Following Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump campaign adviser Stephen Miller was caught on video screaming at a reporter who asked him to provide data backing up his claims about immigration.
“The crime rate in Venezuela is down, I believe, a little bit over 60% over the last several years,” Miller asserted while discussing crime in the United States.
José María Del Pino, a reporter for Colombia-based news channel NTN24, asked Miller if he was relying on figures released by the Venezuelan government, currently led by dictator Nicolás Maduro. Maduro has become an international pariah during his time in power and has been criticized for limiting civil liberties and free expression.
Miller declined to directly answer the question, so Del Pino persisted and repeated his query.
“I am trusting the fact that Kamala Harris is letting illegal immigrants into this country who are raping and murdering children,” Miller responded, raising his voice.
Del Pino continued to ask Miller for the source of his data, but the Trump insider instead filibustered, yelling at the reporter about crimes purportedly connected to immigrant groups. Eventually, Miller walked away from the cameras instead of backing up his argument.
Trump has made similar claims about Venezuela in an attempt to attack President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration.
“Crime is down in Venezuela by 67% because they’re taking their gangs and their criminals and depositing them very nicely into the United States,” Trump said in an April speech.
Politifact rated the statement as false, noting that crime in the U.S. has gone down since Biden took office and that crime data from Venezuela is not reliable. In fact, the Venezuelan government has not published data on murders or robberies in a decade.
White House adviser Stephen Miller and his spray-on hair appear on “Face the Nation” in January 2019.
Before his role on the Republican campaign, Miller served as a senior adviser to Trump in the White House. When he was not being ridiculed for appearing on television with spray-on hair, Miller spearheaded some of Trump’s harshest anti-immigrant policies.
Miller was the architect of Trump’s Muslim travel ban and advocated for the heartbreaking policy of separating immigrant children from their families at border crossings. As part of the Trump team, Miller also pushed for restrictions that cut the number of people who could seek refuge in the United States, and he advocated for denying green cards to immigrants who might seek public assistance.
Miller even used his time in Trump’s White House to decry the famous Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” which is posted at the Statue of Liberty.
When a reporter asked Miller how the Trump administration’s approach to immigration seemed to run contrary to the poem’s plea of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” Miller said, “The poem you were referring to was added later. It's not actually part of the originally Statue of Liberty.”
After the Trump administration ended, Miller has led the conservative legal group America First Legal, which is currently trying to prevent the federal government from compensating Black farmers who have been historically disadvantaged.
Before teaming up with Trump, Miller was an aide to former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. Leaked emails released in 2019 showed that while working for the senator, Miller promoted racist immigration stories and white supremacist literature, and complained about attempts to remove symbols of the pro-slavery Confederacy from the public sphere.
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