Tag: Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller has long-term vision for Trump’s ‘temporary’ immigration order, according to private call with supporters

Washington Post logoTrump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told White House supporters in a private call this week that the president’s new executive order curbing immigration will usher in the kind of broader long-term changes to American society he has advocated for years, even though the 60-day measures were publicly characterized as a “pause” during the coronavirus pandemic.

Miller, the chief architect of the president’s immigration agenda and one of his longest-serving and most trusted advisers, spoke to a group of Trump surrogates Thursday in an off-the-record call about the new executive order, which had been signed the night before. Although the White House had seen the move as something that would resonate with Trump’s political base, the administration instead was facing criticism from immigration hard-liners who were disappointed that the order does not apply to temporary foreign workers despite Trump pitching it as helping to protect jobs for Americans.

Miller told the group that subsequent measures were under consideration that would restrict guest worker programs, but the “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor,” he said, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. Miller indicated that the strategy is part of a long-term vision and not seen only as a stopgap. Continue reading.

Stephen Miller’s hard-line policies on refugee families make a comeback at HHS

While attention was on coronavirus, the White House quietly changed leaders in the office at the center of the family separation firestorm.

After the Trump administration abruptly installed a new hard-line leader last month, the health department’s refugee office is pushing to implement immigration policies favored by White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, according to four health department officials and internal documents reviewed by POLITICO.

The office — which takes custody of thousands of migrant children — is now seeking to delay placing migrant children in shelters operated by the health department, which would instead leave those children in the custody of the Border Patrol for an extended length of time, according to an internal email sent last week and reviewed by POLITICO.

Refugee office leaders are reviewing the policy of allowing undocumented immigrant adults to take custody of refugee children — a long-standing practice that dates back to the George W. Bush administration but has been opposed by Miller and other anti-immigration hard-liners, who think it rewards adults who are in the country illegally, officials said. Continue reading.

Are Officials Protecting Detained Immigrants From COVID-19?

Immigration officials say they are implementing new procedures at detention centers across the country in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, but advocates and experts worry that more needs to be done in order to protect the health of those inside.

On Thursday, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in an email that the agency was using “existing procedures” to keep detainees safe from COVID-19, the disease caused by a strain of coronavirus that originated in China, as well as other communicable diseases.

The spokesperson said the agency had issued guidance to all employees “that outlines the current comprehensive use of Personal Protective Equipment including guidance regarding wearing masks in the appropriate circumstances.” Continue reading.

Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts

Washington Post logoThe White House sought this month to embed immigration enforcement agents within the U.S. refugee agency that cares for unaccompanied migrant children, part of a long-standing effort to use information from their parents and relatives to target them for deportation, according to six current and former administration officials.

Though senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services rejected the attempt, they agreed to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to collect fingerprints and other biometric information from adults seeking to claim migrant children at government shelters. If those adults are deemed ineligible to take custody of children, ICE could then use their information to target them for arrest and deportation.

The arrangement appears to circumvent laws that restrict the use of the refu­gee program for deportation enforcement; Congress has made clear that it does not want those who come forward as potential sponsors of minors in U.S. custody to be frightened away by possible deportation. But, in the reasoning of senior Trump administration officials, adults denied custody of children lose their status as “potential sponsors” and are fair game for arrest.

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The far-right agenda of Trump’s most controversial aide

Washington Post logo“He’s burrowed down into the apparatus to make fundamental change,” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, told my colleagues earlier this year. “People don’t even see a lot of the stuff he’s working on.”

Bannon was speaking of Stephen Miller, the 34-year-old White House staffer who maintains a curiously firm place within President Trump’s otherwise constantly shifting orbit. Miller’s fingerprints can be detected all over Trump’s presidency. He is, after all, one of Trump’s main speechwriters. But his biggest role has been in molding the White House’s immigration policy, tacitly pushing through a sweeping series of measures — from travel bans on Muslim-majority countries to punitive actions against immigrants who receive public assistance — under Trump’s watch.

