White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller appeared on a Trump re-election campaign call Wednesday and delivered a stunning array of lies about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Among them, the former two-term Democratic vice president who spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate is a “radical outlier” who “would incentivize child smuggling and child trafficking on an epic global scale.”
The unsubstantiated attacks also included lies about the Trump administration’s actions, including the false claim that under President Donald Trump migrant children were not separated from their families. The Trump administration separated thousands of children from their parents and their siblings. A recent NBC News report found 545 children will likely never be reunited, as the administration deported the parents or did not keep track of them.
“This administration kept families together,” Miller, a white nationalist, told reporters, as PBS ands MSNBC journalist Yamiche Alcindor reports.
Miller was actually the architect of that policy, one designed to inflict as much emotional damage as possible in an attempt to get its victims to warn other Central American refugees to not come to the U.S.
The New York Times adds that on the campaign call Miller “offered an apocalyptic vision of a Biden presidency in which he said terrorists would pour into the U.S. and America’s southern border would be overrun by migrants.”
“Tens of millions will come from every single part of planet Earth,” Mr. Miller said. Noting that the Trump administration is maintaining a stringent cap on refugee admissions, he alleged that Mr. Biden would approve “a staggering increase on refugees from the most dangerous places in the world.”
Miller also claimed Biden “would incentivize child smuggling and child trafficking on an epic global scale,” CNN’s DL Judd adds, which is a staggering and unsubstantiated lie.
Judd also reports that “with the president’s refusal to condemn the dangerous Q Anon conspiracy theory, which baseless accuses a number of public figures of child trafficking, Miller’s comments on Biden are all the more dangerous.”
Daily Beast Contributing Editor Justin Baragona weighs in on Miller’s lie:
BuzzFeed News immigration reporter Hamed Aleaziz, who has done extensive reporting on the Trump administration’s illegal treatment of migrant children, offers this colorful interpretation of Miller’s false claims:
CQ Roll Call immigration reporter Tanvi Misra:
And there’s this from Los Angeles Times White House reporter Noah Bierman:
Miller’s participation on the call itself is questionable, as he is a member of the administration. The campaign claimed he was appearing in his personal capacity but in recent weeks Trump officials have repeatedly violated the Hatch Act without the slightest concern.
Former Trump administration DHS spokesman David Lapan had some harsh words for Miller’s potential Hatch Act violation: