Tag: Stephen Miller

Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to officials present at a White House meeting.

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay. Continue reading.

ICE Guards ’Systematically” Commit Sexual Assaults On Prisoners, Say Lawyers

Guards in an immigrant detention center in El Paso sexually assaulted and harassed inmates in a “pattern and practice” of abuse, according to a complaint filed by a Texas advocacy group urging the local district attorney and federal prosecutors to conduct a criminal investigation.

The allegations, detailed in a filing first obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, maintain that guards systematically assaulted at least three people in a facility overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — often in areas of the detention center not visible to security cameras. The guards told victims that no one would believe them because footage did not exist and the harassment involved officers as high-ranking as a lieutenant.

According to the complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and shared with prosecutors, several guards “forcibly” kissed and touched the intimate parts of at least one woman. She faces deportation next week — meaning investigators could lose a key witness. Her attorneys have requested that immigration officials pause her deportation pending a review of the matter. Continue reading.

The Man Who Made Stephen Miller

Almost 20 years ago, anti-immigration activist David Horowitz cultivated an angry high-school student. Now his ideas are coming to life in the Trump administration.

In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.

Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate. Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings. Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.” Continue reading.

Stephen Miller’s Uncle Publicly Blames Trump For Mother’s Death From Covid-19

Thousands of lives have been lost as the novel coronavirus continues to spread across the country, yet our government and its officials still refuse to acknowledge the severity of this pandemic. As of this report, data compiled by The New York Times has found that more than 4 million people in the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19 and 143,700 have died. Among them have been some who once called the virus a “hoax,” the families of these individuals, and others who have experienced the loss of loved ones as a result of COVID-19. They are sharing their stories to shed light on the horrific reality of this pandemic and the importance of following health recommendations.

In an interview with Mother Jones, David Glosser, the uncle of xenophobic white supremacist and Trump adviser Stephen Miller shared his mother’s story (she was Miller’s maternal grandmother), who he says died from COVID-19. Glosser not only said that he was “angry” at Miller, but added that he blames the Trump administration in part for his mother’s death. “With the death of my mother, I’m angry and outraged at [Miller] directly and the administration he has devoted his energy to supporting,” he told Mother Jones.

In a Facebook post on July 4, Glosser said: “This morning my mother, Ruth Glosser, died of the late effects of COVID-19 like so many thousands of other people; both young and old. She survived the acute infection but was left with lung and neurological damage that destroyed her will to eat and her ability to breathe well enough to sustain arousal and consciousness. Over an 8-week period she gradually slipped away and died peacefully this morning.” Continue reading.

SPLC Watchdogs Name Stephen Miller To ‘Extremist’ List

Civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has added Trump administration official and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller to its “Extremists Files” for his role in implementing some of the most inhumane and racist immigration policies in modern U.S. history, putting this taxpayer-paid official alongside notorious racists and bigots like former KKK grand wizard David Duke and dead homophobe Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.

“Stephen Miller is the architect behind some of the most draconian anti-immigrant policies that we’ve seen from the Trump administration,” SPLC senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden said in a statement received by Daily Kos, stating that leaked communications with fellow racists from before he joined the White House “essentially provided a roadmap for the dehumanizing and hateful policies that we’ve seen enacted under this administration.”

“Through the conscious use of fear-mongering and xenophobia, Miller implements policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the SPLC said in its new “Extremists” profile on the notorious racist, who was a Senate aide to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III before joining the White House to implement his white supremacist vision. Continue reading.

Leading Homeland Security Under a President Who Embraces ‘Hate-Filled’ Talk

New York Times logoElaine Duke, a lifelong Republican, was acting secretary of homeland security for four months in 2017.

WASHINGTON — Elaine C. Duke, then President Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, arrived at the Roosevelt Room, down the hall from the Oval Office, on a steamy August afternoon in 2017 expecting a discussion about President Trump’s pledge to terminate DACA, the Obama-era protections for young immigrants. Instead, she said, it was “an ambush.”

“The room was stacked,” she recalled. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other White House officials demanded that she sign a memo ending the program, which they had already concluded was illegal. She did not disagree, but she chafed at being cut out of the real decision-making.

“President Trump believes that he can’t trust,” Ms. Duke, now a consultant, said in a wide-ranging interview about the 14 months she spent working for him and the consequences of the president’s suspicion of what he calls the “deep state” in government. “That has affected his ability to get counsel from diverse groups of people.” Continue reading.

A Mike Pence staffer had a horrifying answer when asked if she was a white nationalist

AlterNet logoMSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff revealed a conversation he had with an aide to Vice President Mike Pence in his new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” that gives a disturbing glimpse of the kinds of people working in the Trump administration.

Soboroff has been one of the most dogged reporters pursuing the story of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, and his new book centers on the administration’s horrific decision to systematically separate thousands of migrant kids from their families as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. This policy caused widespread chaos, trauma, and harm that continues to this day.

At one point in the book, as revealed on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night, Soboroff confronted Pence staffer Katie Miller, who had been a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security during the crisis.

“My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids, I will think about the separations differently,” Katie Miller, who later married Trump’s infamously anti-immigrant staffer Stephen Miller, told Soboroff. “I don’t think so. DHS sent me to the border to see the separations myself to try to make me more compassionate, but it didn’t work.” Continue reading.

How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics

Center for American Progress logoIntroduction and summary

The United States is living through a moment of profound and positive change in attitudes toward race, with a large majority of citizens1 coming to grips with the deeply embedded historical legacy of racist structures and ideas. The recent protests and public reaction to George Floyd’s murder are a testament to many individuals’ deep commitment to renewing the founding ideals of the republic. But there is another, more dangerous, side to this debate—one that seeks to rehabilitate toxic political notions of racial superiority, stokes fear of immigrants and minorities to inflame grievances for political ends, and attempts to build a notion of an embattled white majority which has to defend its power by any means necessary. These notions, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups, have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion, with poisonous results. For a starting point, one must look no further than President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy and chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller.

In December 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch published a cache of more than 900 emails2 Miller wrote to his contacts at Breitbart News before the 2016 presidential election. Miller, who began his role in the Trump administration in 2017, is widely considered the president’s most ideologically extreme and bureaucratically effective adviser. Miller has been careful not to talk openly about his political views, so this correspondence proved to be revealing.

In the emails, Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time, advocated many of the most extreme white supremacist concepts. These included the “great replacement” theory, fears of white genocide through immigration, race science, and eugenics; he also linked immigrants with crime, glorified the Confederacy, and promoted the genocidal book, The Camp of the Saints, as a roadmap for U.S. policy. Anti-Semitism was the only missing white nationalist trope in the emails—perhaps unsurprisingly, as Miller himself is Jewish. Continue reading.

A top aide to Vice President Pence tests positive for coronavirus

Washington Post logoA top aide to Vice President Pence has tested positive for the coronavirus, making her the second known person working at the White House to contract the illness in the past two days, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Katie Miller, the vice president’s press secretary, was notified Friday about the result, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been publicly announced by the White House. Miller confirmed to NBC News that she tested positive and said she was asymptomatic. The White House earlier in the day confirmed that a member of Pence’s staff tested positive but did not disclose the individual’s name.

President Trump later appeared to confirm it was Miller. Continue reading.

Before Covid-19, Trump Aide Sought to Use Disease to Close Borders

New York Times logoThe president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus.

From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.

The question was, which disease?

Mr. Miller pushed for invoking the president’s broad public health powers in 2019, when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu. Continue reading.