Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is circulating a petition demanding the immediate dismissal of senior White House adviser Stephen Miller after hundreds of his emails were found to promote a white nationalist agenda and far-right, anti-immigrant ideology.
Documents obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center show that in the months before Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Mr Miller emailed the right-wing website Breitbart more than 900 times, citing white nationalist websites and promoting eugenics and "white genocide" conspiracies. The petition notes that the report found no instance where Mr Miller spoke sympathetically or even neutrally about non-white groups.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez said Mr Miller "has been exposed as a bona fide white nationalist" and "must resign." She is joined by other Democrats, including Ilhan Omar, who said "now we have the emails to prove it," and Bernie Sanders, who called Mr Miller's views "a danger to the American people." Earl Blumenhauer said Mr Miller "should never have been hired and should be fired immediately."
Mr Miller has long been accused of promoting a white nationalist agenda within the White House, where he is seen as the chief architect of anti-immigration policies, including the travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. He has also been accused of saying he would be "happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America's soil" and has publicly described his approach of presenting immigrants with "multiple unsolvable dilemmas."
The emails, dating from 2015 to 2016, were provided by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor fired for anti-Muslim tweets, who said: "What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration." The White House has described the organisation behind the report as an "utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organisation" but has not commented on the content of the messages.
