David Glosser says despite family ties, he cannot justify keeping silent about ‘virtual kidnapping of thousands of children’

Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly savaged by his uncle for promoting the separation of immigrant families at the US-Mexico border.

David Glosser, a retired clinical neuroscientist living in Pennsylvania whose sister is Stephen Miller’s mother, said the policy was so abhorrent he felt a duty to speak out. In an essay published Monday on Politico, Glosser described the family history that he and Miller share as the descendants of Jews who came to America more than a century ago to escape the pogroms of tsarist Russia.

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“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser wrote.

In an interview with the Guardian, Glosser acknowledged that he was risking a rift within the Glosser-Miller family by speaking out but did not think he had a choice. “It’s bound to raise hard feelings,” he said, “but in the face of the virtual kidnapping of thousands of innocent children, I didn’t feel I had the ethical standing to remain silent.”

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The first Glosser to reach the United States from what is now Belarus, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived at Ellis Island in 1903. He was soon joined by other family members in a process that Miller and other Trump administration officials have repeatedly denounced as an intolerable abuse they call “chain migration”.

“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers,” David Glosser wrote in his essay, “had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses … been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

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Miller, who is 32, grew up in the liberal city of Santa Monica, California. He soon stood out in high school as a gadfly who took pleasure in expressing disgust at his surroundings and denounced his teachers and classmates on Larry Elder’s rightwing radio show. He did much the same as an undergraduate at Duke University and went on to work for rightwing Republicans known for their hard line on immigration, including Michele Bachmann and Jeff Sessions, before joining the Trump campaign.

Glosser said he did not know Miller well as a child because they lived on opposite coasts and had not had a substantive conversation with him in more than ten years. “My observations are all based on the public record,” he said. “I hardly know the guy.”

Of Miller’s mother, Miriam, he said: “Obviously my sister is protective of her son and is proud of his achievements, but how she really feels about it, I don’t know. She and I have avoided discussion of politics for many years.”

He had, however, heard from dozens of members of the broader Glosser family in the two years since first posting about his family history and his nephew’s politics on Facebook in October 2016. He would not characterize what they have said about Miller personally but said: “They have all written in support of immigration rights and the protection of refugees.”

Miller is not the first political figure to spark a family rift in the age of Trump. Bobby Goodlatte, the son of the Virginia Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte, has publicly criticized his father for attacking the now fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok and said he hoped his father lost his seat in the November midterms.

Miller’s parents have made no public statements about their son since his elevation to the top ranks of national politics, and their views, while a hot topic of speculation among their Santa Monica neighbors, who note they have in the past been registered Democrats, remain unknown.

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Glosser, however, had no compunction in saying that if the family separation policy were enacted under wartime conditions it would be considered a war crime under international law.

The policy reminded him, he said, of the tsarist policy of kidnapping the male children of many Jewish families and forcing them into the army as conscripts. “To see this kind of thing repeated is a ghoulish echo of those days,” he told the Guardian. “To see this conduct perpetrated in our name, and in particular our family’s name, is just horrible.”

