Stephen Miller, the Architect of Anti-immigrant Hatred
Trump's political advisor is original and successful in his maneuvers, cruel in his methods and deeply racist.
Recently, in an interview on the nationalist Megyn Kelly podcast (The Megyn Kelly Show), Stephen Miller bragged that he had repeatedly beaten President Joe Biden in court.
“We beat them every time we sue them” – he said.
It’s true: America First Legal or AFL, the organization created and led by this former political adviser to Donald Trump and author of his speeches, won a lawsuit that forced the Biden administration to abandon its plan to alleviate the debts of farmers of color, as part of a national effort to remedy longstanding inequalities.
This year, Miller through the AFL has filed a class action lawsuit against Texas A&M University, alleging that it has “engaged in a discriminatory hiring practice, choosing which candidates to hire based on their race or gender,” when it was trying to recruit LGBTQ university staff.
In both cases Miller alleged that the policies he challenged discriminated… against whites. He turned the plate over.
That’s Stephen Miller. Brilliant, original and successful in his maneuvers, cruel in his methods and deeply racist.
A Leader of the Republican Party
But the case that is putting Miller at the forefront of Republican actions against the Biden government is the legal demand of 20 states governed by this party – such as Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana or Alabama – to stop the temporary protection program for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela announced by President Biden on January 5. .
Biden granted deportation deferred action to 30,000 immigrants from these countries, during which they will be authorized to work. In the case of Cubans, after a year in the country, the law that favors them establishes that they become legal immigrants. The situation is different for the others. They must request to be part of the program from their countries of origin and have a sponsor in the United States, who will take care of them and their expenses, so as not to make the taxpayers responsible for it.
Miller is indifferent to where immigrants come from and whether or not they can return to their countries. For him, it’s part of the obsession with exploiting the immigration issue because hate against immigrants is a surefire way to keep Trump’s populist “base” on fire.
“Biden has a simple and uncompromising goal,” Miller told the New York Times. “His goal of his is to increase the foreign-born population of the United States as quickly as possible out of all the nations in the world, and to hell with the consequences for Americans.”
Miller authored or co-authored every major Trump speech for nearly four years, including the inauguration speech where he spoke of “American carnage.” In this way, the adviser gradually appropriated the political agenda of the Republican establishment.
An ally of the supremacists
Stephen Miller is a specialist in providing projects, slogans, and resources dedicated to an alliance with white supremacists, nationalists, and he has been doing that for many years.
It would seem strange, because Miller is Jewish, and the supremacists are notoriously anti-Semitic.
Born in August 1985, Miller grew up in a liberal Jewish family in Santa Monica, California. His father has a real estate company. His ancestors came here in 1903 from Russia, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms (state-sponsored massacres).
He received a Hebrew education at the Reform (modern) Bet Shir Shalom synagogue in that city. Already in high school he developed as a conservative champion. At age 16, he confronted Latino students demanding that they speak English.
The fascist ideology that he developed early on and the actions that he undertook from the White House have led to his family disowning him. On more than one occasion they publicly demonstrated against him. They especially criticize his association with openly anti-Semitic elements on the American right.
His uncle is Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist who taught at Boston University School of Medicine. In conversation with Politico.com, he said: “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been applied a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
“I have watched with dismay and growing horror as my nephew, an educated man who knows his heritage very well, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.” .
“Miller was indoctrinated at a very young age with the idea that he needed to save America from this imagined threat of Blacks and Latinos,” writes Jean Guerrero, author of the biographical book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
‘Feats’ by Stephen Miller
Miller came to the White House in 2017 as a political adviser to then-Senator and later Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He was promoted to the president’s team by Steve Bannon, during the seven months that this well-known extremist was Chief Strategist.
He quickly earned the trust of Donald Trump and eventually put into practice the anti-immigrant ideas that he expressed in his speeches. In them he “used to insert vivid and gory descriptions of crimes apparently committed by immigrants,” says the Times.
Along with Bannon, he inspired and wrote the infamous Executive Order 13769, which banned immigration from five Muslim-majority countries, and was signed in the early days of the administration.
His disastrous nature was best expressed, however, in the policy of family separation in refugee resettlement facilities, which took place between April and June 2018, through which the children of some 5,000 families of detainees were taken away and handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, which dispersed them throughout the country. The parents were prosecuted, arrested or deported.
Hundreds of these children, have not yet been located, and their delivery to state authorities has not been documented.
Zero Tolerance with Children
But for Miller it was an ingenious “zero tolerance policy” that would magically deter illegal immigration. This, despite the fact that many of the detainees had filed refugee appeals at the border, in accordance with international law.
During the meeting of high-level officials that decided on this policy, Miller warned that not enforcing it “is the end of our country as we know it” and that to oppose it would be un-American, Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff of NBC News reported in 2020.
Continuing the already characteristic tradition of cynicism, officials have since argued that they could not return the children to their parents because they had already been adopted and that would cause them unnecessary trauma.
