Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Sunday that he believes White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go” and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem.”
The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union whether he thinks Miller should go during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to host Jake Tapper by saying, “Oh, of course he does.”
“He’s not concerned about substance. He’s more concerned about form, but I also think he has enormous influence over Cabinet operations. And I think we have qualified Cabinet members who are sometimes doing less than they want, because of his direction and his enormous influence. It’s a big problem in this administration. It has been from the beginning,” Tillis said.
Tillis affirmed his support for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s pick to replace Kristi Noem, saying he believes Mullin will be independent of Miller’s influence, even though Mullin repeated similar falsehoods about the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents.
“It makes me think that there are people like Stephen Miller making the decisions,” Tillis added. “It was Steven Miller who said the US position was that we should go after Greenland. And Stephen Miller, who has repeatedly been responsible for embarrassing the President of the United States by acting too quickly, speaking first and thinking later.”
Tillis, who is not seeking re-election this year, was the first Republican to call for the resignation or firing of DHS Secretary Noem.
Although Tillis is optimistic about replacing Noem with Mullin, his Senate colleague, Democratic leaders are pushing for more reforms.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker that the leadership change is not enough to reopen the government and begin funding the Department of Homeland Security again.
“What we want is a situation where ICE truly behaves like any other law enforcement agency in the country, rather than using taxpayer dollars to brutalize or, in some cases, kill American citizens,” Jeffries said.
“What we need is a policy change, not just a personnel change,” he added. “Now, Kristi Noem was a disgrace. She was totally unqualified…She called American citizens domestic terrorists without any justification. But we need dramatic, bold, significant, transformative changes to get ICE under control.”
