November 14th 2019

By Eoin Higgins

Common Dreams

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar on Tuesday decried racist emails from President Donald Trump's advisor Stephen Miller published by the Southern Poverty Law Center and called on the White House aide to resign.

"This type of racism and hatred has no place in our government," Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, said on Twitter. "Miller needs to step down. Now."

"Stephen Miller, Trump's architect of mass human rights abuses at the border (including child separation and detention camps with child fatalities) has been exposed as a bonafide white nationalist," tweeted Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman Democrat from New York. "He's still at the White House shaping U.S. immigration policy."

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez started a petition to force Miller to resign. In an email to supporters, Ocasio-Cortez called Miller out for his "vile brand of xenophobic hatred."

"We're not going to let him do any more damage," wrote Ocasio-Cortez.

The SPLC report on Miller's emails details how the Trump advisor worked to shape coverage by white nationalist outlet Breitbart on immigration. In multiple emails from 2015 and 2016 to former reporter Katie McHugh when Miller was an aide to former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and then the Trump presidential campaign, Miller pushed for reporting focusing primarily on nonwhite immigration and crime.

According to the SPLC:

Miller's perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro also took to social media to criticize Miller's rhetoric.

"Stephen Miller's white nationalist views are a danger to the American people," tweeted Sanders."We are going to defeat this hateful administration and everything it stands for." 

In a tweet, Castro put the blame for Miller's ascendancy squarely on the president.

"Donald Trump put a neo-Nazi in charge of immigration policy," Castro said. "Both him, and Stephen Miller, are a shame to our nation."

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