Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller speaks at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. Photo by Angela WeissAFP via Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman October 28, 2024

Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior aide, delivered a rousing speech at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the warm up act to Trump himself.

The worst you could say about it is Miller scapegoated one group — immigrants — for all of America’s ills. The best you could say is: We’ve been warned.

If there was any doubt what a second Trump term in office would mean for America, Miller, who Vox called “the architect” of Trump’s most effective anti-immigration policies, made his vision crystal clear.

Miller, who co-wrote  Trump’s 2017 inaugural “American carnage” speech, only spoke for five minutes, but it was long enough for him to paint a picture of an America overrun with violent immigrants who steal jobs and rape girls.

Only Trump would allow Americans “to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity,” he told the crowd. “It happens every day.”

Except: It doesn’t. In fact, immigrants in the U.S. commit less violent crime than  citizens, and are far more likely to be victims of rape than perpetrators of it.

But that’s not the point. Nor — sorry to disappoint — is the point that the Trump rally evoked a Nazi rally from 1939.

True, Miller did say on Sunday that “America is for Americans and Americans only!” a slogan that echoes, “Germans for Germans only” which the Nazis used to separate out (and slaughter) Poles, Jews and other undesirables.

But history rarely maps neatly onto the present. What’s scary is not that Miller, unleashed by Trump 2.0, would be like Josef Goebbels. It’s that he would be like Stephen Miller.

Miller, the Jewish descendant of immigrants, spoke on Sunday in an arena with Israeli flags hung from the rafters. Gays for Trump, Latinos for Trump, Blacks for Trump all cheered his racist rhetoric.

To understand how troubling Miller’s MSG speech is, you need to watch a longer and more detailed talk he gave earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he laid out his vision for implementing the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants.

“You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flight,” he said. “So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds. And that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to move those illegals home.”

Miller called for deploying the military to the southern border “with an impedance and denial mission,” and for “repatriation” flights from the U.S. to Mexico.

On Sept. 15 he tweeted the condensed version, in all caps:

“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA. REMIGRATION!!”

Miller speaks with calm, passionate authority when he outlines these plans, and experts don’t doubt that if Trump is elected, he has the bureaucratic acumen to at least try it.

Inside the first Trump administration, he spearheaded measures that, he promised, would “turn off the faucet” to immigrant labor. He  boasted that he “completely shut down” the U.S. asylum system once COVID-19 hit.

Pushback from lawsuits, intransigent bureaucrats and protesters only honed his strategy.

“It would be a mistake to underestimate Miller’s fanatical commitment to getting as far toward that goal as he can,” Andrew Prokop wrote last month in Vox. “He is on a mission — this has been the driving cause of his adult life.”

Prof. Daniel Kanstroom, an immigration law expert and author of the book Deportation Nation, said on the radio program On Point that “there really is no way to implement this kind of massive program without creating what amounts to a police state.”

Kanstroom pointed out the broad category of illegal immigrants includes people who were brought here as children and have spent decades working and raising families of their own. Others derided and dismissed by Trump and Miller have asylum applications pending or have temporary protected status.

The Washington Post has reported, too, that Trump backer Elon Musk worked illegally in the U.S. in 1995 after quitting school.

“You’re going to have to be checking everybody’s I.D.’s,” Kanstroom said. “How do you tell who is an immigrant and who is a citizen? People don’t come with labels on their foreheads.”

Not to beat a dead ancestor, but it’s worth remembering that Miller’s own great-grandfather, Nison Miller, a persecuted Jew in Eastern Europe, sought refuge here in 1904.

Now he wants to set up checkpoints, do mass roundups, build internment camps and deputize local police forces to hunt down immigrants. To redeploy federal agents from, say, FEMA, to border control, and spend more an estimated $315 billion doing it all.

It may play well at the Garden, but the reality is simply chilling.

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