Stephen Miller on military deployment against Maduro: "No one kills more Americans than the cartels"

Stephen Miller, one of the most influential voices in the Trump Administration and current White House deputy chief of staff, argued that the U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean responds to the need to confront cartels. "There are no organizations on this planet that are responsible for more dead Americans than the criminal cartels, the narco-traffickers, that are operating in the Western Hemisphere," he said.

The operation, which includes a naval and air presence off Venezuela, is part of the strategy of considering the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations that pose a direct threat to national security. According to Miller, the mission assigned to the Armed Forces seeks to combat and dismantle these criminal networks while sending a message of pressure to the regime of Nicolas Maduro, accused of supporting them.

Miller also stressed that the White House is "not ruling anything out" in its effort to intensify pressure against the cartels and the Venezuelan regime.

A twist in his discourse

The hardening of Miller's discourse is striking because last year he had made controversial statements in which he gave as valid the Maduro regime's official crime figures. After a presidential debate, he told the press that "the crime rate in Venezuela has dropped, I believe, more than 60%" and suggested that the decrease since Chavismo was sending criminals to the U.S. border.

Questioned by journalist José María Del Pino of NTN24 on whether he trusted Maduro's data, Miller avoided answering and ended up raising the tone by assuring that criminals were coming to the United States.