Stephen Miller Isn’t Just “Linked” to White Nationalists. He Is One.
By Janet Murguía, UnidosUS President and CEO
Of all the people who have surrounded Donald Trump since he began his run for president in 2015, the one who has alarmed us the most is unquestionably Stephen Miller. Prior to his stint in the White House, Miller was a long-time staffer and point person on immigration for then Senator Jeff Sessions. In that role, Miller was the driving force behind Sessions, the most anti-immigrant and anti-Latino member of the U.S. Senate, and the primary reason that, in 2014, the best chance in recent history for comprehensive immigration reform was defeated.
Though Miller’s extensive ties with the most extreme anti-immigrant organizations are well-known to us, we always used a qualifier when describing him — saying, for example, that he “was linked to White nationalists” rather than calling him an actual White nationalist. Those days are over. A trove of emails sent to the Southern Poverty Law Center by a former Breitbart reporter unequivocally confirm what we have long suspected: Miller is not just linked to White nationalists and bigots; he is a White nationalist bigot himself.
The emails revolve around Miller’s attempts to get Breitbart to write stories furthering his hateful and bigoted agenda not only on immigrants, but on Latinos and other communities of color. He defends Confederate statues. He disparages refugees, DACA recipients, temporary protected status holders, and Mexican victims of a hurricane. He insisted that Breitbart cover dubious studies linking immigrants to crime (sound familiar?).
The examples are too numerous to mention but several stand out. One, he touts the writings of Jason Richwine, a researcher who was fired by the Heritage Foundation after UnidosUS and other Latino civil rights organizations found out that he conducted “research” claiming that Hispanics have lower IQs than Whites. Two, Miller recommended the notoriously racist French novel, the Camp of the Saints, to the Breitbart reporter despite the fact that even Miller’s allies in the anti-immigrant movement had disavowed the book 30 years ago for its overtly White supremacist content.
And most disturbingly, the emails show that Miller is a fan of President Coolidge’s 1924 Immigration Act, long cited by historians as one of the most egregiously racist federal laws in American history. The law was passed at the behest of the eugenics movement because eugenicists and Coolidge believed that Italians and Jews were not only inferior but could never really assimilate into American society. Chillingly, Adolf Hitler later said that the 1924 law was an “inspiration” to the Nazi party on how to treat foreigners in Germany.
These are the beliefs and opinions of the man who has spearheaded the Trump administration’s immigration policy efforts. Is it any wonder that we got the Muslim ban? The separation of children from their families? The end of DACA and TPS? It is now beyond dispute that the Trump administration’s actions are not based in sound immigration policy, but in hate and cruelty.
And that hate has resulted not only in the demonization and mistreatment of Latinos, but also in violence. I saw that firsthand last week when I visited to El Paso, the site of the largest mass shooting of Latinos in our history, and had the chance to meet with some very courageous and inspiring people who were victims of that senseless tragedy.
I met a woman who was outside the Walmart fundraising for her daughter’s soccer team when the shooting started. She was so consumed with finding her daughter in the chaos that she did not realize she had been shot in her arm and in her ankle until she was reunited with her child. I heard from two Walmart employees who were working what they thought would be a normal Saturday morning shift. And in spite of everything, what they are most eager about is the opportunity to go back to work — at that very same store.
Beyond their courage and resilience, what also struck me about my conversation with them is the emotional toll it has taken. Not only the expected trauma of being part of a mass shooting, but also that they were targeted because they are Latino. One of them said that was obvious because there are dozens of Walmarts in El Paso, but theirs was the one the Latino community relied on. They know that what happened to them was an act of hate and that the rhetoric that helped lead a gunman to travel 12 hours just to attack Latinos is coming from the highest levels of government.
That concern is shared by the overwhelming majority of Hispanics in this country. A Univision poll of Latino registered voters released in September 2019 found that 87 percent believe racism and bigotry against Latinos and immigrants is a major problem, and that 74 percent believe that growing White Supremacy was a factor in the El Paso shooting. Another factor? Sixty-nine percent believe that president’s rhetoric and tweets bears either a lot or some responsibility for what happened.
Words matter, and hateful words have hateful consequences. Last week, the FBI released its latest hate crimes statistics report, which found a rise again in violence against Latinos. According to the report, the number of violent hate crimes against Latinos rose 13 percent in the last year and 48 percent in the last five years — a period that tracks with President Trump’s emergence as a national political figure.
There is an expression in Spanish, “dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Roughly, “tell me the company you keep and I will tell you who you are.” We have inconvertible proof that Miller is a White nationalist because of his ties and the beliefs unambiguously expressed in these emails. If President Trump and his administration continue to claim that they disavow bigotry, have any interest in starting to combat the rise in hate and bigotry they have unleashed, and don’t want to be tarred with the same White Nationalist brush, they should fire Miller immediately. On the other hand, it will be incredibly telling — and of great concern to communities of color and other Americans — if they do not.
