The Worst of It

Stephen Miller prompted me to write this post. Yes, THAT Stephen Miller, Trump’s new “homeland security” advisor. The Stephen Miller who told the New York Times in November, 2023, that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” The Stephen Miller who described how a Trump administration would build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for deporting immigrants, to be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”

Stephen Miller, the descendent of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, stood in Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 and yelled, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (Miller’s great-grandparents Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie, immigrated to the US in the early 1900s, fleeing antisemitic pogroms in Belarus.)

On November 19, Miller told Fox News that as soon as Trump takes the oath of office, “He will immediately sign executive orders sealing the border shut, beginning the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Miller has been described by Naureen Shah, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, DC as “the brains behind the worst of it.” The “worst of it,” would be Trump’s cruel family separation policy, as well as his 2017 executive order blocking refugees and travelers with passports from seven Muslim-majority countries, a ban described by Amnesty International as cruel, inhumane, and a violation of international law.

I’ve been thinking of Stephen Miller because I just finished reading a fascinating book called “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust,” by Rafael Medoff, founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington DC. The book describes how, with the acquiescence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe during the Holocaust was “deliberately suppressed” far below the limits set by US law.

From the time that Hitler rose to power in 1933, the US government was well aware of the atrocities being carried out against Jews in Germany. Yet, as I wrote in this Medium post here, Breckinridge Long, the US State Department’s official in charge of administering immigration laws from 1939 to 1944, “almost single-handedly blocked Jewish immigration.” The State Department managed, between 1933 and 1943, “to leave unfilled more than 400,000 places within the quota for countries which were under Nazi domination,” as Jamie Sayen wrote in “Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima.”

By January 1942, the Allied leadership had publicly confirmed that two million Jews had already been murdered by the Nazis, Medoff reports. But only on December 17, 1942, did the US government publicly acknowledge the Nazi regime’s ongoing mass murder campaign against European Jews. In early December of that year, Jewish leaders presented FDR with an extensive report about the fate of European Jewish communities. Roosevelt confirmed that “the United States is very well acquainted with most of the facts you are now bringing to our attention.”

For many years, however, Roosevelt’s government stymied all attempts to rescue European Jews from the Nazis. As Medoff documents, his administration refused to admit Jewish refugees to the US Virgin Islands (or sparsely populated Alaska.) In testimony to Congress in November 1943, Assistant Secretary Long claimed that “there just is not any transportation,” to carry refugees, “even as Liberty ships that brought troops and soldiers to Europe returned to the United States empty,” Medoff writes.

Many Jewish leaders begged Roosevelt to take action to rescue the Jews from the Nazis. In one very moving chapter, Medoff describes the “Rabbis’ March,” that took place in Washington, DC, on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Four hundred rabbis, mostly from the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, marched from Union Station to the Capitol.

“Two of the rabbis read aloud the group’s petition to the president, in Hebrew and in English,” Medoff writes. “Children, infants, and elderly men and women are crying to us, ‘Help!’” the rabbis proclaimed. “Millions have already fallen dead, sentenced to fire and sword, and tens of thousands have died of starvation . . . And we, how can we stand up to pray on the holy day of Yom Kippur, knowing that we haven’t fulfilled our responsibility? So we have come, broken-hearted on the eve of our holiest day, to ask you, our honorable President Franklin Roosevelt . . . to form a special agency to rescue the remainder of the Jewish nation in Europe.”

Upon marching to the White House, however, the rabbis were told that the president was unable to see them “because of the pressure of other business,” even though, as Medoff reports, “his schedule was remarkably light that afternoon.” While the rabbis stood across the street, “waiting to see if their representatives would be admitted to the White House, President Roosevelt left through a rear exit, thereby eluding the protesters.”

On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt did sign an executive order establishing a War Refugee Board, empowering it “to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death.” Through the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, and with the aid of the War Refugee Board, about 200,000 Jews in Budapest were saved. Exactly 982 refugees were transported from Allied-occupied Italy to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in August 1944.

When we listen to Stephen Miller, we should remember that hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazism could have been legally admitted to the US had the Roosevelt Administration chosen to fill the legal quotas for immigrants, under the Immigration Act of 1924. Instead, most perished.

Today, it is absolutely legal for people fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries to seek asylum in the United States. As noted by The International Rescue Committee, “the right to seek asylum was incorporated into international law following the atrocities of World War II.” The US Congress adopted key provisions of the 1951 Refugee Convention into U.S. immigration law when it passed the Refugee Act of 1980. Under US immigration law, a person granted asylum is legally allowed to remain in the country without fear of deportation.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, more than half of migrants and displaced people arriving at the US-Mexico border come from six Latin-American countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia. From Mexico, they are fleeing intra-communal and criminal violence. In Guatemala, “extortion by gangs, poverty, and the effects of worsening climate change on farmers” are all driving displacement. Since 2014, almost eight million Venezuelans have fled an economic crisis and authoritarian repression under President Nicolás Maduro.

“Stolpersteine” (brass-plated “stumbling stones”) in Vienna, Austria, record the names of Jewish doctors deported to their deaths in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi death camps. Photo by Larry Kluger

For those who cheer gleefully for Trump’s mass deportation plans, I would ask you to consider what it must feel like to flee poverty, repression, violence, the ravages of the climate crisis, and the risk of death, only to have the door slammed in your face. It has happened before. It’s happening now.