A report published Saturday by The Guardian identifies White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as the "mastermind and enforcer" of President Donald Trump's unprecedented, government-wide crackdown on undocumented children in the United States — an effort the analysis characterizes as "cruel and racist."

Miller, who rose to national prominence as a top immigration adviser during Trump's first term, now holds a deputy chief of staff role that spans policy across the federal government.

The Guardian's report details an attack by the whole government on at least 200,000 undocumented children, who are denied legal immigration pathways and rejected from the country they believed to be their home.

"This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them," one source told The Guardian. "They have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children's safety as their priority"

According to the report, Miller has harnessed the power of at least five Cabinet-level departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers shelter and care programs for migrant children, the Department of Homeland Security, home to ICE, and the Department of Justice, which runs the nation's immigration courts. One source said Miller's influence has allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to access children's mental health records and other personal information without roadblocks.

That reach is significant because each department touches a different part of children's lives — where they are housed, what records are kept on them, and how their cases move through the immigration system.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, defended the government's actions.

"The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children," Bis said. "We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries."

Multiple sources, however, dismissed the administration's common justifications in remarks to The Guardian.

"They are weaponizing that narrative [trafficking] because it makes them out to be the good guys," one source said. "Everything else makes it really clear that they're not."

Among those to speak out was U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who condemned Miller and the Trump administration for streamlining the mass exodus of young children.

"Instead of protecting kids from human trafficking or helping them reunite with family, Trump and officials at HHS and DHS are violating children's rights [and] flouting federal law to hit quotas and satisfy their ideological crusade against immigrants," he said. "The result is significant harm and trauma to innocent children."

The Guardian contextualized the policy by noting that Trump once said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country" — language that, the report noted, "drew comparisons to Nazism."

The significance of that context was confirmed by another source.

"There's some real animus towards the kids coming from Miller and his acolytes," the source told The Guardian. "He sees the kids as, like, the future generation that will, you know, continue a multiracial, multicultural vision of this country."

This article is based on reporting by Raw Story.