Tag: Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller’s influence rising amid changes at DHS

Stephen Miller’s power in the White House is on the rise with the departure of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, giving the influential immigration adviser a stronger hand in reshaping President Trump’s border security team.

The senior White House staffer’s name has been linked to recent upheaval in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the president seeks more like-minded allies in enforcing immigration law and curbing the flow of migrants into the country. Over the past four days, Trump has withdrawn his nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), announced Nielsen’s resignation and ousted the head of the Secret Service.

Opponents of increased immigration hailed Nielsen’s departure and a shift in strategy as a step in the right direction. They cited Miller, a former Senate staffer to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), as a positive presence in pushing Trump’s immigration agenda.

View the complete April 9 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Stephen Miller pressuring Trump officials amid immigration shakeups

The White House hard-liner is driving a more aggressive immigration approach.

As President Donald Trump roils the capital over illegal immigration, his influential aide Stephen Miller is playing a more aggressive behind-the-scenes role in a wider administration shakeup.

Frustrated by the lack of headway on a signature Trump campaign issue, the senior White House adviser has been arguing for personnel changes to bring in more like-minded hardliners, according to three people familiar with the situation — including the ouster of a key immigration official at the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, announced Sunday that she is resigning.

Miller has been telephoning mid-level officials at several federal departments and agencies to demand they do more to stem the influx of immigrants, according to two people familiar with the calls.

View the complete April 7 article by Anita Kumar, Gabby Orr and Daniel Lippman on the Political website here.

Stephen Miller’s claim that ‘thousands of Americans die year after year’ from illegal immigration

The president has made this claim for over two years — but there is still no evidence. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“This is a deep intellectual problem that is plaguing this city, which is that we’ve had thousands of Americans die year after year after year because of threats crossing our southern border.”

— Stephen Miller, senior adviser to President Trump, in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Feb. 17, 2019

Miller slipped this line in the final seconds of his contentious interview with host Chris Wallace over President Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a wall along the southern border, so some viewers might have missed it. But it’s an astonishing statement, suggesting that undocumented immigrants kill thousands of Americans every year.

The White House did not respond to a query concerning Miller’s math, but other anti-immigration advocates have made similar claims. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) claimed in December that there are “thousands of Americans who are dead each year because [of] the Democrats’ refusal to secure our borders.” President Trump claimed in 2018 that 63,000 Americans have been killed by illegal immigrants since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which works out to about 3,700 a year.

View the complete February 21 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

‘Answer my question’: Fox anchor grills defiant Stephen Miller on Trump’s national emergency

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller. Credit: Evan Vucci, AP

Unstoppable rhetoric collided with immovable facts on “Fox News Sunday,” as White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller defended President Trump’s national emergency declaration and invoked the potential for a veto if Congress disapproves in an interview with Chris Wallace.

The segment focused on the limits of presidential powers to circumvent Congress and procure funds to build 230 miles of barriers along the southern border. Miller described an onslaught of drugs and migrants flowing over the border as justification for the emergency declaration.

Yet, like a small army of fact-checkers have noted before, Wallace told Miller the vast majority of hard drugs seized by Customs and Border Protection are captured at points of entry, not between them, and unlawful migration over the border has fallen 90 percent since 2000.

View the complete February 17 article by Alex Horton on The Washington Post website here.

‘All he has is failures’: New report reveals why Trump’s most hated aide is suddenly in the spotlight

He’s one of the few White House figures who can inspire even more revulsion than his boss, but in recent days, he’s been put out on the front lines.

He’s one of the few White House figures who can inspire even more revulsion than his boss, but in recent days, he’s been put out on the front lines.

So why is Stephen Miller suddenly taking center stage?

Miller, a virulently anti-immigrant adviser who found his way under President Donald Trump’s wing through his work with Jeff Sessions, has been behind some of the White House’s cruelest and most inept policies. The infamous Muslim travel ban, which had to go through not one but two complete revisions before it barely passed constitutional muster, was reportedly designed by Miller. He also played a pivotal role, reportedly, in pushing for the immigrant family separation policy, which needlessly traumatized thousands of children in an attempt to deter asylum seekers and led to a massive backlash against the administration. And during the first government shutdown fight over immigration policy at the beginning of 2018, Miller’s efforts to push Trump toward a hardline view were cited as a key reason the negotiations kept falling through.

