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South Bay Community Leaders Call for Trump Adviser's Resignation After Emails Promoting White Nationalism

Religious leaders in San Jose on Friday spoke out against White House adviser Stephen Miller after the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed emails he sent to Breitbart pushing white supremacist ideas.
Kelly O'MaraPeter Jon Shuler
Senior adviser Stephen Miller looks on as President Donald Trump speaks to the media in the Oval Office of the White House. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

A group of South Bay religious and community leaders are calling for the resignation of White House adviser Stephen Miller after the Southern Poverty Law Center this week exposed emails he sent to Breitbart pushing white supremacist ideas.

“Stephen Miller represents an existential threat to who we are as a Valley,” said Father John Pedigo at a press conference held Friday at the Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment in San Jose.

Pedigo, the advocacy and community engagement director for Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, said Silicon Valley is made up of people from all walks of lives and faiths. “We are a valley of immigrants. We are a valley of people from all over the world that work together,” he said.

“Stephen Miller, by giving preference according to race and white supremacy ideology, he creates all sorts of moral problems for us.”

The resignation demand comes after emails released by the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this week showed Miller exercised influence over the far-right website Breitbart, often pushing for harder anti-immigrant messaging and suggesting material from widely debunked white nationalist sources.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, over 900 private emails were reviewed and the vast majority concerned issues of race or immigration.

According to their review, Miller pushes source material to Breitbart that includes “a ‘white genocide’-themed novel, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in Mein Kampf.”

“Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born,” wrote the Southern Poverty Law Center in their analysis.

South Bay religious and community leaders join in an interfaith prayer at the Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment in San Jose.
South Bay religious and community leaders join in an interfaith prayer at the Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment in San Jose. (Peter Jon Shuler/KQED)

Although the emails are from 2015 and 2016, Miller went on to become a senior adviser to President Trump and is often considered the architect of many of the administration’s immigration policies.

It was those policies — from the travel ban to the separation of children from their parents at the border — that the community leaders in the South Bay specifically called out.

“I’m a professor at San Jose State University and I’m here because my students, who are incredibly diverse, are nervous,” said Scott Myers-Lipton.

“They’re scared of this time that we live in and particularly of white supremacy. And we have a man that is in charge of immigration policy in this country that has been shown now to be dabbling, to be thinking about, to be promoting, to be encouraging white supremacist ideology. And my students deserve better than that.”

After various community leaders spoke, they then joined in an interfaith prayer and call-and-response before singing “We Shall Overcome.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment but has previously dismissed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report as a left-wing smear campaign.

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