by Jim Acosta
But it was Sanders who provided us with perhaps the most alarming of all the administration guests to waltz into the Briefing Room. Yes, I’m talking about Stephen Miller, the president’s domestic policy and speechwriting guru, who had arrived to talk to us about his signature issue, immigration. Needless to say, anytime he spoke on the issue, I found myself recoiling from his words.
Miller came into the Briefing Room on August 2 to announce the new administration policy for cutting legal immigration by half. That’s right. This was not a proposal to stop illegal immigration. Miller laid out how Trump wanted to sharply reduce the number of legal immigrants coming into the country. The administration, Miller told us, was proposing a merit or point system for those immigrants.
Speak fluent English? You receive more points than those applicants who aren’t fluent. Other points are awarded if you have an advanced degree or even if you’ve won an Olympic medal.
As Stephen was going around the room and taking questions, it occurred to me that Trump, as he had in so many areas, was attempting to do more than just alter U.S. immigration policy. He was trying to change the very nature of America. For generations, the United States has welcomed people from all walks of life, all education levels, all races, colors, creeds, and religious backgrounds. That’s what makes America . . . America.
Other countries have done what Stephen was proposing. That’s fine. But those countries aren’t the United States.
Now, at the time of this briefing, Trump’s immigration policies weren’t in the news every day, but I’d never stopped being bothered by them. Like Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico (that Mexico had declared it would never pay for), his legal immigration reform plan seemed driven primarily by a prejudice particularly against newcomers to the United States who were not white. Listening to Stephen take questions, I wanted to challenge him not on the bullet points of the plan, but on the motivations behind it. My thought was that Trump’s RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act was uniquely un-American.
I didn’t intend to confront Miller in any dramatic way, I simply wanted to ask him my question. As the briefing dragged on, I wondered if he would even call on me, but finally he did, on the final question. Stephen, who fancies himself something of a scholar on far-right immigration policy, engaged with the glee of a debate team captain. All of a sudden the Briefing Room became a debate room. I held up what I felt was Exhibit A in the defense of America as a welcoming nation to immigrants: the Statue of Liberty.
ACOSTA: What you’re proposing here, what the president’s proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them, you have to speak English? Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?
MILLER: Well, first of all, right now, it’s a requirement that to be naturalized you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of immigration systems would be actually very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and light in the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring [to] that was added later is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty. But more fundamentally, the history . . .
I told Stephen I thought he was engaging in some “National Park revisionism.”
Now, there are times of course when, for a reporter, it’s better not to engage. Perhaps this was one of those times, but I felt I had to try to strip away Miller’s rhetoric, as he seemed intent on painting a negative picture of undocumented immigrants and sometimes even immigration at every turn. I hadn’t wanted to debate the policy in front of the whole press corps; I’d just wanted an answer to my question. Instead, Miller had opted for a debate.
Over the next several minutes, Stephen and I ended up going on at some length about what the Statue of Liberty represented in terms of numbers of legal immigrants, language requirements, and, more broadly, what was behind the larger policy of the Trump administration. My point to Stephen that day was that from the campaign trail to the Oval Office, the administration had repeatedly, consistently come across as hostile to immigrants. After years of racially loaded rhetoric around immigrants, its motivations around immigration policy would always be suspect.
If you look at the criteria Stephen was laying out—and feel free to look this up—there appeared to be an intention to put a premium on immigrants coming to the United States from more Anglocentric countries. As Miller laid out in the Briefing Room that day, immigrants coming from parts of the developing world would be at a serious disadvantage in the new Trump/Miller legal immigration system. The Irish, Italians, Germans, and Russians who sailed under the Statue of Liberty and up to Ellis Island were hardly fluent in English when they arrived on America’s shores. So, what are we saying when we establish such criteria after those immigrants have been assimilated into the United States? I’ll tell you what we’re saying—or, at least, I’ll tell you what the Stephen Millers of the world are saying: they are rolling up the welcome mat and telling the rest of the planet that people of color need not apply. Stephen, you could argue, was simply putting it in plain English.
One interesting moment in our exchange came when Miller, after being challenged on these points, lobbed what appeared to be a fresh line of attack. According to him, I was revealing my “cosmopolitan bias.” What in the world is a “cosmopolitan bias,” you ask? It is as bizarre to me now as it was then, but it is not an unfamiliar term. As it turns out, the term cosmopolitan was used by Joseph Stalin to purge anti-Soviet critics in the USSR. Former CNN anchor Jeff Greenfield wrote a piece about this slur in Politico, in which he unearthed this quote from Stalin: “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.”
