White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reportedly called for saving Americans from “these immigrant criminals” in a meeting with the National Security Council (NSC) about dealing with countries who do not take back deported undocumented immigrants.
“What are we doing to save American lives? We must save American lives! We must save Americans from these immigrant criminals!” a former NSC official told Politico Miller once said in a meeting.
Miller would allegedly tell staffers stories about American citizens who had been killed by immigrants who were set to be deported after committing crimes.
{mosads}The same former NSC official told Politico, “He would tell these stories to make it clear there was no room for anything other than to come down hard on these countries, even if we had other national security interests to consider.”
Miller reportedly at one point recounted the murder of an American woman by a Haitian immigrant who was supposed to have been deported months before after serving a 16-year prison sentence for a variety of crimes, including the illegal use of a gun in a deadly shooting.
The former NSC official said that Miller was intractable when it came to his goal.
“We thought good policy arguments, good bureaucratic arguments — that if we just did the right thing and told the truth, that we would win,” the source said. “But he was playing a totally different game than we were.”
“They just wouldn’t give equal weight and discussion time and value to things that related to the complex dynamics involved in relations between the U.S. and Cambodia or Chad or South Sudan,” a second former NSC official told Politico.
The first former NSC official alleged that Miller does not see undocumented immigrants as human, saying, “He doesn’t treat them as human beings. They’re animals, or they’re a product.”
Miller’s focus on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes after being set for deportation has become part of President Trump’s wider crackdown on immigration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun reactivating deportation cases that were closed under the Obama administration, reviewing cases where the immigrant was arrested or convicted of a crime.