In the checkered sanctuary history of the country, the patriarch of a Jewish family who fled from a dirt shack in the village of what became Belarus to escape the Czar’s army, arrived at Ellis Island on Jan. 7, 1903, with $8 and knowing no English.

Wolf-Leib Glosser’s son Nathan joined him and they made a living selling goods on street corners and worked in sweatshops. They managed to save enough money to pay off the debts of relatives left behind and for passage of immediate family, who joined then in 1906.

One family member, Sam Glosser, settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a steel and coal town, and the Glosser family then sold goods from a horsedrawn wagon. They later opened a haberdashery and a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, eventually employing thousands of workers and big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange.

The United States was not welcoming of Jews but, “In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals and, most important, American citizens,” one of them, Dr. David Glosser, wrote in Politico on Aug. 13, 2018.

Glosser told the story as national attention focused on one family member, his nephew, Stephen Miller, an aide to President Donald Trump.

“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,” wrote Glasser, a retired neuropsychologist and member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University and Jefferson Medical College. “I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so cooly espouses – the travel ban, the radical decrease of fugitives, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants – had been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

A month later, Miller’s childhood rabbi, Neil Comess-Daniels, of the reform synagogue Beth Shir Shalom of Santa Monica, Calif., featured him in a sermon celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Referring to Miller by name, The Guardian reported, the rabbi stated that “you’ve set back the Jewish contribution to making the world spiritually whole through your arbitrary division of these desperate people. The actions that you now encourage President Trump to take make it obvious that you didn’t get my, or our, Jewish message.”

And Jews Against White Nationalism, comprising eight Jewish organizations, issued a statement in 2019 calling Miller a “white nationalist” and the “architect of the Trump administration’s cruel and endless attacks on immigrants.”

Far from being contrite, Miller is pushing an even more supersized immigration program which the President is pursuing in his second term, pledging to deport all estimated 11 undocumented migrants. So severe is the situation that protests have erupted in several cities over what some critics see as the unconscionable manner of the deportations. Trump took the rare and perhaps unconstitutional step of unilaterally deploying California’s National Guard, without the consent of the state’s governor, and activating a battalion of combat-ready Marines.

Trump is the focus of the growing outrage, especially over how the deportations are taking place, but Miller is the architect. He evidently relishes the power which the President has given him in his second term as deputy chief of staff for policy. It gives him an opportunity to continue to influence immigration policy to suit what critics say is his personal agenda: “white nationalism.”

Trump based his political fortunes on an anti-immigration platform when he first sought the Presidency and it quickly became a key issue for his base. But apparently even he has trouble with Miller’s zeal. He “poked fun” at his aide’s “obsession with immigrants” at a meeting during the 2024 campaign, saying, in the words of The New York Times, that if it were up to Miller, “there would be only 100 million people in this country and they would all look like Mr. Miller,” citing a person with knowledge of the comment. Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt denied it happened.

Some critics have been less kind than the President. In 2021, MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan described Miller as “probably the most repugnant individual to serve” in Trump’s administration, HuffPost reported. “There is no shortage of odious people who gained power, thanks to Donald Trump. But if you had to pick just one who should be pushed out of public life, who should hang his head in shame and never be heard from or taken seriously even again, it has to be Stephen Miller.”

Earlier this month, and four years after Hasan’s rebuke, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran declared in a social media post that Miller was “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and was a “world-class hater,” adding, “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” ABC News fired Moran over the post, which has since been deleted, saying the network “does not condone subjective personal attacks on others.”

Suspicion about Miller’s motivation for the very hardline attitude towards immigration is based on his background going back to his high school days. Vanity Fair reported in August 2019 that his “obsession with immigrants” was evident when he ended a friendship with a high school classmate because of his “Latino heritage” and his disdain for some others who “lacked basic English skills.”

Such attitudes were evidently fostered by Miller’s contacts with David Horowitz, a former aide in his high school, according to Jean Guerro, who wrote the 2020 book “HATEMONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” which was adapted by Politico. Miller was an aide to Alabama’s Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions when Horowitz sent a paper to the senator’s office following major Republican losses in 2012. According to Guerro, “Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. ‘Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,’ Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to “voters’ base instincts.”

Guerro argues that Horowitz shaped Miller’s thinking, adding, “If you want to understand the language Trump uses to talk about immigrants and his opponents, or the immigration policies he has put in place, often via Miller, you have also to understand Horowitz and the formative role he played in Miller’s career and life.” Miller is also known to be acquainted with known “white nationalists” and with reading books such as “The Camp of the Saints,” a 1973 novel by French author and explorer Jean Raspail that claimed that immigrants would destroy Western civilization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala., published about 900 messages which it said Miller had sent to the rightwing Breitbart News between March 2015 and June 2016 indicating that he “tried to shape news coverage with material he found on at least one website that espouses white nationalist viewpoints, including fringe theories that people of color are trying to engage in a ‘white genocide’.”

Far from breaking with Trump, Miller has ensured that he stays as close to the President, including the use flattery. In April 2024, HuffPost provided samples, including describing him as having “an encyclopedic memory” and being “the most gifted politician of our time.” Then there was this: After analyzing Trump’s mugshot at the Fulton County, Georgia, jail last year, Miller declared, “They say the eyes are the window into the human soul. That blazing set of eyes that we saw in that photograph revealed a soul that is literally burning with a righteous flame on behalf of 300 Americans. That is one of the most powerful images that I have ever seen.”