Katie Miller is threatening the citizenship of a critic | Arwa Mahdawi

7 hours ago 3

It’s Miller Meltdown Time

Some couples bond over shared hobbies; others over shared values. The Maga bigwigs Stephen and Katie Miller, on the other hand, appear to have connected over their shared love of terrorizing immigrant children.

The political power couple, who married in 2020, bonded during Donald Trump’s first term, when Stephen helped engineer a family-separation policy at the border that ripped more than 5,000 children, as young as four months old, from their immigrant parents. At the time, Miller (then going by her maiden name, Waldman) was an immigration spokesperson, and a big fan of Stephen’s hardline policies. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” she told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book on the border policy, Separated. The book also quotes Miller saying she didn’t expect to change her mind: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently. But I don’t think so.”

Fast-forward to the present day and the married couple now share three young children. Stephen is White House deputy chief of staff and possibly the most dangerous man in the Trump administration. Miller, meanwhile, quit a mysterious role at Elon Musk’s private ventures back in May to start a podcast about motherhood as part of an apparent plan to recruit more women to Maga. Yep, the woman who couldn’t muster up any compassion for kids in cages is now a momfluencer.

Miller seems to have been correct in her earlier assessment: having kids hasn’t made her think differently about family separation, a practice that attorneys and former immigration officials allege has been revived. What has changed, however, is the fact that she’s now weaponizing her poor children against anyone who dares challenge her. And now that her husband is Trump’s right-hand man, she’s not just going after immigrants – she’s threatening to strip one of her critics of US citizenship.

This week, Miller appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, along with a panel that included the leftwing commentator Cenk Uygur, to discuss Islamophobic attacks on the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Miller kicked off the discussion with an incomprehensible point about the anti-Israel movement and then accused Uygur of “using coded language to attack American Jews and to say that we should not be here and we should not be in existence”.

Uygur retorted by saying she was lying, adding: “It’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying.” An epic meltdown ensued.

“Piers, quite frankly, I’m really sick and tired of this racist bigoted rhetoric that can comes from people like you against my husband, against my family and my children,” Miller yelled. (Uygur had said nothing about Miller’s children.) “I am raising Jewish children in this country … ”

“Who brought your children into this?” Uygur then said. “What a weirdo.”

Miller, who doesn’t appear to have much experience being challenged during an interview, then started ranting at Piers Morgan about how Uygur saying “the Millers lie” is coded language for them being Jewish. After some more screaming, she also told Uygur: “You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct … because you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar,” a frequent subject of Republican attacks.

You can watch the whole thing for yourself but the bottom line is this: the wife of the US homeland security adviser apparently threatened to denaturalize someone because she didn’t like the fact he criticized her.

This, to be clear, is hardly some one-off. Threatening to deport your critics, even those with American citizenship, seems to be Maga policy now. The representative Nancy Mace, a Trump loyalist, for example, has said she would “love to see” Omar, a progressive representative, “deported back to Somalia”.

Various Republicans are also threatening to deport Mamdani; indeed, Miller’s meltdown occurred during a discussion about how the representative Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee have been pushing the federal justice department to investigate Mamdani’s citizenship. (Mamdani was born in Uganda, moved to the US at age seven and became a citizen in 2018.) Fine, who has suggested Omar is a “Muslim terrorist” and called for Gaza to be nuked, recently demanded the federal government “review every naturalization of the past 30 years – starting with Mamdani”.

Fine doesn’t really need to be demanding this, by the way, because the government is already on it. Back in June, the justice department announced plans to prioritize efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their US citizenship. Barack Obama, I should note, also led a denaturalization push – but the difference between that and Trump 2.0 is the way in which the president is using deportation fears to chill political speech and intimidate his enemies.

While people of color are the main target of these attacks, even some privileged white people are being threatened with deportation or the loss of their citizenship because of their opinions – a terrifying throwback to McCarthyism. Back when Musk and Trump were feuding, for example, the president responded to a question on whether he’d deport the South African tech billionaire by saying: “I don’t know, we’ll have to take a look.” And, in July, Trump said he was thinking of revoking the citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell, an American-born comedian and actor who has repeatedly criticized the president. To be clear, Trump can’t legally take away the citizenship of someone born in the US. But as we all know by now, Trump rarely seems to look at the law as an impediment.

Expect more of this. The Trump administration has made it very clear to 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the US that they’d better keep their mouths shut to keep their passports. Ultimately, Miller’s threat on Piers Morgan’s show wasn’t just directed at Uygur, it was a warning to everyone in America: criticize Maga and there will be consequences.

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