Although many advisers have come and gone during Trump’s tumultuous presidency, Miller has endured. That is, until now. Over the past week, more than 100 Democratic lawmakers and some civil society organizations have called for Miller’s resignation in response to new revelations about the depths of his ideological extremism.

View the complete November 24 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.

More than 100 Democrats sign letter calling for Stephen Miller to resign

The Hill logoMore than 100 Democratic lawmakers on Thursday signed on to a letter calling for President Trump to fire senior adviser Stephen Miller as a civil rights group details hundreds of controversial emails he sent prior to his time in the administration.

“Given Mr. Miller’s role in shaping immigration policy for your administration, his documented dedication to extremist, anti-immigrant ideology and conspiracy-mongering is disqualifying,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Democrats wrote that Miller’s ideology manifested itself in the form of several policy decisions, including a travel ban on citizens of several Muslim-majority countries, a decrease in refugee admissions and the decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

View the complete November 21 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

The White Nationalist Websites Cited by Stephen Miller

New York Times logoNewly released emails show President Trump’s chief immigration adviser was a young Senate aide who promoted his anti-immigrant views by referring to the sites.

WASHINGTON — Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, believes that diversity has weakened the United States, and that the increase in Spanish speakers is a “ferocious attack on the living standards of the American working class.”

Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, is a self-described “white advocate” who has written that “newcomers are not the needy; they are the greedy.”

Their websites were among the sources cited by Stephen Miller, the White House aide who is the driving force behind President Trump’s immigration policies, in emails and conversations with conservative allies at Breitbart News when he was a young Senate aide. A cache of those emails, obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, provides new insight into the ideas that have shaped Mr. Miller’s thinking and suggest he has maintained deeper intellectual ties to the world of white nationalism than previously known.

View the complete November 18 article by Katie Rogers and Jason DeParle on The New York Times website here.

White House backs Stephen Miller amid white nationalist allegations

The Hill logoThe White House is standing by senior adviser Stephen Miller as he faces calls from dozens of Democrats to resign after newly released emails showed he circulated material linked to white nationalism to conservative media before joining the administration.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has published summaries of hundreds of emails Miller sent to Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart News. The emails contain links and references to far-right websites, with much of the focus on immigration. The SPLC is planning to release additional emails in the coming days.

Democrats have reacted to the emails with outrage, decrying Miller as a white nationalist and calling for his resignation. But the White House has scoffed at the source of the documents, painting the SPLC as a discredited group and defending Miller in an indication that one of Trump’s longest tenured and most influential aides will weather the controversy.

View the complete November 16 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Stephen Miller E-Mails Show How He Promoted White Nationalist Ideology In Media

The Southern Poverty Law Center has obtained emails from 2015 and 2016 between White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller — at the time an adviser to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — and then-Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. The emails show both Miller’s dedication to a number of prominent ideas in the white nationalist far-right circles and his determination to see them gain further exposure in the media.

Four years later, the ideas that Miller secretly mentioned in his emails are now being openly discussed on Fox News and saturate right-wing media.

Fox News hosts have avidly pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the idea that white people are being systematically “replaced” by non-white immigrants. Tucker Carlson, for example, has become Fox’s most prominent mouthpiece for white nationalism by decrying immigration and diversity for “radically and permanently changing our country.”

View the complete November 13 article by John Whitehouse and Eric Kleefeld on the National Memo website here.

Chris Wallace Shoots Down Stephen Miller’s Claim Whistleblower Is Part of ‘Deep State’

“This individual is a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government,” White House policy adviser said

“This is a deep state operative, pure and simple,” White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace in an attempt to characterize as partisan the whistleblower who came forward following President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president asking him to dig up dirt on his political rival.

“I think it’s unfortunate that the media continues to describe this individual as a whistleblower, an honorific that this individual most certainly does not deserve. A partisan hit job does not make you a whistleblower just because you go through the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Miller said.

Then Wallace cut to video of the Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testifying before Congress that the whistleblower and the Inspector General have “acted in good faith throughout” and have done everything “by the book and followed the law.”

View the complete September 29 article by Peter Wade on The Rolling Stone website here.