Title 42
Another Miller “feat” is the Title 42 policy, so named for its location in federal health law. This is the law that governs the removals (expulsions) of people who have recently been in a country where there is a contagious disease.
Since March 2020 and inspired by Miller, it has been used mainly to reject thousands of migrants who appear at the border checkpoints to request asylum. They are not allowed to apply and wait in dangerous and unsanitary facilities for an answer, for months.
The policy has led to some two million expulsions of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador since the start of the pandemic, half of which are repeat offenders.
The excuse was to prevent these people from carrying the virus that causes COVID-19 with them. But in the same period, millions of people with regular entry permits to the country were allowed to enter the country, both at border points and at airports and ports, without invoking the health issue.
Title 42 continued to apply two years after Democratic President Joe Biden took office.
This is Miller
Miller remained an ally of Trump during and after the election, helping him spread the fallacy of rigged elections. He is a staunch ally of Trump, who has kept him close to him during all these years precisely because he lacks political ambitions and therefore does not cause resentment in the former president. But like him, he despises democracy and is a champion of aggressive action.
In 2018, during a controversial interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller declined to answer questions. Without admitting interruption, he insisted on presenting Trump as a “political genius.” Tapper decided to cut him off and move on to the next segment, saying that he didn’t want to continue wasting viewers’ time.
Here is the entire interview:
But beyond personal loyalty to Trump, Miller is a thinker of obscurantist, cruel, reactionary ideas. He is the architect of anti-immigrant hate
His biographer Jean Guerrero says: “He is not an opportunist or a self-promoter, but a true ideologue, a true fanatic.”
“I can say with confidence from my reporting that he is fluent in hate and deliberately traffics in hate and communicates with haters,” the journalist adds.
This list of Miller’s actions is not exhaustive. As early as 2017 Miller began spreading lies about voter fraud, paving the way for the rejection of Trump’s defeat in 2020, specifically focusing on New Hampshire, a state Trump lost to Hillary Clinton.
Since his departure from the White House Miller has slipped into the positions of the country’s radical right, promoting publications such as VDAR and American Renaissance on his social accounts and republishing the posts of other extremists.
Miller’s Tweets
In fact, his Twitter account-@StephenM-is illustrative of his positions and his stance of constant self-victimization. These are posts from only two days. These are Miller’s tweets and retweets.
“Democratic prosecutors want to free violent criminals and jail their political opponents. This is how democracies become tyrannies.”
Democrat prosecutors want to free violent felons and jail their political opponents.
This is how democracies become tyrannies.
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 31, 2023
“Our national humiliation is endless.”
Our national humiliation is endless. https://t.co/ov94AXAvhy
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) February 1, 2023
“Sure, 100,000 New Yorkers have been in homeless shelters over the past year, but illegal immigrants must get open-ended stays at 4-star hotels at taxpayer expense.”
Sure, 100,000 New Yorkers have been in homeless shelters over the past year, but illegal immigrants must get open-ended 4 star hotel stays at taxpayer expense
pic.twitter.com/Bk2RthHIwK— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) January 31, 2023
“Reacting to the Fox News story that a handful of Republican congressmen could prevent Democratic and Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar from being barred from committee duties because of her positions.”
“Unilateral disarmament is not a strategy or a principle; it is surrender. Voting to keep Omar on her committee will not stop Democrats from booting Republicans in the future but it will ensure that they do so even more zealously knowing that there will never be retaliation. Weakness disguised as virtue.”
Unilateral disarmament is not a strategy or a principle; it is surrender. Voting to keep Omar on her committee will not stop Dems from booting Republicans in the future but ensure they do so even more zealously knowing there will never be a reprisal. Weakness disguised as virtue. https://t.co/UujQ1i0ahH
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 30, 2023
“When supplying weapons to a nation at war with a nuclear-armed adversary, at what point will that adversary consider itself to be at war with the United States?”
When supplying weapons to a nation at war with a nuclear-armed adversary, at what point will that adversary consider itself to be at war with the United States? https://t.co/YNzArCreTS
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) January 30, 2023
“Biden *voluntarily* freed an illegal alien who then allegedly robbed, raped and strangled the life from a young autistic woman. Story was buried. No outcry. Corporate media decided publicizing her murder did not serve their agenda. A family weeps alone. A nation dies in silence.”
Biden *voluntarily* freed an illegal alien who then allegedly robbed, raped and strangled the life from a young autistic woman. Story was buried. No outcry. Corporate media decided publicizing her murder did not serve their agenda. A family weeps alone. A nation dies in silence. https://t.co/jjn7xwWUrX
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 30, 2023
Conclusion
Those who thought that the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 and his exile from the White House would be the end of Stephen Miller as an agitator and ideologue of the MAGA wing of the Republican party was wrong. Miller is present, active and efficient, not looking for headlines but action. His rhetoric and his ideology are hurtful, cruel and wrong. He is an architect of hate, mainly against immigrants.
This article was supported in whole or in part by funds provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library and the Latino Media Collaborative.
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