“Enemy of the people?” “Cosmopolitan bias?” Anybody else see a pattern here?
The “cosmopolitans,” Greenfield writes, were academics, writers, scientists, and often Jewish. Miller is from a Jewish family, so I hardly think he is espousing anti-Semitic views. Still, white supremacists, nationalists, and neo-Nazis who make up the “alt-right” have all adopted the term cosmopolitan when speaking of the opposing side. ThinkProgress uncovered passages from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke railing against “cosmopolitan” views that Israel be a “Jewish-only state.” The term was also employed by the anti-immigration forces at VDARE, a white nationalist group that describes the battle over immigration as “an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.” As noted in Volker Ullrich’s book Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939, cosmopolitan was an anti-Semitic term “used against the Jews by Nazis and Bolsheviks alike” who were “considered not only cosmopolitan, but also rootless, and in the late 1940s the term became a code word for Jews who insisted on their Jewish identity.”
Time and again, before Miller used the insult, references to the term cosmopolitan bias appear in far-right literature as an attack on proponents of multiculturalism, tolerance of minorities, and diversity. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Miller hurled that epithet at me during the White House briefing, but I think not. Miller is exceedingly fluent in the language of anti-immigration zealots. He has been advocating their ideas, their proposals, and their worldview for years.
Even without being accused of having a cosmopolitan bias, I found the conversation around the Statue of Liberty partic
ularly troubling. Lady Liberty is such a powerful image for all Americans, one that lies at the heart of how we view ourselves and how, for generations, the world has viewed us. My father didn’t travel to America by ship, sailing below the Statue of Liberty, as so many immigrants did decades ago, and he wasn’t processed through Ellis Island, but he was welcomed into this new country. Were there people who were rude to him and my grandmother (who spoke little English) when they first arrived and at times during the years that followed? Sure, of course. All immigrants endure that. Still, my father was certainly not painted with a broad brush by the president of the United States as part of a community of “rapists” and criminals flooding into the country.
Moreover, Miller’s alternative facts on Lady Liberty were insulting to a disturbing degree. Just go to the National Park Service website for the Statue of Liberty. There’s a page dedicated to Lady Liberty entitled “The Immigrant’s Statue.” There you can find photo after photo of boats teeming with immigrants coming into New York Harbor, beaming with hope for their future in a new country. Italian, Irish, and other European immigrants are seen holding the hands of their children as they arrive on America’s shores. Towering above them is, of course, Lady Liberty.
The poem “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus, still resonates today:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Miller is right that the poem was mounted not on the statue itself, but inside the pedestal’s lower level, but let’s get the history right here. Lazarus, herself the child of Portuguese Jewish immigrants, wrote the sonnet in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the statue. According to the National Park Service website, the chairman of the statue project commissioned Lazarus’s work. In 1903 the poem was added to Lady Liberty, immediately transforming the statue into a symbol for immigrants coming to America. Regardless of when the poem was added, the larger meaning of its inclusion on the statue remains the same.
It was astonishing to sit in that Briefing Room as Stephen Miller pretended his administration was not motivated by racially prejudiced attitudes toward immigrants. Of course it is. A senior administration official who worked in both national security and on the issue of immigration once told me that Miller’s zeal to roll back the flow of migrants into the United States was indeed colored by his own personal beliefs. Stephen “didn’t hide his hatred,” the senior Homeland Security official told me privately. “It bled into all of the White House policies.” Stephen did not respond to my requests to discuss this.
Similar to my exchanges with Spicer, confronting Stephen required a shift in strategy. Unorthodox tactics, such as reading a poem from the Statue of Liberty, sometimes do a better job of getting to the heart of the matter than asking the boilerplate policy-based questions. Go ahead and try to ask the question directly: Stephen, isn’t this a racist policy? He’s not going to bite at that apple. But poke the stick in places he’s not expecting, and you might throw him off his game and perhaps prompt a candid remark that reveals everything.
A couple of weeks later, Sarah Sanders was briefing reporters on Air Force One when she noted that it was Stephen Miller’s birthday. She joked that he was hoping for a text from Jim Acosta. To show, once again, that there were no hard feelings, I sent him a text and wished him a happy birthday. He immediately wrote back, “Thanks!”
For the record, I would debate Miller anytime anywhere on the subject of immigration—not because I have a passion for flooding America with immigrants from south of the border, as the xenophobes would have you believe. (Miller accused me at that briefing of being in favor of “open borders,” a tactic used by anti-immigration zealots. Nothing could be further from the truth.) I would do it because the president of the United States of America and the people who work at the White House should always be champions for our nation’s immigrants. That’s the American way, even if it’s not Trump’s way, or Stephen’s.