View the complete December 30 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet.org website here.

‘You didn’t get our message’: key Trump aide Stephen Miller condemned by childhood rabbi

The following article by Andrew Gumbel was posted on the Guardian website September 10, 2018:

Neil Comess-Daniels denounces Miller as a purveyor of ‘violence, malice and brutality’ for zero-tolerance immigration policies

Stephen Miller. Comess-Daniels’ denunciation follows close on the heels of a similar repudiation by Miller’s uncle, David Glosser. Credit:: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters

The childhood rabbi to Stephen Miller, special adviser to Donald Trump and a key architect of his “zero-tolerance” immigration policies, criticized his former charge on Monday as a purveyor of “negativity, violence, malice and brutality” who had learned nothing from his Jewish spiritual education.

Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels of Beth Shir Shalom, a progressive reform synagogue in the beachside city of Santa Monica where Miller grew up, devoted his sermon marking the Jewish New Year to a striking denunciation of Miller and the now-abandoned policy he championed of separating immigrant families at the border.

“Honestly, Mr Miller, you’ve set back the Jewish contribution to making the world spiritually whole through your arbitrary division of these desperate people,” the rabbi said. “The actions that you now encourage President Trump to take make it obvious to me that you didn’t get my, or our, Jewish message.

View the complete article here.

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.

The following commentary by David Glosser was posted on the Politico website August 13, 2018:

If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

Brendan Smialowski, AFP via Getty

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

View the complete article here.

The order Trump holds in contempt was once America’s proudest creation

The following commentary by Johnathan Fenby was posted on the Guardian website June 17, 2018:

Seventy years ago, as a new major book suggests, America helped rebuild Europe and assumed the role of global peacemaker

Donald Trump: ‘He sets a pattern of reaching for his six-gun regardless of others.’ Credit: Brendan Smialowski, AFP Getty Images

Behind the Twitter storms and hyperbolic self-promotion, Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent in his approach to the world. A single aim runs through his international policy – to liberate himself and his country from constraints and to leave it free to pursue whatever he determines to be its destiny.

Thus, this month, he has rounded on allies in the G7 and formed a “partnership for peace” with Kim Jong-un. His complaints about how America has been ripped off may not be unjustified, as when they target China’s commercial behaviour or the low European contribution to defence. But in the broad sweep of the president’s view of the world, that is becoming rather beside the point as he sets a pattern of reaching for his six gun regardless of others, proclaiming victory come what may and gingering up his electoral base. The rest of the world has only been able to stand by, trying to absorb each bump as if they were isolated incidents. Trump’s shock-jock style obscures the way in which the global order of the past seven decades is being shifted amid the constant agitation from the White House and Air Force One. Continue reading “The order Trump holds in contempt was once America’s proudest creation”

Graham: Stephen Miller makes immigration deal impossible

The following article by Jordain Carney was posted on the Hill website January 21, 2018:

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) warned on Sunday that the White House staff is undercutting President Trump and Congress’s ability to get a deal on immigration.

“Every time we have a proposal it is only yanked back by staff members. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere,” Graham told reporters as he headed into a closed-door negotiation with a bipartisan group of senators. Continue reading “Graham: Stephen Miller makes immigration deal impossible”

Rush to defend Trump from book’s claims creates more debate

The following article by Mallory Shelbourne was posted on the Hill website January 7, 2018:

Trump administration officials on Sunday are playing defense for their boss against shocking allegations reported in a new book detailing the first year of Trump’s presidency.

Multiple individuals close to President Trump hit the Sunday show circuit, including two Cabinet officials, but White House policy adviser Stephen Miller became the talk of the morning after Jake Tapper abruptly cut off a contentious interview with the Trump aide during CNN’s “State of the Union.” Continue reading “Rush to defend Trump from book’s claims creates more debate”