CNN invited the uncle of White House policy adviser Stephen Miller to appear Friday to criticize the Trump administration’s “racist” response to the caravan of Central American migrants approaching the Southern border.
David Glosser criticized the hard-line immigration approach advocated by his nephew in harshly personal terms and invoked his family’s personal history fleeing Nazi prosecution to accuse the administration of abandoning the “American dream.”
“I can understand that you have political preferences but this institutional political racism that’s been sweeping across the country, focused on vilifying people you don’t know, people who are just like us, just like our family,” Glosser told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota. “We needed to come here, we needed to find some place to go and those who couldn’t suffered the consequences, so to me it’s a complete repudiation of the American dream.”
The Trump administration is deploying 5,000 troops to address the expected influx of asylum seekers as some 4,000 migrants from Honduras and El Salvador are expected to arrive on the U.S.–Mexico border in the coming weeks.
Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote an op-ed in August in which he called his nephew an “immigration hypocrite” for his prominent role in guiding the administration toward a more stringent immigration-enforcement policy.
The op-ed recounted the story of Miller’s ancestors, who survived the holocaust by fleeing what is now Belarus for America, and suggested that Miller’s support for ending family migration constituted a betrayal of those forebears.
“Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions,” Glosser wrote. “After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration.”