As a White House senior adviser to President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller has aggressively pushed for a very draconian immigration policy. And according to a disturbing report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), leaked e-mails by the far-right Republican show an “affinity for white nationalism.”
Reviewed by the SPLC’s Hatewatch project, e-mails sent by Miller to Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016 — according to Hatewatch’s Michael Edison Hayden — “showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency.” Such policies, Hayden notes, include “reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants” and “an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries.”
“White nationalist websites, a ‘white genocide’-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in ‘Mein Kampf.’”
Miller’s source material in 2015 and 2016, according to Hayden, included “white nationalist websites, a ‘white genocide’-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in ‘Mein Kampf.’”
Hatewatch, according to Hayden, “reviewed more than 900 previously private e-mails Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 4, 2015 to June 27, 2016.”
“Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the e-mails is repetitious,” Hayden observes. “When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by non-whites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending non-white 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 non-white or foreign-born.”
The e-mails were leaked to Hatewatch by journalist Katie McHugh, who was with Breitbart News from April 2014 to June 2017. McHugh’s white nationalist-themed rhetoric became too extreme even for Breitbart, and she was fired after posting hateful anti-Muslim tweets in 2017. But McHugh has since renounced the alt-right and overtly racist things she said in the past.
“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those e-mails has become policy at the Trump administration.”
McHugh told Hatewatch, “what Stephen Miller sent to me in those e-mails has become policy at the Trump administration.”
On October 23, 2015, Hayden reports, Miller e-mailed McHugh an article by writer Steve Sailer for VDARE — a website that was founded by white nationalist Peter Brimelow in 1999 and is known for promoting the racist Replacement Theory, which claims that governments are trying to replace white populations with non-white populations.
In a September 6, 2015 e-mail, Miller recommended that Breitbart News cover “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist novel that was written by French writer Jean Raspail and is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
McHugh told Hatewatch that in July 2015, Miller recommended that she use the white nationalist website American Renaissance as a source of information.
Miller, now 34, became a senior policy adviser for Trump’s presidential campaign in January 2016, and he went on to serve on Trump’s transition team after he won the election. Earlier this year, Miller had policy disagreements with former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen — who he believed wasn’t draconian enough on illegal immigration.