“It has never been easier in American history for illegal aliens to commit crimes of violence against Americans,” Miller, now White House senior policy adviser, argued in a Jan. 5, 2016, email with the subject line “off-the-record observation.”

In a Nov. 12 report, Hatewatch published emails that President Donald Trump’s de facto immigration czar sent to editors and reporters at Breitbart News while he was an aide to then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh leaked Miller’s emails to Hatewatch.



White House senior adviser Stephen Miller listens as President Donald Trump speaks in March 2018 at the White House in Washington. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Miller was referring to “convicted criminal aliens” he said the Obama administration was releasing from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Months earlier, Miller read an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that debunked a connection between immigration and crime, the emails show, but he chose to ignore it.

Jason L. Riley, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, noted in the op-ed that “numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants – regardless of nationality or legal status – are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated.”

In a July 15, 2015, email to Breitbart, Miller dismissed Riley’s writing as being “more lies about new [A]merica,” borrowing language found in white nationalist writing about evolving demographics. Hatewatch reached out to Riley for a comment about Miller’s email, but the think tank analyst did not respond.

Findings from the libertarian Cato Institute also back up Riley’s conclusions. The advocacy group American Immigration Council asserts there is no correlation between immigration and crime. The Marshall Project, a nonprofit group focusing on criminal justice issues, also found “no sign of a link” between undocumented immigration and crime. To find arguments of a connection between immigration and crime, one typically must turn to white nationalist websites or hate groups.

The two Miller emails cited earlier are emblematic of his views toward immigrants of color, apparent in the more than 900 emails McHugh shared with Hatewatch. Throughout Miller’s emails, he repeatedly portrays those immigrants as threatening or violent.

Breitbart News has dismissed the emails McHugh sent to Hatewatch. Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore pointed out that the person who leaked the emails was “fired years ago for a multitude of reasons.” McHugh has said she was fired for anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced the far right. She admits she should not have taken part in what two journalism experts contacted by Hatewatch called a propaganda campaign by Miller.

“It is no surprise to us that the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] opposes news coverage of illegal-immigrant crime and believes such coverage is disproportionate, especially when compared to the rest of the media, which often refuse to cover such crimes,” Moore wrote to Hatewatch.