President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for deputy chief of staff for policy is best known as an immigration hardliner. But over the last few years, he’s taken on a side hustle as a crusader against “wokeness” on college campuses.
Trump recently announced that Stephen Miller, his former lead speechwriter and senior policy adviser, will serve as his deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser during his second term. Miller is expected to spearhead the administration’s plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants upon Trump’s return to the White House. During Trump’s first term, Miller pioneered the travel ban that targeted a half-dozen majority-Muslim countries, a policy that affected international students and academics; that ban could be reinstated next year.
A closer look at Miller’s recent résumé also reveals an aggressive campaign against Biden’s Title IX rules and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses. While higher education won’t be Miller’s top priority, his interactions with the sector offer a sense of how colleges could factor into Trump’s thinking.
“The prime source of antisemitism, racism, intellectual rot and moral decay on college campuses is DEI,” Miller wrote in a post to X in December of last year.
In 2021, Miller founded America First Legal, billed as a conservative rival to the American Civil Liberties Union. Miller, who is not a lawyer, assembled a small team largely made up of lawyers from Trump’s first administration. The group’s senior vice president, Reed Rubinstein, previously served as general counsel for the Education Department. Colleges have been among the firm’s key targets.
Over the past three years, America First Legal has filed a cascade of lawsuits and other legal actions against what the group has dubbed “woke corporations,” including higher-education institutions, over allegedly discriminatory sex- and race-based hiring and admissions preferences.
“America First Legal clearly thinks that any effort to promote diversity is a violation of the equal protection clause and the violation of federal antidiscrimination law,” said Thomas Healy, a professor of law at Seton Hall University.
America First Legal was also a contributor to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term, which proposes banning campus diversity efforts and “woke gender ideology,” as well as eliminating protections for transgender students. (Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, but his allies are among its architects.)
Trump’s transition team and America First Legal didn’t respond to requests from The Chronicle to interview Miller about his higher-education views.
Among the college cases brought by America First Legal is a January 2023 lawsuit against six Texas medical schools, accusing them of using illegal race- and gender-based preferences in admissions. The organization also represents Scott Gerber, a law professor who claims he was fired from Ohio Northern University for opposing diversity-related hiring practices.
Northwestern University got hit with a complaint in July, alleging discrimination against white men when hiring professors and selecting articles and editors for its law review. The lawsuit singles out several Black women who were hired as faculty members and claims they were less qualified than other candidates.
America First Legal has also targeted colleges for their handling of campus protests against the war in Gaza. After the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report in October condemning how colleges had responded to campus antisemitism, America First Legal filed several lawsuits against federal agencies, including the Justice Department, alleging they had failed to enforce the law by allowing “pro-Hamas activities” on college campuses.
Decision 2024
Read more about what could be in store for colleges during President Trump’s second administration.
In April, America First Legal teamed up with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and two University of Texas at Austin professors in a lawsuit to challenge Biden’s Title IX rule. Those regulations are best known for expanding protections for transgender students, but they also included provisions spelling out pregnant students’ rights.
The professors argue in the suit that they should have the right to consider students’ absences for elective or illegal abortions as unexcused, per a legal filing in May. America First Legal also backed the professors’ refusal to hire teaching assistants who violated Texas or federal law by shipping or receiving abortion pills or related paraphernalia. They scored a temporary block from a federal judge in July.
Many of the group’s cases against colleges remain pending. One was thrown out earlier this year: A lawsuit against New York University — filed on behalf of a student who argued he’d face rejection from the law review due to his race and gender — was dismissed for failing to state a claim.
However, a victory in court doesn’t always appear to be Miller’s goal.
After the Supreme Court struck down the use of race as a factor in colleges’ admissions decisions, America First Legal sent a demand letter to the dean of every law school in the United States, threatening to sue any institutions that didn’t comply.
“If they try to violate, circumvent or bypass, subvert or otherwise program around that ruling, we are going to take them to court,” Miller said at the time. “We are going to hold them to account.”
Legal threats alone can cast a chilling effect on colleges, said Steven Brint, a public policy professor at the University of California at Riverside who studies higher education. “It’s possible to have an impact without winning a case,” Brint said. “Some of these entities may feel a degree of fear about potential repercussions if they aren’t compliant with the kind of policies that America First Legal is pursuing.”
Miller’s opposition to progressive campus policies dates back well before he founded America First Legal.
As an undergraduate student at Duke University, he served as president of an organization called Students for Academic Freedom. He also regularly penned columns for The Chronicle, the student newspaper. His first piece — headlined “Welcome to Leftist University” — lamented the scarcity of Republican faculty members, claiming that it forced conservative students to choose between expressing themselves freely and receiving a fair grade. He also criticized what he described as the university administration’s obsession with multiculturalism, referencing a luncheon for Black students that was organized as part of freshman orientation.
“Call me a sentimental fool, but I agree with Martin Luther King Jr. and don’t think that we should divide people based on the color of their skin,” Miller wrote.
Legal experts predicted that, given Miller’s record, he could have a meaningful influence on the federal government’s approach to issues like race, sexuality, and gender identity in higher ed.
Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, said Miller is likely to help shape the future of Title IX, considering America First Legal’s opposition to the Biden-era rule. “They clearly are focused on this issue,” she said.
Healy said Miller’s new position in the administration could give him a role in staffing and directing the Education and Justice Departments, ensuring key hires support the same broad interpretation of antidiscrimination law. To Healy, this would render America First Legal’s advocacy effectively “irrelevant.”
“Why do you need a legal organization to challenge the policies of the administration when you are now the administration?” Healy said.
