AMY GOODMAN: White House adviser Stephen Miller starts his new job today as President Trump’s chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles, following sweeping Republican losses in last week’s historic midterm elections. Miller is the chief architect of Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration crackdown. Trump’s decision to promote Miller is widely seen as a signal the president will double down on his agenda despite the rebuke from voters. Trump praised Miller Friday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Stephen has been with me from the beginning. He gets it, very good politically, and he’s a very good man. He’ll do a great job, great manager. … I wanted to make a change. I think Susie’s done a very good job, great job, but I just wanted to make it. Stephen’s been great. And we’ve got to make — we’ve got to make moves.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, who will lead that committee next term, spoke to CNN over the weekend.

REP. ROBERT GARCIA: Stephen Miller is the architect of this horrific, unjust policy happening across the country in the way that we are treating folks. Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti, as we know, an assassin. The way that he is going around creating immigration policy that separates families, that is causing people harm, that’s creating a detention process where a few large companies are profiting, the unconstitutional detention of people, the way that folks are losing their due process rights, that has to be investigated. And we know that Stephen Miller has been an architect of that. And so, what’s happening there, what’s happening in Iran, Stephen Miller is at the center of the major policy decisions that are happening in the administration, and so it does deserve oversight and investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Garcia also said in a statement, “Stephen Miller should lawyer up,” to which Todd Blanche, the attorney general, said he is his lawyer.

According to The New York Times, just one day after the election, Stephen Miller called national security officials to push forward with the immigration crackdown.

For more, we go now to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. She’s also a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and an associate professor at the USC, the University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Jean Guerrero, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you share your response when you heard that after the massive Republican midterm defeat, the response of the president, even though he has said over the weekend he didn’t think it was the Iran war, but his crackdown on immigrants, that he has chosen Stephen Miller, who symbolized that crackdown on immigrants?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes. Thanks for having me, Amy.

This decision is not at all surprising to me, given that Stephen Miller, as we all know, is the most effective sycophant in the Trump administration. As Trump himself said, he’s one of his longest-lasting advisers, one of his most trusted advisers. But it is a deeply disturbing decision, because Miller is one of the most troubled and one of the most dangerous individuals in this White House. He is responsible for federal agents being unleashed in communities across the United States to target people based on their race and based on their language. He had federal agents go into workplaces, into construction sites, into Home Depots, into farms, which devastated communities economically, as well as psychologically and spiritually.

But to me, this is indicative of the fact that Trump is choosing to double down, which is an instinct that he shares with Stephen Miller and which Stephen Miller enables him in, this instinct to choose cruelty over everything else and and to just — I think Trump hopes that Miller is going to get him out of this mess, because in the past when he has gone with Miller’s decisions to use the scapegoating of immigrants to rally the base, it has worked. But this war on immigrants has reached a level that has horrified the American public, and I really don’t believe it’s going to work this time. Stephen Miller is not going to get Trump out of this mess.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can start off — I mean, you wrote a whole book, Jean, on Stephen Miller, called Hatemonger — why you decided to do that? I mean, yes, and the subtitle, it’s Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. But give us a short history of who he is.

JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah. Stephen Miller grew up in Santa Monica, California, which is known as a liberal progressive community. And he is, in many ways, a product of liberal hypocrisy. He saw the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders in California and how often their support for immigrant rights and social justice was often performative, and he decided to exploit that to rise in political power. And he was mentored by individuals who believe that war needs — that politics needs to be a form of warfare.

And I chose to write this book and to investigate Stephen Miller because I was an immigration reporter and I was seeing the impact of the first Trump administration’s policies on families at the border. The administration kept saying that they were going after criminals, that if you didn’t want to be targeted by the family separations, you just had to follow the law. But I was talking to people who were having 1-year-old babies ripped out of their arms after having presented at ports of entry legally. So I wanted to understand: If this wasn’t about the law, if this wasn’t about law and order, which the administration was claiming that it was, and it clearly wasn’t, then what was it about? And to me, I felt that I had to understand Stephen Miller.

And what I understood is that, at the end of the day, this was about reengineering the racial demographics of this country. That is why Stephen Miller, during the first administration, focused on strangling legal pathways into this country, whether it was gutting the asylum system, the refugee system, restricting green card access for the poor. This was never about going after criminals. It was about changing what America is and who is allowed to come here. And that is why, during this administration, they have focused on invading American cities to pursue operations that amount to ethnic cleansing.

And these operations, he has told federal agents they can act with immunity, which is why you saw the killings across the United States of citizens and noncitizens alike. And I think this was deliberate. I mean, Stephen Miller — one thing that people need to understand about Stephen Miller is that he is, above all, a sadist, and there is one group of people that he despises more than immigrants, and that is the allies, the citizen allies, of immigrants, people who choose compassion and who choose to stand up for their neighbors. He was shaped by this book called The Camp of the Saints, which basically the heroes of this book are people who call for genocide of Brown immigrants, who are cast as a threat to civilization. And the worst villains are not the immigrants, but the citizen allies who stand up for their neighbors.

And so, I think Miller has this profound hostility for immigrants of color, and we’ve seen that, but he also — and I think this is what we’re going to see in the coming two years — has a deep, deep loathing for the people who use their privilege and who use their power to stand up for those who are being persecuted. He despises that. And he is going to use the powers that he now has to target and to terrorize and to torture not only immigrant communities, but their allies, people who are citizens who are — who believe in welcoming the stranger.

