What a grim irony it is that Stephen Miller is the descendent of persecuted Jews who, to save their lives and to better themselves, emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century.
It is a grim irony because Miller is Trump’s right-hand thug in the cruel persecution of immigrants in the United States. A variation of that vicious persecution was perpetrated against Miller’s own family ancestors in Czarist Russia and the Nazi reign of terror throughout Europe.
Miller’s uncle sharply criticized him (Stephen) in an essay he wrote and posted online in 2018. In that year, during Trump’s first term in the White House, Miller succeeded in his heartbreaking policy of separating children from their immigrant parents at the Southern Border.
Miller’s uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, is a retired neuropsychologist associated with the Boston School of Medicine.
The following is a paragraph from Glosser’s essay:
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is 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’s great-grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, came to America in 1903 because of persecution and forced military conscription in a village of Eastern Europe. Wolf-Leib was Stephen Miller’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side.
“Had Mr. Trump’s immigration policies been in effect at that time (early years of the 20th Century),” Glosser wrote, “I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers.”
Glosser wrote he fears his nephew, Stephen, has forgotten his heritage and the suffering his ancestors endured.
“Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics,” he stated, “Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions . . . If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in effect a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Those were Glosser’s thoughts seven years ago. Can you imagine how he is reacting to Miller’s/Trump’s current intensified cruelties? Glosser, like the rest of us, see scenes on television (or in person) of the following:
- Raids and round-ups of people, including teenagers, even at their work places that recall the round-ups of Jews by Nazi Gestapo squads who then sent those people to work camps and death camps.
- Scenes of parents and children screaming and crying in fright and terror as they are snatched from neighborhoods or city streets or right outside their places of employment.
- The deportations of people to holding centers that resemble zoos with little or no food, cramped and substandard bathroom facilities and hot or cold temperatures, such as the hot-humid hell of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a sadistic detention center in the Florida Everglades. Certain Floridian politicians are so “proud” of that facility, even showing if off with tours.
- Deporting people to dangerous countries they have never lived in before.
Just months ago, there was the deportation of known illegal-immigrant criminals. That was a good policy outcome, but since then any immigrants have been demonized and rounded up willy-nilly as if they, too, are dangerous criminals.
During his years as a high-school student in Santa Monica, Calif. Stephen Miller often railed against immigrants, and since then his wish has gleefully come true as a senior aide to Donald Trump with Miller’s goal of deporting 3,000 immigrants per day, come hell or high water.
Dr. Glosser noted that during five decades, his immigrant ancestors emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become educated merchants, scholars, professionals and American citizens.
Glosser added: “I shudder at what would have become of them had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses (travel ban, the separation of children and parents, talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants) had been in effect when my great-grandfather Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”
We should all be shuddering. What’s needed is a long-overdue compassionate immigration bill approved by Congress.
