Snow, Not Confetti: Aruna Miller's Road From Hyderabad to a Second Term as Maryland's Lieutenant Governor

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In February 1972, a 7-year-old girl from Hyderabad, India, stepped off a plane in New York. She spoke no English. She barely knew the people waiting for her: her father had come ahead to study, and the rest of the family had followed one at a time, as money allowed, while her grandmother raised her back home. She was the last to arrive. Outside, she saw what she thought were crowds throwing confetti to welcome her. It was snow. “I’d never seen snow before,” Aruna Miller later told WUSA9.

Fifty-four years later, on the night of November 3, 2026, Miller stood with Gov. Wes Moore at the M&T Bank Exchange in Baltimore as supporters chanted “four more years.” The Associated Press had called the race for the Democratic ticket within minutes of the polls closing, over Republican Dan Cox. “Gov. Moore and I will never forget the trust you placed in us. The work isn’t finished,” Miller told the crowd. Then: “I love you, Maryland.”

Miller is the first immigrant and the first woman of color elected to statewide office in Maryland, and the first South Asian woman to serve as a lieutenant governor anywhere in the United States. She calls herself an “accidental politician.” Her rise has also come with questions about some of her supporters, questions she has strongly denied. Both are part of her story.

An engineer’s daughter in Poughkeepsie

Miller was born in Hyderabad into a Hindu family, according to the Maryland 400 project and The Quint. Her father had left India to earn a PhD in mechanical engineering and went on to work as an engineer at IBM. The family settled in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father was a devout Hindu; her mother was born Hindu but grew up in the Catholic tradition, and Miller has described growing up in “an interfaith household.”

Politics was not part of family life. “We never talked about politics at the kitchen table,” she told the Baltimore Banner. At her parents’ urging, she studied civil engineering, earning her degree at what is now the Missouri University of Science and Technology. She worked as a transportation engineer in several states before moving to Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1990, where she spent roughly 25 years at the county’s Department of Transportation.

She did not become a U.S. citizen until 2000, nearly three decades after she arrived. That fall she cast her first vote, in the presidential election. “I remember distinctly crying in the polling booth. Like, ‘Oh my gosh, this really makes me an American,'” she recalled.

A decade later, she would be on the ballot herself.

The “accidental politician”

Miller began as a volunteer for Democratic candidates. “A lot happens before a candidate is actually elected. There’s a lot of boots on the ground,” she told India Currents. After about five years, local Democrats asked her to run. In 2010 she won a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates representing District 15 in Montgomery County, and she served two terms.

In 2018 she gave up that seat to run for Congress in Maryland’s 6th District. She lost the Democratic primary to businessman David Trone. A former Trone staffer later told The Independent that after the primary, Miller “did not endorse him, did not call him.” She left the legislature in 2019 to become executive director of the advocacy group Indian American Impact.

It looked like the end of her career in elected office. Instead, a phone call changed everything.

“Oh my gosh, Wes!”

In November 2021, Wes Moore, a first-time candidate, asked Miller to be his running mate. He asked her over Zoom, and she didn’t know it was being recorded. “Oh my gosh, Wes!” she said. “You have no idea how honored, how excited, how blessed I feel.” The clip became a campaign video, which the Banner reported left her “less than thrilled.”

Not everyone thought the ticket could win. Miller recalled one friend telling her, “I just don’t think you’re going to win and I can’t support you.” She told the Banner she herself had doubts that voters would back “a brown woman.”

They won the primary and then beat Cox easily in November 2022. Moore made a bold promise about his partner: “She will be the most consequential lieutenant governor in this country. And you can mark my words.” On January 18, 2023, Miller was sworn in as Maryland’s 10th lieutenant governor, taking her oath as a practicing Hindu on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

But the campaign had also produced allegations that would follow her into office.

The donor controversy

In October 2022, The Intercept reported that Miller and Moore had been honored by people associated with Hindu nationalist ideology, according to The Quint. Later reporting by The Quint, summarized by AsAmNews, said federal campaign filings showed more than $110,000 in donations to Miller from people tied to pro-BJP or Hindutva groups, including the Overseas Friends of the BJP. It also reported that an Overseas Friends of the BJP activist had served as treasurer of her 2018 congressional campaign. Democratic activist Scott Webber told AsAmNews the issue concerned him because Miller was “a progressive, pro-immigrant, woman who is associated with a movement that goes against Democratic party lines.”

Miller denied the charges. The Moore campaign said the ticket had not taken a single dollar from Hindutva groups. In 2023, The Independent reported further claims from local critics. One, a former Trone campaign worker, said Miller’s husband, David, had followed his car home after he confronted the couple about her donors. David Miller denied it through her office, which said the couple had never owned the kind of car described. Her spokeswoman called the claims “unfounded gossip” and said attempts to mischaracterize Miller’s record were “misguided at best, and sexist and discriminatory at worst.”

The controversy did not stop her from becoming one of the state’s most visible defenders of immigrants during President Trump’s second term.

Taking on Washington

Maryland’s lieutenant governor has almost no legal duties beyond succeeding the governor if needed. Miller has filled the role with causes. In 2023 she founded the state’s Council on Interfaith Outreach, and she has spoken often about federal job cuts that have hit Maryland hard. In a 2026 interview with India’s Open magazine, she criticized the administration’s immigration policies, including its $100,000 H-1B visa fee: “This is hurting families, and we are going to push back against it.” And she added: “But that administration is temporary.”

The clashes went both ways. In May 2026, after the state elections board said a vendor error had sent some voters incorrect mail-in ballots for the primary, President Trump called for a federal investigation and wrote on Truth Social that “This was done by the Corrupt Governor of the State, Wes Moore.” Miller pushed back on Fox News, saying the elections board is independent of the governor and that mistakes like this happen almost every election. New ballots, she said, would go to every affected voter.

A University of Maryland, Baltimore County poll in October showed Moore at 51 percent and Cox at 24 percent, and the AP called the race almost immediately on election night.

The snow and the confetti

Miller has described her life as an effort to belong. “I spent my entire life trying to fit into spaces that didn’t have me in mine,” she told WUSA9, as an immigrant, a female engineer and a legislator of color. When she first won statewide in 2022, she said: “Ever since I came to this country in 1972, I’ve never stopped being excited for the promise of America.”

On election night that year, the Banner reported, she and Moore celebrated in a shower of confetti in a Baltimore hotel ballroom. Fifty years earlier, the girl from Hyderabad had looked out at a New York winter and mistaken the snow for confetti, a welcome she thought was meant for her. Now, beginning a second term, she gets to decide what kind of welcome Maryland offers the next child stepping off a plane.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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