White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Monday repeatedly questioned a reporter inquiring about the Trump administration’s deportations of women with young children.
Outside the White House, a reporter wondered whether such deportations made sense financially.
“I’m not disputing the facts surrounding many of these women who were removed with their kids, but given that you’re looking for more money from Congress, ICE says they need more beds, they need more money, is it the best use of the administration’s resources to be going after moms of young kids, basically?” the reporter asked.
Miller at first declined to answer. Instead, he decided to be the one asking questions.
“Do you yourself have an opinion on the subject?” he asked.
“I’m more interested in yours,” the reporter replied.
Miller again responded with his own question.
“What percentage of the—let’s just pick an even number of say, 10 million illegal aliens,” he said. “Let’s say Biden released 10 million illegal aliens into the country over the last four years. What percentage do you think we stay here of those 10 million?”
The reporter replied that he wasn’t interested in “doing a game show” with Miller, who responded with yet another question.
“Is it your view that if a Democrat president releases 10, 15, 20 million illegals into the country, then they all get to stay forever and for all of life?”
The reporter, seeming a bit exasperated by this point, told Miller, “I don’t have a view about what Democratic presidents do.
“I’m asking about what the Republican president—” he reiterated, before being cut off.
“Okay, so you don’t want to answer the question because you know the answer is obvious: everyone that Biden let in has to go home, of course, and it’s a crazy thing to even ask,” the Trump official said.
When the reporter reminded Miller that his question was about how the administration is prioritizing its work, Miller finally got around to an answer.
“ICE is going to continue to focus on raids against high criminal aliens,” he said. ”We’re going to use the entire force and power the federal government to get them all. Many will choose also to leave voluntarily and take advantage of the CBP Home app. But we’re not going ask taxpayers to subsidize the presence of a single illegal alien in this country.”
In one particularly egregious case, the Trump administration deported a Honduras-born mother and her 2-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen. The pair are set to have a hearing next month.
The judge, Trump appointee Terry Doughty, wrote that the court has a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Other deportations to Honduras last week, according to civil rights groups and families’ attorneys, were of a cancer-stricken four-year-old and their seven-year-old sibling. Both are citizens who were also deported with their mother.
In each family’s case, the ACLU says, “ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them.”
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