Kamala Harris Wants Trump To Fire Stephen Miller

As soon as Senator Kamala Harris ended her campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination, she promised supporters that she would still “do everything in my power to overcome Donald Trump and fight for the future of our country.”


She has wasted no time in doing that work: On Monday (December 9), HuffPost reported that she and 26 other Democratic senators sent a letter to the White Residence calling for the removal of Stephen Miller, who currently serves as a senior policy advisor to the president and is reportedly accountable for much of the xenophobic immigration policy that has come out of the Trump White Residence in the past three years.


In the letter, senators point to the hundreds of leaked emails Miller had sent to reporters, several who work or worked for Breitbart, a website with its own history of white supremacist ideology. The emails, which were published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in November, further reinforced already public knowledge of Miller’s white supremacist leanings, which had been on display as early as his high school days.


“What is driving Mr. Miller [is] not national security, it’s white supremacy — something that has no place in our nation, federal government, and especially not the White House,” the senators wrote in the letter, which Harris’s personnel also sent to MTV News. “Simply put, Mr. Miller is unfit to serve in any capacity at the White Home, let alone as a senior policy adviser.”


Before he joined the Trump campaign in January 2016, Miller worked as an aide for Jeff Sessions, whose tenure as a senator for Alabama was marked by plenty of anti-immigrant stances of his own. Sessions served as as Trump’s Attorney General from February 2017 to November 2018; he was asked by Trump to resign mere months immediately after he introduced a “zero-tolerance” policy on undocumented entry which, among other things, resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents; being forced into inhumane detention centers; and some days being lost in a system that was never intended to protect them.


In their letter to the White Residence, senators said Miller’s connection with that policy, as well the xenophobic “travel ban” that specifically targeted people from a number of Muslim-majority nations, and the administration’s choice to rescind DACA protections, a ruling that is currently being deliberated in the Supreme Court.


“Mr. Miller has also reportedly advanced [the Trump] administration’s efforts to slash refugee admissions, allowance asylum access for weak populations, prevent extensions of Short-term Protected Status to those granted safety from humanitarian crises abroad, and disqualify immigrants who use public resources from obtaining certain immigration benefits,” the senators wrote. “Each and every one of those policies has a disproportionate adverse impact on communities of color and our nation. Almost every one of those aligns with the white nationalist dreams espoused by Mr. Miller in his emails.”


This isn’t the opening time members of Congress have called for Miller to be fired, either. In November, following the emails were released, 107 Representatives wrote a letter to the president explaining how Miller’s leaked emails further confirmed his status as “an avid white nationalist and conspiracy theorist’ and decried his “support of white supremacist ideology and literary texts, xenophobic conspiracy theories, along with his promotion of white supremacist websites,” according to Forbes.


“According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, which procured the emails, 80 percent of the more than 900 emails directly referenced race or immigration, and none held ‘examples of Miller writing sympathetically or perhaps in neutral tones about any person who is non-white or foreign-born,’” the November letter pointed out. “Given Mr. Miller’s role in shaping immigration policy for your administration, his documented dedication to extremist, anti-immigrant ideology and conspiracy-mongering is disqualifying.”


Representatives added that Miller “brought his dedication to white nationalism with him into your administration and translated this hateful ideology directly into your administration’s discriminatory immigration policies,” though it should be noted that Trump also has a history of racism and xenophobia all his own.


Lawmakers have also called for closer examinations of Miller’s impact on the White Home and its national policies. On Saturday (December 7), NBC News announced that Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX) asked the Department of Homeland Security to audit its policies in an effort “to show the motivations of the administration's immigration policies and trim light on the people that help craft them.”


The Trump White Residence has for now stood by Miller, who has lasted a relatively long time given the administration’s habit of rotating employees in and out of posts. In November, White Residence press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Axios “we have not seen the report,” and immediately moved to discredit the SPLC as a “long-debunked far-left smear organization” without supplying any proof as to those claims.


HuffPost points out the White Residence never denied the emails’ authenticity, or moved to distance itself from them. Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley has also claimed that the publishing of the emails was anti-Semitic in nature, given that Miller is Jewish. As Forbes notes, Jewish companies have also called for Miller to resign; a number of joined a letter signed by a coalition of over 50 groups that urged Trump to fire his advisor, and anyone else in the current administration who promotes racism, xenophobia, and bigotry.