Stephen Miller leads new push to boot immigrant kids and accelerate third-country deportations

Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is reportedly leading the administration’s efforts to deport thousands of people to countries that are not their own while trying to send nearly 200,000 children out of the country.

Miller has played a key role in the administration’s mass deportation efforts that have sent more than 25,000 people to so-called “third countries,” a process that immigration attorneys have called an illegal loophole to send immigrants back to the dangerous homelands they fled in the first place.

Under Miller’s direction, the administration has pledged at least $410 million to more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, to accept people deported from the U.S., according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

Miller is also leading a White House effort to deport a growing number of immigrant children. Nearly 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the U.S. since Trump returned to office, according to Department of Justice data reviewed by the advocacy group Mobile Pathways and shared with The Guardian.

The administration’s government-wide approach to mass deportation efforts follows a pledge to remove at least 1 million people from the country each year as arrests hit record highs each month.

Steering those third-country removal agreements is Christian Ehrhardt, who leads the newly created Office of Remigration at the Department of State. The White House has denied Miller’s involvement in Ehrhardt’s appointment.

Last year, the State Department funneled $250 million meant for refugee services to pay immigrants to leave the country, The Independent previously reported.

The Office of Remigration — echoing a term used among far-right and white nationalist groups who support the mass removal of immigrants — is intended as a “hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking” and “interagency coordination” for “removals/repatriations” while supporting the “the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status.”

The Trump administration has deported at least 25,447 immigrants under those third country removal arrangements, according to a joint investigation into third-country deportations from 26 media organizations organized by Paris-based Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news group.

Third-country removals reached record highs this summer; Human Rights First tracked 18 flights to ten countries in July, with first-time flights to Belize and Dominica, and repeated flights to Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Panama, Paraguay and Sierra Leone.

Within just 24 hours last month, from August 20-21, Human Rights First tracked third country transfers to Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Paraguay, as well as flights deporting Mexicans to Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica.

“The only illegal aliens going to third countries are those whose home countries won’t accept them including dangerous criminals or illegal aliens with orders of removal who have asked to not be removed to their home country,” according to White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.

“If an illegal alien filed false claims, that is felony immigration fraud and should be investigated,” she told The Independent. “If any illegal alien who wants to go home, we will arrange a free flight for them and give them a $3,000 check.”

After working in Trump’s personnel office during his term, Ehrhardt, who has no background in international diplomacy, worked on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-backed blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

He was reportedly shown the Wikipedia page showing the definition of “remigration” during a meeting with administration officials, according to The Washington Post.

Immigration attorneys and human rights groups say the arrangements are designed to circumvent court orders from U.S. judges who blocked certain immigrants from returning to countries where they faced threats of persecution, violence and death.

In those “third” countries, those immigrants are vulnerable to being forcibly expelled back to the countries they fled — a process known as “refoulement” that violates international refugee treaties.

On Friday, a federal appeals court determined that the Trump administration policy is unlawful, a challenge that is expected to get kicked up to the Supreme Court.

The government “cannot evade protections against persecution and torture by simply changing the deportation destination,” Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said in a statement.

Third-country removals “make a mockery of U.S. law, which prohibits returning people to persecution and torture,” said Anwen Hughes, senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs with Human Rights First.

Miller has also led a multi-agency effort to radically increase removals of immigrant children, an immensely vulnerable population with limited access to legal immigration pathways under the Trump administration.

That effort spans the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of immigrant children who entered the U.S. without a parent or guardian.

The health department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for sheltering those children in federal facilities and supported programs as they work to connect them with potential sponsors and their families.

But Miller’s unprecedented inter-agency effort has opened the door for vast amounts of sensitive records to be shared across the government in a process that has typically been separate and apart from immigration enforcement.

Those efforts have unleashed what immigration attorneys have described as a coercive effort to force children into abandoning their legal bids to stay in the U.S., boosting numbers in the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.

Of the more than 200,000 children who have been ordered removed from the U.S. within the second Trump administration, at least 70 percent were under the age of 13, according to an analysis from Mobile Pathways and The Guardian.

Since Trump returned to the White House, immigration judges have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary deportation orders for immigrant minors each month, an explosive surge that has vastly outnumbered orders from even Trump’s first term, The Independent previously reported.

Those efforts have left hundreds of undocumented immigrant children stuck in federal custody.

The White House did not deny Miller’s coordination of a multi-agency effort targeting children but claimed that the administration is working to reduce child trafficking. “We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” Bis told The Independent. “DHS and DOJ working to ensure tough criminal penalties for any bad actors who collaborate with cartels to kidnap, torture, smuggle, and traffic children.”

Thousands of those children lost their legal representation overnight when the administration cut long-standing ties with a network of service providers this summer. The government ultimately inked a $158 million no-bid contract with a controversial anti-trafficking group to support those children instead.