A childhood friend of Donald Trump henchman Stephen Miller has called him a ‘dark clown’ who wants to rid America of immigrants.
Jason Islas was pals with the White House deputy chief of staff while they were growing up in Santa Monica, California.
But Islas told the Daily Mail Miller suddenly dumped him when they were teenagers because of his Latino heritage.
Miller is the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy, which included one of the largest mass deportation pushes in history.
In June, Miller said Trump wanted the agency to ramp up the number of daily arrests to 3,000.
Islas said he was 14 when Miller, then 13, called him up in the summer of 1999 – just days before they were due to start high school – and explained why they couldn’t hang out anymore.
The friends first met at Franklin Elementary School in the liberal coastal city. They were also classmates at nearby Lincoln Middle School, and Islas even attended Miller’s bar mitzvah.
‘We were friends on campus,’ Islas, now 40, recalled. ‘We’d eat lunch together, talk on the phone, that kind of stuff.’
At the time, Miller, now 39, was living with his family in the wealthiest part of Santa Monica – the bucolic streets north of Montana Avenue.
‘I had called him over the course of the summer and left messages, like you did back in those days,’ Islas said.
‘He returned my call and told me we couldn’t be friends in high school. It was a matter of fact conversation. He was very straightforward.
‘He gave me a list of reasons, most of them personal.
‘He had decided we couldn’t be friends anymore because of my Latino heritage.
‘It was very quick. I remember hanging up the phone and being like, “I guess that’s that.” It was just kind of bizarre.’
It had been many decades since earlier generations of Islas’ family first moved to the US from Mexico.
Miller has immigrant roots of his own as his maternal great-grandparents came to the US from the Russian Empire in the early 1900s. They arrived and were processed through Ellis Island after fleeing anti-Jewish violence.
That summertime phone call was the last time the two ever spoke, Islas said. They both went on to attend the same high school – but with a 3,000-person student body, their paths rarely crossed.
Acquaintances say high school was where Miller’s militant persona spawned and the foundations of his staunch conservative ideology developed.
Islas described him as a ‘performer’ who was frequently ‘running his mouth’.
At one point, Miller ran for student president. His campaign included an infamous speech accusing Latino school janitors of being lazy, saying it was not his job to pick up litter.
Islas said Miller resembled a ‘dark clown’.
‘People thought he was dark, but no one took him seriously enough,’ he said.
‘We never thought of him becoming part of the mainstream political discourse.
‘He was a firebrand type. He was a mouthpiece of a certain ideology and not to be taken seriously as a political influencer.’
He was seen as ‘more of a future cable news personality than a policymaker’.
Nikki Fiske, Miller’s third-grade teacher at Franklin Elementary, previously likened Miller, then 8, to Peanuts character Pigpen, who was surrounded by a permanent cloud of dust in the comics.
She told The Hollywood Reporter young Miller had a messy desk and was a ‘strange dude’.
‘I remember he would take a bottle of glue and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it,’ she said.
He had ‘such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.’
Islas said Miller ‘is a unique combination of somebody who is both politically savvy and a true believer.
‘He believes in this ethno-nationalist world view. He’s in a position right now to exercise tremendous power – and he’s doing it.
‘He’s clearly one of the most powerful figures in the Trump administration.’
Islas pointed to the huge increase in funding for ICE through Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill – $170 billion over fiscal years 2025 through 2029 for immigration and border enforcement – as evidence that Miller’s hawkish agenda is a ‘priority’ within the administration which he called ‘racialized law and order’.
Islas had ‘almost forgotten about him entirely’ until 2016 when he saw Miller was working for Trump’s first presidential campaign.
The realization was ‘surreal and very abstract. I was like, ‘I guess this is happening.’
Historically a Democratic voter, Islas said he doesn’t have a ‘proper political home’ at the moment and decried the party’s leaders who have ‘dropped the ball’ and don’t ‘understand the forces that they’re dealing with currently’.
‘Leadership is out of touch with how normal people live their lives,’ he said.
Islas, who works as an energy and sustainability marketing manager, said ‘major socioeconomic class issues have been at play here in Santa Monica and are growing in the country overall.
‘Stephen and Trump and that whole milieu have been exploiting the growing divide between the elites and average Americans.
‘Trump is an individual with a certain skill set that’s allowed him to take advantage of the situation.’
Islas said he ‘fundamentally’ disagrees with Miller’s worldview.
‘From a practical perspective, but also from a moral perspective, the United States needs immigration,’ he said.
‘We are the only industrialized economy with a growing population. Without a growing population we wouldn’t be able to support social security.
‘The promise of America is that you can leave history behind – you can come here and leave the trauma of the old world behind, which is what Stephen’s family did.’