Murdoch paper warns Trump that Stephen Miller conspiracy is backfiring after humiliating GOP defeat.

A newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch issued a stern warning to President Donald Trump after the high-profile Republican lost.

In a new editorial, The Wall Street Journal warned Trump that the radical immigration strategy promoted by top aide Stephen Miller is provoking a voter backlash.

It comes after a Trump-backed candidate for the Texas state Senate lost to a Democrat over the weekend.

“How did a Republican lose by 14 points a safely conservative Texas state Senate seat that President Trump won by 17 points in 2024? The answer: when voters backlash against the Trump administration, especially its mass deportation debacle,” the Journal wrote, describing the Tarrant County special election.

Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, who endorsed Trump at Truth Social, and overwhelmingly defeated his opponent.

Rehment is the first Democrat to hold the seat in decades.

The paper notes that the timing was devastating for Republicans following the high-profile Minneapolis killings by federal immigration agents. “A 31-point vote swing in little more than 14 months can only be explained as a rising tide of opposition to Mr. Trump’s first year and a sour public mood,” the Journal observed.

The White House has faced a growing national backlash after federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Goode in early January and Alex Pretty later that month, as part of aggressive enforcement actions in the state.

Both incidents sparked controversy over the conflicting official narrative. In Pretty’s case, Homeland Security officials and White House aides initially claimed he approached agents with a gun and threatened them, while bystander videos show him holding only a cellphone before being pinned down and shot.

Similarly, authorities initially suggested that Goode tried to ram the agents into her vehicle before fatally shooting him, a claim contradicted by eyewitness footage and reporting. Critics argue that these initial statements painted both victims as dangerous to justify the shooting, accusing the administration of misrepresenting the events.

The killings come after Trump deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to Minneapolis as part of an aggressive immigration strategy created by Miller.

Miller’s immigration strategy under Trump has pushed for aggressive mass arrests and deportations, pushing ICE agents to meet higher daily quotas, even targeting non-criminal undocumented immigrants.

The Wall Street Journal criticized Miller’s radical strategy, which includes a daily quota of 3,000 immigration arrests, saying it “results in agent infiltration of homes and businesses.”

While immigration has historically been a winning issue for Republicans, the Journal warned that “ugliness on the streets is turning off swing voters who will determine who wins congressional races this year.”

Polls recently showed Americans turning on Trump and his immigration strategy ahead of the 2026 midterms. A YouGov poll conducted on January 25 found that nearly half (48 percent) of respondents did not think the shooting of Pretty in Minneapolis was justified.

Another YouGov poll found that 52 percent of Americans think the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict immigration to the U.S. have gone too far.

As a result, the paper concluded that while Trump has signaled a desire to “dial back street confrontations,” he should also reconsider Miller’s influence. “The Miller strategy is unlikely to fare well this year,” warned the editorial.

The Wall Street Journal is not the first Murdoch-owned newspaper to publicly condemn Trump’s immigration strategy.

In an op-ed published last week, the New York Post argued that the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has backfired politically.

“These enforcement tactics won’t turn the tide, instead they’re backfiring,” the Post wrote.