Like my confrontations with Trump, my exchange with Stephen Miller struck a nerve with the public. Yes, the death threats once again rolled in, but so did gestures of gratitude. One CNN viewer sent me a T-shirt depicting the Statue of Liberty and featuring Emma Lazarus’s poem. Another viewer sent me a children’s book about Lady Liberty’s true meaning. Despite an official attempt from the White House to change the significance of this enduring symbol of American freedom, the people at home weren’t fooled. So many Americans, I was reminded, were on the side of truth and tolerance. In the days that followed, I met Indian Americans, Arab Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, all of whom thanked me for standing up for the immigrant story that had come to define America. My encounters with them have stayed with me. Sounds corny, I know, but they believe in the America I grew up learning about. They believe in the America I believe in, an America for all of us. We are and should always remain a beacon of hope, the brightest light in the universe.
7
Charlottesville
For the first six months of Trump’s presidency, life for the White House press corps was a bit like the movie Groundhog Day—no matter what happened the day before, you would wake up and realize that Trump was still president, the world was still a mess, and we were covering it all, over and over again. Patterns began to emerge. The Trump tweets, hyperbolic, misspelled, and factually challenged, would come in the morning, throwing off the news cycle. Then there was usually some kind of media session with Trump during which he would attack an adversary, real or imagined, and the narrative of the day would change again, leaving Spicer, Sanders, and the mystery guest at the Briefing Room podium to parrot falsehoods or worse to the American public. Looking back on some of this now, I see that it was all rather predictable, an odd thing to say given Trump’s frequent ability to shock the free world.
It was because of this strange rhythm, which normalized Trump’s extreme and unpredictable behavior, that everyone immediately saw the profound and disturbing implications of what unfolded during August 2017. Words, of course, do matter, a lot—a lesson this country would learn over and over again that August.
It began on August 11. Trump had spent the first part of the day drumming up another confrontation with North Korea, which, troubling as it was, seemed largely on a par with what he’d been saying recently. Later that night, roughly twelve hours after he’d sent a tweet informing North Korea that America was “locked and loaded” (after first warning Kim Jong-un that he would be subjected to “fire and fury”), darkness fell on the tiny city of Charlottesville, Virginia, save for the dozens of torch-wielding white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and other extremists from the nascent “alt-right” movement in America who were marching across the campus of the University of Virginia. These American fascists, who seemed to have come out of nowhere, had gathered for what they called a “Unite the Right” rally, which had been organized to protest the removal of a statue dedicated to the confederate war hero Robert E. Lee. The marchers carried Tiki torches and chanted such neo-Nazi slogans as “Jews will not replace us,” “Blood and soil,” and “White lives matter,” before encircling the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the UVA campus.
At the statue, they brawled with counterprotesters, some with the antifascist movement known as Antifa. The cops came in and bro
ke up the violence, at least for the night. There was no mistaking the images beaming out of Charlottesville and going viral around the world in a matter of seconds. A new face of hatred and evil had emerged in America.
The next day, on August 12, the Unite the Right demonstrators, many armed with weapons thanks to Virginia’s loose firearms laws, returned to Lee’s statue ready to do battle again, this time with deadly consequences. Carrying Confederate flags, and in some cases wearing red MAGA hats, the neo-Nazis and white nationalists fought again with counterprotesters on the streets of Charlottesville.
Then, in one horrific moment captured on video, a car driven by a white supremacist plowed into a group of people demonstrating against the extremists, killing a thirty-two-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. She had gone to the rally to speak out against the fascists. Nearly twenty other counterdemonstrators were injured. The driver, a twenty-year-old self-described Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr., was charged with Heyer’s murder. The day would claim two other lives in the area when two Virginia State Police officers were killed as their helicopter crashed after being deployed to bring order to Charlottesville.
Having grown up in Virginia, I couldn’t believe what had happened in my home state. Yes, the state was once the heart of the Confederacy, but the Virginia of my childhood and college days had evolved into a multiracial and much more moderate place. Indeed, it was a point of pride for me that it was home to the nation’s first elected African American governor, Douglas Wilder. My high school in the DC suburb of Annandale, Virginia, had actually been very diverse. Situated outside the nation’s capital but just inside the Beltway, Annandale High School boasted a student body of just about every race, creed, and color. My classmates all got along pretty well.