Katie Miller Tried (Really, Very Hard!) But Just Couldn't Give A Shit About Migrant Children

Image: Paul Morigi/Stringer (Getty Images)

Katie Miller—press secretary of Vice President Mike Pence, wife of white nationalist cheerleader Stephen Miller, and covid-19 haver—allegedly visited a child detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border in an attempt to empathize with the plight of small children cruelly torn from their parents and incarcerated, but despite this journey toward human emotions, ended up not giving a fuck about them.

According Separated, a new book by NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff about the Trump administration’s disastrous family-separation policy which removed thousands of migrant children from their parents, Miller lacked empathy for the frightened, undocumented kids, something that even a few of her colleagues managed to possess.

From Business Insider, emphasis ours:

[Rachel] Maddow previewed a part of the book where Soboroff interviewed Katie Miller, who at the time was a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency enacting the policy.

The excerpt Maddow published on the show quoted Miller as telling Soboroff: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about the separations differently. But I don’t think so … DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself — to try to make me more compassionate — but it didn’t work.”

Soboroff wrote: “’It didn’t work? I will never forget what I saw. Seriously. Are you a white nationalist?’ I asked, exasperated.”

Miller responded: “No, but I believe if you come to America you should assimilate. Why do we need to have ‘Little Havana’?”

Let’s be clear: Katie Miller went to detention centers, looked at all the terrified migrant children stuck in these grim—often unhygienic—facilities, absolutely clueless as to where their parents or guardians were and didn’t feel an iota of sympathy. Instead, she wondered why a four-year-old from Guatemala isn’t assimilating. She couldn’t even muster up bullshitting about her point of view for the sake of looking even slightly more human, not even a hamhanded, “Well, this is sad predicament, but we need to get a handle of our borders.” Instead, she shrugged off the entire affair as a waste of time and was happy to admit it.

Of course, anyone who willingly marries Stephen Miller, an eggheaded racist who has harassed Latinx people since he was in high school, is likely to have comparably nauseating opinions of immigrants and anyone non-white. But it’s especially rich coming from a woman who is one beach day and a broken flat iron away from not being read as white herself. The cruelty that the Millers have toward today’s immigrants ignores the connection between antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment, negates the long history of American-Jewish resistance to restrictive immigration law, and it spits on the graves of Jewish refugees who were denied entry by the United States when they needed it most.