“I am living with the deep pain of watching someone I once loved become the face of evil,” Alisa Kasmer says in an open letter to her cousin, Stephen Miller, who currently serves as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the US Homeland Security Advisor for the Trump administration.
As a political advisor, Stephen Miller has a long history of making extreme, inflammatory, and hostile statements toward immigrants, political opponents, and judges whose rulings don’t suit him. Anyone who disagrees with him is likely to be denounced as a leftist, communist, traitor, insurrectionist, terrorist, or insulted as warped, twisted, depraved.
Before entering the White House, Miller worked under conservative Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, helping craft policies aimed at rolling back civil rights, weakening voting protections, and targeting marginalized communities.
During Trump's first term in office, Miller was the chief architect of the President’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which led to the forced separation of thousands of children from their parents at the southern border.
Leaked emails revealed that Miller frequently shared white nationalist talking points and publications, including content from VDARE and the Camp of the Saints – a notoriously racist and anti-immigrant novel embraced by far-right extremists.
Miller also routinely collaborated with anti-immigration hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), both of which have deep ties to white nationalist ideologies.
Miller elevated their ideas into national policy, blurring the line between governance and extremist ideology, resulting in sweeping deportations and a normalization of xenophobia at the highest levels of government. ~ Common Cause
With a rallying cry of “You are unleashed,” Miller has now proclaimed that all of the government’s military strength will be deployed against American cities and the protesters he has often falsely characterized as terrorists.
After watching reports on Fox TV, President Trump claimed that Portland, Oregon, was a war-ravaged city on fire and filled with terrorists.
This is because Fox had taken footage from the 2020 George Floyd protests in Portland and inserted it into reports on the more recent, smaller, peaceful demonstrations at ICE facilities, creating the false impression of ongoing large-scale chaos, riots, fires, and violence in the city.
Trump bought the Fox fake news hook, line, and sinker, because it serves his agenda. Then he ordered the National Guard to be deployed.
U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, ironically a Trump appointee, subsequently issued a temporary restraining order against the troop deployment, stating that the president’s claim of unrest in Portland was “untethered to facts,” noting, “This country has a long-standing and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs. This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”
Stephen Miller reacted by calling the judge’s TRO “insurrection.”
Stephen Miller’s heritage: A cruel irony noted by his relatives
Retired neuropsychologist David S. Glosser is Stephen Miller’s uncle. In an op-ed published during Trump’s first term, Glosser disclosed that Miller’s maternal grandfather was a Jew who fled Belarus at the turn of the century and established a new life in America.
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.
Most damning is the administration’s evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America.”
In her public letter to Miller this year, his cousin Alisa Kasmer adds:
“I think many of us are grieving. Grieving a world that feels more cruel than kind. A future that feels further away each day. I grieve for the country we could be… one with unmatched wealth, intelligence, and potential. A nation with resources to ensure everyone lives with dignity, equity, health, and safety. A nation with enough technological and medical advancements to be something truly extraordinary.
But instead, those resources and that wealth are being hoarded by a few, poisoned by ego and power, devoid of empathy, starving the rest. Our privilege has been wasted on cruelty and torture, targeting the very people who make our communities whole—the hardest workers, the most vulnerable, the ones who carry this country on their backs. A society is only as strong as its most vulnerable, and ours are at their weakest. This is not by accident, but by design. Your design, Stephen.
And here’s where it hurts even more: we were raised Jewish. Stephen, you and I both know what that means. We were raised with stories of survival. We learned about pogroms, ghettos, the Holocaust—not just as history, but as part of our identity. We carry the trauma of generations who were hunted, hated, expelled, murdered, just for existing. We were taught to remember.
We celebrated holidays each year with the reminder to stand up and say “never again.” But what you are doing breaks that sacred promise. It breaks everything we were taught. How can you do to others what has been done to us? How can you wake up each day and repeat the cruelty that our people barely escaped from? We were taught to never forget where we came from. But you seem to have erased it all. And it devastates me. To be this close to the cruelty, through you, has left me ashamed and shattered.”
Resources:
Alisma Kasmer on Cousin Stephen Miller ~ Facebook
Stephen Miller’s Own Cousin Calls Him ‘The Face Of Evil’ for Role In Immigration Crackdown ~ Independent
Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. ~ Politico
Top 5 Most Awful Things You Need to Know About Stephen Miller ~ Common Cause
‘You Are Unleashed’: White House Officials Rally Memphis Law Enforcement Ahead of National Guard Troop Deployment ~ Independent
Trump Orders Crackdown On ‘Domestic Terrorists’ In Escalation of a Campaign Against Political Rivals ~ Oregon Public Broadcasting
Trump Says He Will Send Troops to Portland, Oregon, In Latest Deployment to US Cities ~ Central Oregon Daily News
Stephen Miller Loses It After Judge Blocks Portland Troop Deployment ~ Yahoo News
Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails ~ SPLC
The White Nationalist Websites Cited by Stephen Miller ~ NYT
The Trump Zero Tolerance Policy: A Cruel Approach with Humane and Viable Alternatives ~ Refugees International
Trump, Apparently Misled by Video Of 2020 Protests, Threatens to Send Troops to Portland ~ Guardian
I feel almost as badly for his family as I do the country. One bright spot is people like holding people like them to account. Thanks, Brad.
Excellent reporting, Brad. Thank you for your hard work in getting the facts out.