White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller sent dozens of emails to a right-wing reporter promoting the materials of one anti-immigrant hate group in particular, an ongoing investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch has found, including an embargoed report and a group staff cell number for the purposes of further propagating his racist, anti-immigrant narrative.
Campaign Action
The first part of the Hatewatch investigation revealed that Miller had sent nearly 1,000 emails in total—many from a government account during his time working for then-Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—to Breitbart editors with links to white nationalist and anti-immigrant garbage. But a deeper look reveals Miller appeared to hold one hate group—the Tanton network’s Center for Immigration Studies—in high regard, emailing former Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh at least 46 times with materials linked to the organization.
In fact, the emails reveal a close relationship between Miller and the CIS: Miller sent an embargoed report from the group, along with a cell phone number for a top staffer, to McHugh in hopes that she could help him “spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” she told Hatewatch, which said she has “renounced far-right politics” since getting fired from Breitbart in 2017.
Miller also praised the writings of Jason Richwine, a CIS contributor who in 2013 was forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation after his Harvard University dissertation arguing that Latinos have lower IQs than whites was exposed. Five years later, Miller’s devotion to the CIS has only grown more intense: “CIS researchers say the White House has invited them into policymaking discussions,” Hatewatch said.
“Earlier this year, the administration invited CIS executive director Mark Krikorian and other conservative leaders to participate in a meeting with Trump to hear his plans to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico,” the report continued. Last year, another Tanton network group that has for years sought to squash bilingualism, the English-only organization ProEnglish, also went to the White House to meet with an unnamed “senior legislative aide.” One guess who that might be.
The CIS, meanwhile, has taken offense at being labeled a hate group by the SPLC, even unsuccessfully suing over the designation. But the fact is that CIS has distributed literally thousands of writings by radicals, including white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Norwegian anti-Muslim blogger Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, who according to the SPLC “was cited over 100 times in the manifesto of racist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.”
This is the group that Miller praised when he was a keynote speaker at one of its events in 2015—while still working for Sessions as his director of communications, mind you—when he said that working with the organization’s research director was “one of the great pleasures of my professional life.” Two years later, he’s now in the White House and is the architect of vast, consequential policies targeting the very people and families he’s hated for years.
