Hate group leader: Our allies 'are now very well placed' in the Trump administration

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday April 25, 2017 · 10:52 AM PDT

2017/04/25 · 10:52

Senior White House advisers Stephen Miller (L) and Steve Bannon step off Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, on March 5, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images) — Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon

Yes, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign emboldened white supremacists and extremists, with a wave of hate crimes sweeping the nation in the immediate days following his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton. White nationalists like Steve Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have found a new home in the administration, and as the New York Times recently noted, a number of lesser known but equally deplorable anti-immigrant voices have joined right alongside them:

Mr. Trump’s senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, worked tirelessly to defeat immigration reform as a staff member for Senator Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. Gene P. Hamilton, who worked on illegal immigration as Mr. Sessions’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee, is now a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Border Patrol and ICE, where Mr. Feere is working. Julia Hahn, who wrote about immigration for Breitbart — with headlines like “Republican-Led Congress Oversees Large-Scale Importation of Somali Migrants” — has followed her former boss, Stephen K. Bannon, to the White House as a deputy policy strategist.

Daniel Tichenor, an immigration politics scholar at the University of Oregon, called it “highly unusual” in the post-World War II era to have proponents of sharply reduced immigration in such high-ranking positions.

“You would have to go to the 1920s and 1930s to find a comparable period in which you could point to people within the executive agencies and the White House who favored significant restrictions,” Mr. Tichenor said.

The ghoulish Miller helped Bannon draft Trump’s failed Muslim bans, and was personally responsible for derailing the second one in court after boasting on cable news that "fundamentally, you’re still going to have the same basic policy outcome." Not the smartest bunch, but dangerous nonetheless. Miller’s extremism stretches back years, with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer calling him a college buddy and high school classmates recalling him making numerous racist remarks about Latinos and other people of color. No wonder he’s received such high praise from Trump and Sessions.

But just as frightening are the additions of former staffers from two anti-immigrant hate groups to two federal immigration agencies (because of course): the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jon Feere to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Julie Kirchner to Customs and Border Protection. Both CIS and FAIR, founded by white nationalist, eugenicist, and retired eye doctor John Tanton, have been designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Papers from Tanton’s library show he “has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era.” And according to Think Progress, “Tanton is a strict nativist who once wrote a paper titled ‘The Case for Passive Eugenics.’” Charming.

Both CIS and FAIR disown SPLC’s fact-finding and claim they just want to reform the legal immigration system, but the truth is they want to stop brown people from coming to the U.S. And the ones that are already here, they want out. “We’ve worked closely with lots of people, who are now very well placed in his administration, for a long time,” FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, admitted about the allies he and other anti-immigrant extremists now have in the White House. With an unshackled ICE sweeping up hardworking, undocumented immigrants with no criminal history and deep ties to this nation, that’s been very clear so far.

Hate group leader: Our allies 'are now very well placed' in the Trump administration

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