Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.

He is directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children. Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country.

Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the US by immigration judges since Trump returned to the White House, a doubling of such court orders since January 2025, according to analysis of data from the Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) conducted by the California-based advocacy Mobile Pathways and shared with the Guardian. The advocacy group has focused its numbers on children appearing in immigration court, regardless of whether they arrived in the US alone or with family, and believes the total to be an undercount.

Miller has harnessed personnel and power for his task from at least five cabinet-level government departments, as described to the Guardian by several sources briefed on various initiatives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The departments include Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care of migrant children who are in the country without a parent or guardian; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are based; and the Department of Justice (DoJ), which houses the immigration courts – with the state department and the Department of Defense playing more subsidiary roles.

Miller frequently confers with subordinates, daily at times, pressing them to maximize removals of immigrant children from the US, according to a number of sources familiar with the White House plans.

“The folks that have to do the implementation are told, ‘These instructions came directly from the White House,’ or ‘These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,’ as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion and doing it in the way that they were instructed to do it,” one source said.

Sources warned of the White House pushing each department to boost efforts individually and by working together in new ways to speed up and expand the deportation of undocumented children – especially by dismantling inter-agency communication safeguards designed to protect children, and hurrying them in vast numbers, without lawyers, in front of asylum officers and immigration judges who are either inclined or are under pressure to take a hard line and get them out of the US.

All departments involved, and the White House, were sent questions and asked for comment.

The White House did not deny that Miller is orchestrating a multi-agency effort to speed up the removal of undocumented children but claimed the effort was not new.

However, the White House and some other agencies that responded framed their endeavors as an anti-trafficking initiative instead of a means to enforcement.

“The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” said White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.

The Homeland Security Council is a body which, under Trump, now answers directly to him within the executive office of the president of the United States and is led by Miller.

But there is no certainty that deported young people end up reunited with family and safe in their home countries, as many of them left in the first place because of threats to their wellbeing, including from their own family, or in order to reunite with parents in the US.

One source said: “This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them … they have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children’s safety as their priority.”

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an immigration policy fellow at Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary focused on racial equity, said: “A facade of trafficking is sort of a convenient, feel-good cover that has nothing to do with trafficking and everything to do with reducing the program [of federal care for undocumented children], getting rid of services, getting rid of things they don’t like, and then removing kids.” Trickler-McNulty was previously an assistant director at ICE and a senior counselor at USCIS during the Biden administration.