Critics label Miller’s birthright response ‘extreme racism’
Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump, issued a series of statements after the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
In a post on X, Miller wrote that the decision was “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court,” according to a Guardian opinion column by Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim – one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright.”
In a separate statement, Miller said: “The idea that you could have a country where you just set foot on U.S. soil, and any child you have gets to be an American citizen and vote in our elections, collect our welfare, sit on our juries, sit in judgment of our fellow men and women – it’s such an outrage to the idea of having a country, it defies description,” according to the Daily Beast.
Miller also rejected the ruling outright as “wrong,” according to Mediaite, which described him as a key architect of Trump’s national deportation policy.
The New Republic reported that Miller argued President Ulysses S. Grant “did not want to create an automatic third-world citizenship requirement for America.” The New Republic rebutted that Grant “played a major role in the codification of the Fourteenth Amendment, fiercely advocating that the burgeoning concept of birthright citizenship should be granted to Native Americans, immigrants, and the millions of men, women, and children that had been recently freed from slavery.”
Critics described Miller’s response as displaying “extreme racism,” according to AL.com. Yahoo News reported that Miller has suggested an extreme workaround for the Supreme Court’s ruling, though details of the proposal were not specified in the report.