Stephen Miller called out by own cousin over violent immigration policy
Washington DC - White House advisor Stephen Miller was called out by his own cousin over the violent and harsh anti-immigration policy he has overseen.
In an interview with The New Republic, Alisa Kasmer said her cousin was trying to "take away" the opportunities that his own family had taken advantage of when they fled to the US.
According to TNR, Miller's ancestors arrived in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser fled tsarist Russia to escape anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription.
Glosser moved to New York City, where he sold bananas and other fruit on street corners while sending some of his earnings back to his family in what is now modern-day Belarus.
"We're Jewish – we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing," Kasmer told TNR, making the case that Miller knows how important refugee and migrant programs have been to his own family.
"Now he's trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: That ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses – to live a rewarding life," she said.
Kasmer's comments to TNR mirror a post she made to Facebook earlier this year in which she expressed the deep pain she feels seeing Miller running an immigration policy in which masked agents abduct people off the streets and put them in detention centers without due process.
"I found myself in a stage of grief I didn't even realize I had been carrying," she wrote. "A grief that's been living inside me for years – quiet, but constant. It comes from being so close to the root of something violent and vile."
Cover photo: AFP/Jim Watson