Stephen Miller, the hard-line Trump adviser who helped craft some of the administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement policies, is apparently profiting from the tools that make them possible, a new report finds.
According to financial disclosures cited in a new report by the Project on Government Oversight, Miller is one of a dozen current White House staffers invested in Palantir, the data analytics firm whose contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have made it the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. His stake—valued between $100,001 and $250,000—is the largest among staffers.
Ethics experts say the investment raises serious concerns, given Palantir’s deepening relationship with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agencies central to policies Miller continues to influence.
“If he hasn’t stepped over the line, he’s just on the verge of it,” Virginia Canter, counsel for ethics and anticorruption at Democracy Defenders Fund, told the Project on Government Oversight as part of its report. “I just don’t think anybody would be comfortable with him keeping this stock.”
An anonymous White House official tells Fast Company that Miller in fact owns a number of stocks that surpass the legal threshold that could constitute a conflict of interest, but he has maintained to the White House ethics office that he has, and will continue to, recuse himself from official matters that could affect those stocks.
In a statement to Fast Company, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration is committed to transparency around such disclosures, insisting, “President Trump, Vice President Vance, and senior White House staff have completed required ethics briefings and financial reporting obligations.”
(Palantir did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment on the ethical implications of Miller’s investment.)
Palantir’s ties to DHS and ICE date back to the early 2010s. The company supplies software that helps organize criminal investigations and track the movements of immigrants. During Trump’s second term, those ties have only strengthened. Palantir has become a “more mature partner to ICE,” according to internal company communications obtained by 404 Media. In January, the company secured a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, a system that monitors immigration cases “from identification to removal” and provides “near real-time visibility” into self-deportation, government records show.
That visibility fits neatly into the broader crackdown on immigration now underway, a campaign in which Miller plays a central role. Last month, he joined Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in setting an aggressive new enforcement benchmark: 3,000 immigration arrests per day. That’s triple the daily average from the start of Trump’s second term, according to Axios. As of Monday, ICE was detaining 59,000 immigrants—more than 140% of the agency’s official detention capacity of 41,500 beds, CBS News reports.
Given Miller’s direct involvement in shaping enforcement policy—and Palantir’s growing role in executing it—it’s not surprising that his financial interest in the company is setting off alarms among government ethics experts.
Miller could easily cross an ethical line in his work, for example, if he were “in a meeting involving DHS officials talking about whether the data analytics capability of DHS needs to be improved or changed in some way, knowing full well that Palantir would be the beneficiary,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told the Project on Government Oversight.
Still, investors remain bullish: Palantir’s stock hit an all-time high on June 24, just one day after news of Miller’s stake became public.
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