{"id":435049,"date":"2026-01-28T15:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T15:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/435049\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T15:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T15:58:11","slug":"pressure-grows-on-stephen-miller-after-alex-pretti-killing-but-trump-unlikely-to-cut-ties-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/435049\/","title":{"rendered":"Pressure grows on Stephen Miller after Alex Pretti killing but Trump unlikely to cut ties | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pressure is growing on the key White House senior adviser Stephen Miller<\/a> over the killing of the intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by border patrol agents in Minneapolis and its politically divisive aftermath.<\/p>\n

Miller, the architect of Donald Trump\u2019s hardline immigration policy, finds himself in the rare position of being contradicted and excluded from crucial decisions by the US president.<\/p>\n

About three and a half hours after the tragedy on Saturday, Miller used social media<\/a> to describe Pretti, 37, as a \u201cwould-be assassin\u201d who \u201ctried to murder federal agents\u201d. On Tuesday, when asked if he believed Pretti was an assassin, Trump said: \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president had held a two-hour meeting<\/a> with the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, in the Oval Office on Monday evening at Noem\u2019s request. Miller was conspicuously absent.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Axios news site, citing four unnamed sources, reported that Miller<\/a> was responsible for the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s baseless claim that Pretti intended to \u201cmassacre\u201d officers, parroted by Noem. \u201cStephen heard \u2018gun\u2019 and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to \u2018massacre\u2019 cops,\u201d one of the sources said.<\/p>\n

But on Tuesday, in a statement to CNN, Miller admitted that the border patrol agents \u201cmay not have been following\u201d proper protocol before the fatal shooting of Pretti \u2013 a rare reversal by a man known for typically reinforcing and intensifying his positions.<\/p>\n

On this occasion not even the Trump administration<\/a> could create its own version of reality. Multiple phone videos made by witnesses exposed its false narrative and prompted an outcry from the public, business leaders and even some Republicans, forcing the president into a partial climbdown on Monday.<\/p>\n

He decided to pull the border patrol commander Greg Bovino<\/a> out of Minneapolis and send in his border czar, Tom Homan, who has been critical of Miller\u2019s approach, to \u201crecalibrate tactics\u201d and improve cooperation with state and local officials. The president also held cordial phone calls with Minnesota\u2019s governor, Tim Walz, and the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey.<\/p>\n

That raised a question mark over Noem\u2019s future. More than 160 Democrats in the House of Representatives have signed on to an effort to impeach her<\/a>. Asked on Tuesday whether the homeland security secretary would step down, Trump insisted that she would not. \u201cI think she\u2019s doing a very good job,\u201d he said. \u201cThe border is totally secure.\u201d<\/p>\n

But arguably the true culprit of the Minneapolis debacle is Miller, who is officially the White House deputy chief of staff but has been likened by some to Trump\u2019s prime minister<\/a>. Axios reported: \u201cHis reach, sources say, includes effective oversight of Noem, despite her cabinet-level seniority. \u2018Everything I\u2019ve done, I\u2019ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,\u2019 Noem is said to have told one interlocutor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last May, for example, Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that he wanted 3,000 immigration arrests a day \u2013 a nearly tenfold increase on the previous year. His abuses of power have discredited Trump\u2019s deportation policy, argues Larry Jacobs<\/a>, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

\u201cStephen Miller is the architect,\u201d Jacobs said. \u201cHe\u2019s the guy who has been haranguing ICE to get tougher and deliver more numbers, bring people in and we\u2019ll sort them out as to whether you got the right people later. The recklessness, the brutality, the lack of legal process \u2013 all of that has its roots with Stephen Miller.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the fact that he was locked out of the White House meeting is a strong message to Washington that the president does not approve of this process and that there has to be a change. I do not expect Stephen Miller to be fired because Donald Trump supports the policy, just not how it was done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller, 40, has proved a master at converting Trump\u2019s impulses into policy. He has been so central to the Make America Great Again project, and so ostentatious in his loyalty, that there seems little chance of him losing his job. But Minneapolis<\/a> was a rare misstep in which he got ahead of his boss and, some observers believe, he will now take a back seat until the storm passes.<\/p>\n

Henry Olsen<\/a>, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: \u201cHe\u2019ll have much less of a public role in the foreseeable future. It\u2019s clear that Trump personally does not like the PR aspect of what\u2019s been going on, and he\u2019s sensitive to that and always has been, and he knows from both his instinct and from what the data is telling him, that Miller and Noem did not do themselves any favours with how they immediately came out to address the killing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olsen does not believe that Miller is in danger of becoming the fall guy, however. \u201cMiller\u2019s been with him for quite some time. Trump has no problem getting rid of non-performing subordinates but one suspects that Miller in many ways is performing and he is not going to toss him over the side lightly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller performs where it matters for Trump: on television. He is a pugnacious defender of the president, given to colourful language that characterises Democrats as a \u201cdomestic extremist organisation\u201d and America leading a world \u201cthat is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power\u201d. His wife, Katie Miller, is striving to carve a niche as a Maga podcaster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rick Wilson<\/a>, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: \u201cStephen Miller is too dominant in Trump\u2019s mental schema about what the Maga base wants to truly be cut out of a loop. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a world where Stephen Miller doesn\u2019t retain his authority and his power with Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson, a veteran political strategist who has worked on Republican campaigns, added: \u201cStrategically he may step back a half step, but this is not a world where Stephen Miller is going to give up power. He\u2019s worked too hard to get to where he is.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with Stephen Miller is that evil is resilient. He doesn\u2019t feel any shame. He doesn\u2019t think that this is a bad thing. He\u2019s convinced that other people have embarrassed him but not that he\u2019s running a vast assault on the constitutional liberties of Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pressure is growing on the key White House senior adviser Stephen Miller over the killing of the intensive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-435049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}