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Stephen Miller, who serves as White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser for President Donald Trump, appeared on the right-wing Newsmax network on Friday and demanded that immigrants pay the United States “reparations.”
The wild demand came 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” that are “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 asked.
Everything Miller asserted was false or a distortion of reality, and his shrill tone is how he always communicates. The public school system continues to function—though the Trump administration is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. And there have never been open borders to the U.S., and children continue to learn reading and writing. There are also no neighborhoods controlled by foreign gangs.
Reparatives have been discussed and debated for years as people try to contend with the disadvantages caused by hundreds of years of racist policy like slavery, Jim Crow, and the like. And by invoking the idea, Miller is taking a serious issue and perverting it to serve the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant zealotry.
Despite the extreme worldview Miller espoused and the odd way he expressed it, he is not an outside figure. He is the principal architect of Trump’s harsh immigration policies, reprising a role he served in during Trump’s first time in office.
The centrality of Miller was on full display during the April 14 meeting at the White House between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. While discussing the case of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador, Trump called on Miller to explain why his administration continues to resist efforts to return the father of two as Democrats have demanded.
Miller lied and claimed the Supreme Court had sided with the administration in its ruling on the Abrego Garcia case. In reality, the court—even the conservative members—came 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 is unable to secure Abrego Garcia’s release.
Miller is making absurdist arguments about reparations and lying on Trump’s behalf because that is the lane he has built for himself in politics.
From early in his political career, Miller has been entrenched in white supremacist politics. While working as an aide to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2015 and 2016, Miller regularly pushed white nationalist talking points, ideas, and stories purportedly bolstering the case of white nationalism in emails to the far-right site Breitbart News.
Not only did Miller fill his emails with white supremacist talking points, but in a review of those emails, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted they were “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 in the Trump administration, constructing the family separation policy that took migrant children from their families. The operation opened up the United States to criticism from around the world on human rights abuses.
Trump’s immigration policies and strategies are as bigoted and xenophobic as they are because the man creating much of them is in lockstep with Trump’s zealotry, and translating that hateful bile into policies hurting thousands of families.
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