A GOP senator tore into Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, on Sunday and said that the two-time White House official was “out of his depth.”
It was some of the most withering criticism directed at the administration yet from Sen. Thom Tillis, a retiring Republican lawmaker who announced his decision not to seek re-election after voting against his party over the “Big, Beautiful Bill” last year.
Tillis’s breakup with the president was messy over the course of 2025, and in its wake, he has become one of the only vocal critics of the president within his own party on the Hill. But the tone of his attacks against Miller in particular shifted in the wake of the shootings of two Americans killed while protesting ICE and DHS agents in Minneapolis in early 2026, and the senator has come to assert that the president’s mass deportation program is riddled with incompetent leadership.
He made that accusation again on Sunday, on CNN’s State of the Union, telling Jake Tapper that Miller should resign and laying the blame for the false narrative around one of the slain protesters, Alex Pretti, “brandishing” a loaded firearm at officers. Pretti never unholstered a weapon that he was legally permitted to be carrying at the time of his death.
Tillis pointed to Miller as a constant source of embarrassment for the U.S.: “It was Stephen Miller talking about a terrorist brandishing a gun. It was Stephen Miller who said it was the position of the United States that we should go after Greenland. It’s Stephen Miller that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassments for the president of the United States, speaking first and asking questions later.”
The senator went on to trash Miller for having an “outsized influence on the Cabinet”, telling Tapper: “He’s a big problem in this administration, he has been from the beginning.”
Tillis was one of the first Republicans on the Hill to call for the resignation of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem after the deaths of Pretti and Renee Good, and has undermined the White House’s argument solely blaming Democrats and non-compliant state officials for the chaos that has followed immigration enforcement operations and “raids” around the country.
In Minneapolis in particular, Trump officials were forced to make a major U-turn and withdraw hundreds of agents from the city after bipartisan criticism grew too loud on the Hill and polling showed that the public’s view of ICE as an agency was quickly souring.
Accusations of Noem’s sexual relationship with a specially-appointed staffer, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, were also officially becoming a point of humiliation for the administration.
Noem was fired from her role as secretary on Friday and appointed to head a new organization without formal congressional authorization or funding. She’s set to be replaced by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, one of Tillis’s Republican colleagues in the upper chamber.
Tillis told CNN that he believed Mullin, who’d echoed some of the same conspiracies about Pretti spread by Miller and Noem, would learn from the mistakes of his predecessor at the job and wait to comment on developing issues before the facts were clear.
The upheaval at DHS has been rumored in D.C. for months and comes as the president’s approval ratings on immigration have reached some of their lowest levels in history. Previously one of the president’s stronger issues, the president is now ten points underwater on his handling of the issue in a new NBC News poll published on Sunday.
As a result of Tillis’s retirement and a host of other dynamics, including the tendency of the president’s party to lose ground during the midterms, the North Carolina Senate seat is now heavily favored to fall into Democratic hands next year. The Senate map was once thought to be favorable for Republicans this year, but has quickly turned against the GOP as Democrats have recruited powerful candidates in several races while Republicans face strong political headwinds.
His retirement also comes amid a wave of Republicans leaving the Hill on their own terms this cycle, a trend that has complicated the GOP’s maps in both chambers. That list of departing Republicans grew last week with the sudden surprise retirement of Sen. Steve Daines, a two-term member of the GOP caucus, who withdrew his candidacy less than ten minutes before the state filing deadline — ensuring that his favored replacement, who’d filed his own bid minutes earlier, would be in the primary race unchallenged.
Other retirements that caught the GOP off guard included Sen. Joni Ernst, whose departure sparked a battle to replace her in Iowa, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, like Tillis, chose to exit Congress after a public blow-up with Trump.
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