Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called on senior White House adviser Stephen Miller to immediately resign amid reports that he regularly pushed white nationalist talking points and xenophobia in a series of emails sent in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
The Southern Poverty Law Center published an investigation from its Hatewatch arm Tuesday after reviewing more than 900 messages that Miller sent to the conservative news outlet Breitbart from March 2015 to June 2016. More than 80% of the missives related to “or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration,” the group found, and many sought to promote far-right extremist ideas and anti-immigration messaging.
Many of the emails were sent before he joined Trump’s campaign while Miller was working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).
But despite the timeline, Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday that the trove of uncovered emails should bring the White House aide’s immediate resignation.
“Stephen Miller, Trump’s architect of mass human rights abuses at the border (including child separation & detention camps w/ child fatalities) has been exposed as a bonafide white nationalist,” the lawmaker wrote Tuesday night on Twitter. “He’s still at the White House shaping US immigration policy.”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s architect of mass human rights abuses at the border (including child separation & detention camps w/ child fatalities) has been exposed as a bonafide white nationalist.
He’s still at the White House shaping US immigration policy.
Miller must resign. Now. https://t.co/hwjy1xl6D4— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 12, 2019
The Trump administration refused to discuss the SPLC’s investigation on Tuesday. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said she had not seen the report but called the SPLC an “utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization” in a statement to HuffPost.
She added that the nonprofit group, which regularly defends civil liberties and shines a light on hate groups, was “beneath public discussion.”
Hatewatch said Tuesday that many of Miller’s emails were centered on race and immigration, calling his perspective “repetitious” and highly focused on “ending nonwhite immigration to the United States.” They were given to the news outlet by a former Breitbart editor, Katie McHugh, who said they “clearly illustrate his beliefs, which until now have not been made explicit and known to the American people.”
Miller has been the architect of many of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration efforts and one of the administration’s most vocal defenders.
“Americans should be terrified by the casual way that Stephen Miller, who has enormous influence in the White House, shares racist content and speaks the language of white nationalists in emails to people he apparently considered fellow travelers,” Michael Edison Hayden, an investigative reporter at Hatewatch, said in a statement Tuesday.
Read the full investigation at the SPLC.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
