Stephen Miller’s apparent sidelining by Donald Trump is a deliberate ruse to allow him to secretly retain his iron grip on immigration policy, senior administration officials have told PunchUp.
The deputy White House chief of staff, 40, was reported earlier this week to have been frozen out of major Department of Homeland Security calls after he dragged the president, 79, into politically toxic territory by branding Alex Pretti—the 37-year-old VA ICU nurse blasted to death by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Jan. 24—a “domestic terrorist.”
Trump’s hardline immigration adviser had, The Atlantic reported, been replaced with his border czar Tom Homan, 64, and long-standing CBP commissioner Rodney Scott as the officials whom the new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was consulting ahead of Miller. Miller has made far fewer appearances on TV since, whereas before he was a regular, the report also noted.
But the narrative and media briefing from the White House is a smokescreen which Miller has engineered to keep him running immigration policy while Homan, 64, absorbs the public heat, three senior administration sources have told PunchUp, the Daily Beast’s sister investigations Substack.
“Miller and Homan are in lock step. It’s almost like a tag team,” one said.
Another DHS official told the outlet that Miller regularly meets with Mullin, 48, to discuss immigration policy, tactics, and results. They said that from the very start of Mullin’s DHS tenure, following Kristi Noem’s March firing, it had been clear who was in charge—and it is not the Cabinet secretary.
Mullin came in and “told Miller how well he had been doing so far,” the insider said, in what they described as a clear show of deference from the DHS Secretary that made clear where the power truly lies.
Miller’s choreographed retreat, the sources say, is a direct response to the public-relations catastrophe that engulfed DHS after the January killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.
Good, an unarmed 37-year-old mother, was shot dead by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, 43, on Jan. 7. PunchUp revealed last month that Ross has since been quietly relocated to a fresh state posting while an FBI probe stalls—a scoop that triggered fury from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a string of Democrats on Capitol Hill.
There has been a noted change in approach from the days when Noem sidelined Homan and ordered her hard-charging on-the-ground Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, to carry out the mass detention of immigrants on the streets of Los Angeles, Illinois, and Minneapolis.
Bovino, 58, retired ignominiously in April amid multiple investigations into his controversial tenure at the agency, as PunchUp reported. The agency has since been forced to quietly re-vet hundreds of recruits hired during Noem’s chaotic mass-hiring spree, and return to the agency’s standard full-academy training model—another PunchUp scoop.
ICE arrests have slumped from around 36,000 in January to roughly 30,000 in March, a long way short of Miller’s much-touted target of 3,000 detentions a day, while Mullin has said he is carrying out deportations “in a more quiet way.”
But rather than fight the perception of being in retreat, Miller has chosen to weaponize it—letting Homan, an acting ICE director in the first Trump administration, publicly inherit Noem’s crown while the pair tighten their grip on day-to-day operations.
The arrangement, PunchUp’s sources say, has left Mullin, the former Oklahoma senator parachuted into the role in March, being squeezed by both men. “Homan is really trying to throw his weight around after being sidelined by Noem. Mullin wants his own picks but is getting blocked,” one revealed.
This has been most acute regarding who will replace outgoing ICE director Todd Lyons when he leaves the agency on May 31. Mullin has been pushing for his hometown sheriff, Vic Regalado, as PunchUp first reported—a controversial former Tulsa Police sergeant who has appeared at events featuring conspiracy theorists.
Homan, however, is lobbying for his old friend David Venturella, the former GEO Group executive he personally recruited into DHS as a senior adviser last year on a federal ethics waiver.
Venturella spent 12 years at the private prison giant, which holds more than $1 billion in active ICE detention contracts. Homan himself drew consulting fees from GEO Group until January 2025, the Washington Post reported last May, prompting House Democrats to demand that he confirm a full recusal from any decision involving his former client.
Mullin pledged during his Senate confirmation in March that his “goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
“The president likes Homan’s approach at the moment,” a former White House official told The Atlantic—a verdict Miller appears happy to let stand.
PunchUp and the Daily Beast approached the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment. A DHS spokesperson said, “This is one team. Secretary Mullin works closely with President Trump, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan to deliver on the American people’s mandate to remove criminal illegal aliens from this country.”
