Stephen Miller is making citizenship a matter of blood to exile the children of strangers. The Supreme Court just ruled his executive order unconstitutional in a 5–4 decision that hung by a single thread, striking down the decree that would strip the birthright of children born on this soil to undocumented parents. He is outraged. He called the decision “one of the most destructive and outrageous in the long history of the Supreme Court.” He wrote on X that “American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans.” He called the ruling a national self-obliteration and revealed exactly what he thought he had lost. He is not wrong about what he is losing; he is losing the legal fiction that allows him to sort human beings by the accidents of their ancestry and call it policy.
The phrase he has elevated into administration policy — “poisoning the blood of our country” — is a translation of Blutvergiftung, a term Adolf Hitler used in Mein Kampf to explain why civilizations die. “All the great civilizations of the past decayed because the originally creative race died out, as a result of poisoning of the blood,” Hitler wrote. When Miller says on Fox News that we have “people from all over the world from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” and that they can come here, have a baby, and that baby is automatically a citizen, he is not making a policy argument. He is reciting a racial metaphysics dressed in civic language. Wherever the wheel was invented, it was not in the United States. It was likely Mesopotamia, around 4200–4000 BC, which Miller would call the Third World but was in fact the cradle of civilization. The man who boasts of civilizational superiority cannot locate the first civilization.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson saw through the project. In concurrence, she wrote that the Government and its defenders “propose a return to [Dred Scott’s] core tenet” — the rule of blood over soil. The cruelty is the point. In the first eight months of 2025, ICE arrested the parents of approximately 14,450 U.S.-birthright children; more than 7,000 of those children saw a parent deported. ICE also arrested 4,843 spouses of citizens in that same window. Miller calls this enforcement. It is the operational expression of a theory that says these children are not fully American, and that the Constitution is wrong to say they are.
Read Leviticus on the resident alien, and the demand is plain in the face of those 7,000 children: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). The mechanism is memory. A people who remember being the stranger learn to welcome the stranger. Miller’s project requires the opposite: a people who forget, so they can be told the stranger is a poison. Read Amos, and the class is plain in the face of dawn raids and 4,843 spouses arrested: “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy” (Amos 4:1). The prophet does not write a policy paper. He names who is doing what to whom, and he names it in the voice of God. The Torah commands the love of the stranger thirty-six times. Miller’s ideology is a thirty-six-fold violation. He has stood at the Western Wall and called for a regime the people who built that wall would have recognized as the cruelty of an empire that tried to wipe them out. We who claim the prophets cannot stay quiet about this. Not in this generation.
Read the words of Jesus, and the judgment is plain at every courtroom where a mixed-status family is being torn apart: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” (Matthew 25:43). You who draft these memoranda, you who sit in the offices of the White House and draw circles of belonging around the children of the powerful: the Christ you claim to worship was a Galilean, a borderland carpenter mocked by the religious elite of his day for his accent and his lack of pedigree. He had no place to lay his head, and his family fled across the border into Egypt to escape an executioner’s decree. The child you would strip of citizenship is the child the Holy Family was.
The confession belongs here. I am a man formed in a tradition that has done what the Miller project is doing. The Catholic Church ran the residential schools. The Church sat on the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that the descendants of European Christians had a right to claim the lands of non-Christian peoples because the non-Christian peoples were less than fully human. I cannot name Miller’s cruelty without naming the institutional form of the same cruelty in my own house, and the prayer my people owe the people we harmed is not yet paid. And the deportation machine Miller operates is older than any single hand that ever turned its wheel. Every administration that has filled detention beds and torn families apart has relied on the same quiet agreement that the law applies differently depending on the name on the paperwork. The climate Miller is exploiting is one our own communities helped to build. We who eat the fruit of the labor these strangers provide while voting for the fences that keep their children out know how easily we forget our own sojourns.
Pope Francis named the larger sickness the globalization of indifference — the cool comfort of looking the other way while the cages fill. Archbishop Óscar Romero knew that the laws of empire eventually run out of room for the poor, and he told the soldiers holding the rifles that they were bound by a higher law: no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. I tell you, Stephen Miller, and the men who echo your theories of blood: you were born better than this.
The door of the parish is still open, and the table is still set. The tradition you claim as a Jew is the tradition that names what you are doing as sin. The tradition of the country you serve is the tradition that has just ruled, again, that no one in this nation is illegal by birth. The tradition you are drawing from, the Blutvergiftung tradition, offers no door. It ends in the machinery you are building. Put down the pens that draw these borders in the blood of the stranger, and come sit at a table where the only inheritance that matters is the bread broken and shared. The choice is yours. The hour is late. The children of the deported are not abstractions. They are the Christ of Matthew 25, standing at the gate, asking to be welcomed in.