Wayne State University Athletics

Baseball 6/3/2020 9:00:00 AM Nicole Werling, WSU Sports Information Student Writer

Where Are They Now - Baseball Student-Athlete Brian Miller

Baseball Alum Takes His Skills to Serve as a Special Agent at the Department of Homeland Security

DETROIT -- Brian Miller, a Senior Special Agent at the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Professional Responsibility, located in San Diego, California, devoted his successful law enforcement journey to the hard work he accomplished during his time at Wayne State University on what is now Harwell Field.

Miller, who was originally recruited to play baseball at Kalamazoo College, played there for one year before being offered a spot on the team at WSU.

He described the three years spent playing for Wayne State as "amazing."

When his hard work and dedication on baseball diamond ended, Miller was awarded the University's prestigious Howard A. Donnelly award, which is given to an outstanding graduating senior for their contributions in the areas of leadership and service while maintaining high scholarship during their studies.

Growing up, Miller knew he wanted to go into public service to follow in his father's (Neal Miller) footsteps, who served as a Detroit firefighter. Days after earning his degree in criminal justice, he started in the police academy, where he then gave back to the community serving as a Wayne State University police officer for about two years.

"It was a great jump-start to get into law enforcement," Miller said.

When he first joined federal law enforcement, he worked for three years at the busiest sector in San Diego as a border patrol agent, where would detect and prevent illegal aliens from entering the U.S.

Miller was then recruited by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to work as a special agent. During this time, he was selected as the outstanding student which gave him the opportunity to choose his duty station.

"Earning the Donnelly Award at Wayne was fantastic but being able to choose any duty station with DEA was an honor. If I had not earned that award, I would have gone back to Detroit, and my life would have been different.

"A year after committing to stay San Diego, I met my wife, who also worked as a federal agent. Two years later, we were married, and we have two great kids who are now off to college," he said.

Miller went on to spend 21 years in the DEA as a special agent and supervisor in San Diego and South America, where he conducted international drug and money laundering investigations.

He was then promoted to a supervisory special agent where he ran a narcotic task force, which was a group of DEA agents that partnered with state and local police officers.

After 21 years working in the DEA, he transferred into his current position within the Department of Homeland Security where he investigates corruption along the border, mentors DHS agents and teaches leadership courses in San Diego County.

"I respond to critical incidents and use of force incidents. If the border patrol gets involved in a shooting, we go out and investigate that shooting. We make sure policies and tactics were followed."

"It has been a great career, and my time as a student-athlete really helped shape my choice to go into law enforcement, but more importantly it helped me get through 30 years of a very intense and stressful occupation," Miller stated.

Being part of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS nominated Miller for a master's program at the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) in March.

"Going through a master's program 30 years after graduating from Wayne State was challenging because a lot of time had passed, but I made it through, and I have two takeaways from my time as a student-athlete -- Resilience and teamwork."

"Resilience is how people hold up under stress, and as a college student, you may see how difficult and stressful it can be, but when you add what is essentially a full-time job of playing baseball, it ramps up the stress. Another thing I took from it was time management," commented Miller.

He explained how time consuming being a student-athlete can be when juggling practice, schoolwork, games and managing a part-time job. As busy as he was, time management was key to being successful throughout his time at WSU.

At one point in his career, Miller was assigned to work overseas for six years in Santiago de Chile, the capital and largest city of Chile in Latin America, where they had two competing national police forces. He proposed to get them to work together on a task force, something he described as "unheard of" because they disliked each other.

"I was able to preach to them the importance of working together as a team by using the analogy of sports. By using soccer I would say, 'you work for one agency, and your partner works for another agency, but you're putting on "La Roja de Torro" (The Red of Everybody), where everyone put on one national team jersey, you no longer work for this city or that city, you work for the country of Chile,'" remarked Miller.

By using that analogy, he was able to get them to work as a team.

"I don't know if I would have had that ability had I not been a student-athlete, because as a student-athlete, it takes a lot to succeed, and Wayne State always gave us all the tools we needed to succeed, which was support in the classroom and on the field. There is no other way I could have done it," added Miller.

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