If, like me, you've been wondering why Afghan people who worked as interpreters with the U.S. military were slow to get out of the country and struggled to get VISAs approved, it has been traced back to a procedure put in place by Stephen Miller. Who is he? He's the right-wing aide to the Trump White House and he's also a white supremacist. Miller began making life difficult for Afghans who worked with the United States as a Senate staffer, even prior to Trump’s election. Here's the story. <p>
WHO IS STEPHEN MILLER? - Wikipedia says "Stephen Miller is an American political advisor who served as a senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting to President Donald Trump. His politics have been described as far-right and anti-immigration. "
WASHINGTON — As the United States potentially abandons tens of thousands of Afghans who helped two decades of military and diplomatic efforts there to the mercies of the Taliban, a single person may deserve more credit than any other: top Trump White House aide and immigration foe Stephen Miller.
<p>Miller, who worked for all four years as former President Donald Trump’s immigration adviser pushing restrictive policies across the board, was instrumental in slowing down the processing of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for Afghan interpreters, embassy staff and others who are now top targets for Taliban assassination, according to both refugee advocates and those who have worked with him.<p>
“The seeds of the insanity that we’re seeing right now were planted in Stephen Miller‘s brain,” said Matt Zeller, a former Army officer who served in Afghanistan and co-founded the group No One Left Behind, adding that Miller is as much to blame for the deaths of interpreters and others as the Taliban themselves. “He’s complicit in their murders ... He’s brilliant at how evil he is.”<p>
Olivia Troye, who worked in the White House for former Vice President Mike Pence, said Miller had a knack for using the bureaucracy to effect his agenda.<p>
“He does it in a very crafty way. You can trace the steps of everything he did along the way,” she said, describing how Miller was even able to use the COVID-19 pandemic to slow down the of processing of SIV applications. “This was just another opportunity to push his anti-immigration agenda.”<p>
Miller, who now helps run the pro-Trump group America First Legal, did not respond to HuffPost queries.<p>
(Photo: Stephen Miller . credit SPLcenter)
In recent days, though, he has pushed the ideas both that Afghans brought here might well be terrorists and that it is too expensive to resettle them, as well as the broader theme that they would “change America.”A day later, he warned on Twitter that permitting these Afghans into the country now would result in even more Afghans coming later: “Keep in mind refugees are on fast-track to citizenship, so the initial resettlement will spark a huge wave of follow-on chain migration.”<p>
And on Monday, he claimed that most of the Afghans arriving do not deserve the opportunity. “The vast majority of those being evacuated had no role in the U.S. war effort,” he wrote. “As I warned from the outset, Biden is using his disastrous Afghanistan exit — and a gullible media — as the pretext for large-scale resettlement of unvetted Afghan refugees throughout the U.S.”<p>
Miller, now 36, has had a reputation as a strident anti-immigration nativist for more than a decade. Known for sending angry all-caps emails to journalists warning of the perils posed by immigrants as a staffer to then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller’s views began dramatically affecting U.S. government policy in 2015, after Republicans retook control of the Senate and his boss became chairman of the Judiciary Committee.<p>
