Stephen Miller, who serves as White Home deputy chief of workers and homeland safety adviser for President Donald Trump, appeared on the right-wing Newsmax community on Friday and demanded that immigrants pay the USA “reparations.”
The wild demand got here amid a rant about immigration that Miller delivered to host Rob Schmitt.
“For the love of God, where are the damages for Americans?” Miller yelled. “We used to have a functioning public school system in this country. Then we had open borders. Now our schools are in chaos and disarray. We need hundreds of translators. Nobody’s learning how to read or write.”
He then claimed cities like Los Angeles had “entire neighborhoods” which might be “occupied and controlled by foreign gangs.”
“Where do all the residents that have been displaced, who have been forced out of Los Angeles—where do they go to get their reparations?” Miller requested.
All the things Miller asserted was false or a distortion of actuality, and his shrill tone is how he at all times communicates. The general public faculty system continues to perform—although the Trump administration is attempting to dismantle the Division of Training. And there have by no means been open borders to the U.S., and kids proceed to study studying and writing. There are additionally no neighborhoods managed by overseas gangs.
Reparatives have been mentioned and debated for years as folks attempt to cope with the disadvantages brought on by lots of of years of racist coverage like slavery, Jim Crow, and the like. And by invoking the thought, Miller is taking a critical difficulty and perverting it to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant zealotry.
Regardless of the acute worldview Miller espoused and the odd means he expressed it, he isn’t an outdoor determine. He’s the principal architect of Trump’s harsh immigration insurance policies, reprising a task he served in throughout Trump’s first time in workplace.
The centrality of Miller was on full show throughout the April 14 assembly on the White Home between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Whereas discussing the case of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador, Trump referred to as on Miller to clarify why his administration continues to withstand efforts to return the daddy of two as Democrats have demanded.
Miller lied and claimed the Supreme Court docket had sided with the administration in its ruling on the Abrego Garcia case. In actuality, the court docket—even the conservative members—got here down in favor of returning Abrego Garcia, which the administration has refused to do.
Democratic leaders have traveled to El Salvador, undermining the administration’s argument that it’s unable to safe Abrego Garcia’s launch.
Miller is making absurdist arguments about reparations and mendacity on Trump’s behalf as a result of that’s the lane he has constructed for himself in politics.
From early in his political profession, Miller has been entrenched in white supremacist politics. Whereas working as an aide to Alabama Sen. Jeff Classes in 2015 and 2016, Miller often pushed white nationalist speaking factors, concepts, and tales purportedly bolstering the case of white nationalism in emails to the far-right website Breitbart Information.
Not solely did Miller fill his emails with white supremacist speaking factors, however in a assessment of these emails, the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle famous they had been “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”
Miller continued his extremist work within the Trump administration, establishing the household separation coverage that took migrant kids from their households. The operation opened up the USA to criticism from around the globe on human rights abuses.
Trump’s immigration insurance policies and techniques are as bigoted and xenophobic as they’re as a result of the person creating a lot of them is in lockstep with Trump’s zealotry, and translating that hateful bile into insurance policies hurting hundreds of households.
