As a candidate in the 2016 election, former President Donald Trump campaigned on a wildly anti-immigrant platform.
In the speech announcing his candidacy, Trump absurdly claimed Mexico was sending "rapists" and drug pushers to invade the United States. Trump claimed he could solve this problem he invented with a wall at the southern border—a campaign promise that invigorated his far-right base.
Following his upset ascent to the White House, Trump's immigration policy was decried by Americans across the country as cruel and bigoted.
Trump worked tirelessly to deny safety to refugees and asylum-seekers, claiming it was too easy for violent criminals to infiltrate the country under the guise of refugees.
The Trump administration's Justice Department began trying all southern border crossings as criminal offenses—a reversal of the Obama-era policy that charged first-time crossers with a civil offense and sent their cases to immigration, rather than criminal, courts. As a result, arrests skyrocketed and border facilities quickly became overcrowded and unsanitary.
Most horrifically, thousands of children were separated from their parents. Even as Trump left office, hundreds of these children have yet to be reunited. Some will likely never see their parents again as a result of what amounts to state-sponsored kidnapping.
But the architect of Trump's most vile immigration policies—avowed white nationalist Stephen Miller—railed against President Joe Biden's immigration policies in a recent Fox News interview.
Miller was responding to the Biden administration's reopening of an influx detention facility for immigrant children in Carrizo Springs, Texas that isn't subject to state regulations—a move that sparked criticism from both sides of the aisle.
Miller said:
"What we're seeing here is the cruelty and inhumanity of Joe Biden's immigration policies. He came into office and announced that there's an open door and that young people who come into this country illegally are going to be resettled instead of returned."
Biden's administration is facing significant obstacles in undoing the Trump administration's cruelty toward immigrants.
While Biden successfully undid Trump's ban on immigration from majority-Muslim countries and has steadily begun efforts to reunite children with their parents, the President's effort to freeze all deportations for 100 days was struck down in the courts and hundreds have been deported since his inauguration.
Though Biden's enactment of his immigration platform so far has frustrated some immigrant rights activists, people found it absurd that Miller—of all people—felt comfortable condemning its "cruelty."
Twitter put Miller through the wringer for his shamelessness.
Miller somehow continues to be a viable policy advisor for the Republican party.