AMY GOODMAN: You said the book is The Camp of the Saints. I wanted to ask you about President Trump, who sat down for an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes following the widespread Republican defeat in the midterm elections. Trump made these remarks about his immigration raids and deportations.

ROSS DOUTHAT: So, you think your deportation policy — 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think it was too tough.

ROSS DOUTHAT: — went too far. It was too tough.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think it might be too tough, yeah. And a lot of people would say that it’s great, but a lot of people think it’s too tough.

ROSS DOUTHAT: What would happen —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I think, ultimate — 

ROSS DOUTHAT: What does the deal look like with the Democrats?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think, ultimately, that hurt me. … But there’s a group of people that, I would say on the sort of pretty far right, that would like everybody taken out.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Do some of them — 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And there’s a group of people on the —

ROSS DOUTHAT: Do any of those people work in your administration?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yes.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Are they in the building with us right now?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Well, there are a lot of those people.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is very interesting, Jean Guerrero. On the one hand, you have Vice President Vance putting out a statement after the midterm saying the war did the Republicans in. Trump has refuted this, but then went on to say it was the immigration crackdown, and appoints Stephen Miller, the symbol and architect of that, as his chief of staff. Can you explain?

JEAN GUERRERO: Trump is trying to play both sides. He’s trying to exploit the echo chambers. He’s hoping one group of people will receive one piece of information and the others will receive the other. But this is clearly contradictory. He has chosen to elevate Stephen Miller, who for his entire life has expressed deep antagonism for immigrants who are here, whether they’re legally here, whether they came here and don’t have status.

One thing that I included in my book that I want to talk about is that Stephen Miller, from the time he was in high school and throughout college, he would disparage custodial staff, and he would throw his food on the ground. He would leave his trash out, and he would say, “Why do I have to pick up my trash when there are people here to do it for me?”

And so, what’s really interesting is that Stephen Miller is somebody who, I think, during the first administration, was primarily motivated by his restrictionist beliefs and his desire to racially reengineer this country, as I mentioned. But during this administration, we’re seeing something else. I mean, you’re pointing out a really interesting contradiction, Amy. There’s another really interesting contradiction, which is that while they are deporting longtime undocumented immigrants who’ve been contributing to this country and who’ve accumulated some level of power in the form of U.S. citizen children, in the form of jobs, in the form of neighbors who care about them, they are pursuing a foreign policy that is displacing masses of people across Latin America, across the Middle East. And Stephen Miller has been one of the most vocal proponents of Trump’s foreign interventions and invasions.

And what I think is happening here, it sounds contradictory, but at the end of the day, it boils down to who Miller was as a teenager, which is somebody who didn’t mind immigrants being around so long as they served, they were serving him without complaint, so long as he could subjugate them. They are eliminating people who have deep roots here, and what they are doing is displacing people who have no roots here, who are ultimately going to come here.

And so, I think, at the end of the day, Stephen Miller and Trump are exactly who they’ve been criticizing all along. They are transnational. They are in alliance with transnational corporate elites who are displacing people across the country. And I think people need — are starting to understand that. This is one of the reasons that we saw this blue wave in the midterms.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, you just finished leading a program at USC Annenberg that’s geared to change the immigration debate by the next presidential election in 2028. Can you talk about this program, Our Unsilencing? The sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo participated, the man, 52-year-old father, Mexican father, who was shot to death by an immigration agent in Houston July 7th?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes. So, I have been using my knowledge of Miller’s playbook and the impact that he had on the immigration debate to build a countermovement, and this is what the boot camp is about. We are empowering individuals who have been overlooked and who have not been at the center of the immigration debate to be at the center of the immigration debate. We’re training them how to tell their own stories on their own terms, and how to do so in a way that’s well researched, that’s grounded in tying their experiences to specific calls to action, that’s grounded in knowledge of the history of how personal testimony has transformed social movements in the United States, and also in a way that’s strategic in the immigration debate.

And so, we have people who have different levels of experience. The sons of Lorenzo Salgado came with more experience. They’ve been doing an amazing job. But everybody left knowing that they’re going to be central in changing the course of U.S. history.

And I think everybody listening has a role to play. We all need to be talking about the war on immigrants as a war on people power, because that is what it is. And I think people are starting to realize that. The war on immigrants, which is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into jailing and displacing valued community members, and, ultimately, it is a war on labor. It is a war on civil and constitutional rights. And we need to demand the Democrats, with their new majorities — yes, it’s important that they hold the Trump administration accountable, but if they are not also prioritizing legislation on this issue, on the war on immigrants, then they’re going to come off as completely disingenuous. They need to pursue legislation to abolish ICE, and we need to demand that they do that.

We need ICE out of our cities. And we need also to prioritize legislation for the longtime undocumented population. You cannot have a sector of the working population that is criminalized and subjugated, because when you have that, then you are able to exploit the entire working class. And that is what this has always been about. And that is what this boot camp is determined to infuse into the public imagination, that the war on immigrants is a war on you. It is a war on everybody in this country, and we are going to expose it for what it is.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, I want to thank you for being with us, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Coming up, meet Los Angeles’s new DSA Congressmember-elect Angela Gonzales-Torres. Her father was deported to Mexico when she was a teenager. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “There Is Power in a Union” by Billy Bragg, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.