program would study women from all angles, not one. ... End all racial discrimination in University admissions. So-called affirmative action – which is a system of racial preferences – is not simply misguided. It is a devastating, paternalistic policy endorsed by white liberals more concerned with how they look to their elitist friends than to the well-being of the minorities they claim they want to help.”

▪ Nov. 20, 2006: “Duke, in lockstep with the modern American university, worships at the altar of multiculturalism. As we obsess over, adulate and extol the non-American cultures we ignore the culture we all hold in common. ... Every year Page Auditorium is packed to celebrate Indian and Asian culture, while crucial American cultural events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, President’s Day and Veterans Day are ignored and forgotten.”

▪ Dec. 4, 2006: “It’s the most wonderful time of year – but you wouldn’t know it looking around Duke’s campus. ... You’d probably find more Christmas decorations at your local mosque. ... There is absolutely no single logical reason why we shouldn’t have a Christmas tree on the quad and a Nativity scene in the Bryan Center. Eighty-five percent of our nation is Christian and every single one of us, Christian or not (I’m a practicing Jew myself), is living in a country settled and founded by Christians and benefiting daily from the principles of Christian philosophy on which our forebears relied.”

▪ Feb. 26, 2007: “The lacrosse allegations provided a fantastic opportunity to advance a social agenda and to keep the distance between the paranoid delusions of widespread racism upon which so many of the careers and the lives of the activists have been built and the rather obvious reality that the overwhelming majority of whites in America are not racist (and in fact commit rape against black citizens with disproportionate infrequency). ... Is it any surprise radical students, activists and faculty latched onto these charges with such euphoria? Or that to this day they have neither apologized nor retreated?”