Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota urged senior White House aide Stephen Miller to resign following revelations about his leaked emails Tuesday.
The first-term congresswomen — half of the group of progressive Democrats who call themselves “The Squad” — separately pressed for Mr. Miller’s resignation after a report about his emails showed him pushing what the lawmakers characterized as “white nationalist” rhetoric.
Reacting on Twitter, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the leaked emails showed Mr. Miller to be a “bonafide [sic] white nationalist” who “must resign” immediately.
“Each day we allow a white nationalist to be in charge of US immigration policy is a day where thousands of children & families lives are in danger,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. The website for her reelection campaign has since begun circulating a petition demanding his resignation.
Ms. Omar, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, similarly called on Twitter for Mr. Miller’s resignation and added that his emails prove she was right when she previously called him a “white nationalist” months earlier.
“As I said earlier this year: Stephen Miller is a white nationalist,” Ms. Omar tweeted. “And now we have the emails to prove it.”
“This type of racism and hatred has no place in our government,” she added.
Mr. Miller, 34, has served as a senior White House policy adviser since the start of Mr. Trump’s administration in early 2017 after previously working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican and the president’s first attorney general.
He has repeatedly been labeled a “white nationalist” by Ms. Omar and other critics during that span over his hardline stance on immigration, and those calls renewed after the Southern Poverty Law Center watchdog group reported this week about leaked emails he sent to editors at Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016.
“In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage,” the SPLC report concluded, referring to the gunman who killed worshipers at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Mr. Miller did not immediately return a message requesting comment.
“We have not seen the report,” said White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. “The SPLC, however, is an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization that has recently been forced — to its great humiliation — to issue a major retraction for other wholly-fabricated accusations. They libel, slander, and defame conservatives for a living. They are beneath public discussion.”
Ms. Omar previously called Mr. Miller a “white nationalist” after it was reported in April that he led an effort by the Trump administration to put a “tougher” director at the head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
She was accordingly criticized over the comment by Republicans including Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, among others.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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