Calling his line of questioning “dumb,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller lashed out at a television journalist on Monday while claiming non-white Americans who’ve been caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement dragnets are perfectly fine with the Trump administration’s tactics in places like Chicago.
Miller was speaking to CNN anchor Boris Sanchez on the network’s CNN Newsroom program when Sanchez noted that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has criticized the Trump administration’s recent use of federal resources to conduct nighttime raids and roving patrols in Chicago by suggesting that ICE officers are racially profiling and targeting Black and brown people for detention and possible arrest.
Asked to respond, Miller did not initially deny the allegation but instead replied that “Black people in Chicago” are “thrilled” to see the Trump administration “getting the illegal aliens out of their communities who are “stealing their housing, jobs and resources.”
He then claimed, “Black citizens who are native to Chicago” had been “begging to have illegals taken out of their country” during the Biden administration and accused Illinois officials of having “created a system of law in Chicago” that afford people more rights than U.S. citizens if they’re in the country illegally while accusing anti-ICE protesters of engaging in what he called “an effort to delegitimize the core function of the federal government of enforcing our immigration laws and our sovereignty” and “domestic terrorism.”
When Sanchez again pressed him on whether Pritzker’s accusation that the administration is “profiling brown people” in immigration raids “designed to go after people of color,” Miller again did not deny the claim. But in response, he attacked Sanchez’s line of inquiry.
“What a dumb question. The illegal aliens who are here are taking jobs away from blacks. They’re taking jobs away from whites, they’re taking jobs away from Latinos. They’re taking their health benefits away. They’re taking their school slots away, and of course, in many cases, they’re committing heinous crimes. We cannot have a system of law in this country that privileges illegal aliens over American citizens, and that’s what they’re doing,” an agitated Miller said.
Only when Sanchez asked him a third time to respond to Pritzker’s allegations did Miller answer directly in the negative.
“The answer is, no, that is a lie and it’s a dumb question,” he said.
His comments to CNN came ahead of a scheduled hearing in a lawsuit brought by Illinois and the City of Chicago to prevent President Donald Trump from using out-of-state National Guard soldiers or active duty troops for what the government described as “federal protection missions” in Chicago.
The president has, dating back to his first term, pushed to use the military to quell protests against his administration in cities or states where voters have elected Democratic officials. While those efforts were thwarted by officials in his first administration who questioned their legality, Trump’s team this time around is far more compliant and is working to satisfy his desire to see the military put down dissent against his government’s actions.
Lawyers for the city and state said in court papers filed on Monday that Americans “should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor.”
To guard against this, foundational principles of American law limit the president’s authority to involve the military in domestic affairs,” they added. “Those bedrock principles are in peril.”
In their complaint, Illinois and Chicago argue that Trump’s “flimsy pretext” for boots on the ground includes protests outside a two-story Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a Chicago suburb, where fewer than 8,000 people live.
State and local law enforcement are capable of responding to those incidents, and Trump’s federalization of the National Guard from other states “infringes on Illinois’s sovereignty and right to self-governance,” according to the lawsuit.
“It will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police,” lawyers argued. “It also creates economic harm, depressing business activities and tourism that not only hurt Illinoisians but also hurt Illinois’s tax revenue.”
Trump has similarly surged federal law enforcement into several other Democratic-led states and cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while Memphis is also preparing to see troops on the ground.
California sued the administration earlier this year in the wake of Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests against large-scale immigration raids and arrests.
Last month, a federal judge determined that the administration illegally deployed military assets into the Los Angeles area in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the military from enforcing domestic law.
Trump — whose efforts appeared designed to create “a national police force with the president as its chief” — deployed troops to southern California “ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” according to the ruling from California District Judge Charles Breyer.
But “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law,” he added.
The president instead illegally and “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles,” according to the judge’s ruling.
Illinois and Oregon officials are similarly arguing that the president’s deployments to those states are in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, as well as Tenth Amendment protections ensuring that police authority rests with the states, not the federal government.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting
