She beat Stephen Miller within the race for highschool class president. Now she’s preventing his deportation efforts | EUROtoday

Cynthia Santiago, an lawyer in Southern California, received her highschool presidential class race in opposition to Stephen Miller, the present White House Deputy Chief of Staff. More than 20 years later, Santiago is making an attempt to combat Miller’s mass deportation efforts.

Santiago, the daughter of immigrants, has been working to defend immigrants’ rights since 2012. But having gone to highschool with Miller, watching his rise to prominence in President Donald Trump’s world, and the actions of the administration he’s a senior member of, anxious her.

“I was very concerned about where his thoughts were going, his views on immigration and the immigrant communities, his views against diversity in the United States,” Santiago instructed The Daily Beast.

Miller, largely credited because the architect of Trump’s immigration insurance policies throughout his first administration, has seemingly all the time abided by right-wing beliefs and anti-immigration insurance policies.

Recalling the day she received her class election at Santa Monica High School, Santiago stated that Miller was “booed” off stage for giving an incendiary speech about selecting up trash.

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A video of the second, posted on-line years in the past, exhibits Miller on stage asking his fellow college students, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”

A faculty newspaper clipping, obtained by The Daily Beastsays Miller’s microphone was turned off and he was escorted off stage for what college officers stated was going “over time.”

Writing for the Santa Monica Lookout in 2002, Miller advocated for all bulletins to be written in English solely, claimed “very few” Hispanic college students have been in honors courses, and asserted that the varsity’s political correctness would make Osama bin Laden “feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”

The Independent has requested the White House for remark.

Santiago stated that a lot of Miller’s ideas are “things that he digs from history” and that he doesn’t have a lot of a “perspective of the world we live in today.”

But along with his standing as an in depth Trump ally, Department of Homeland Security advisor, and deputy chief of employees, Miller is ready to convey his ideas to life.

The California lawyer says she is seeing firsthand how a few of Miller’s techniques are impacting immigrants in Southern California.

Santiago instructed The Daily Beast that one of many methods the federal government is rising the variety of deportees is by taking pending asylum instances marked as “favorable” to court docket and revoking an individual’s short-term standing.

“I saw [ICE ] taking people from courtrooms, sticking them in the van,” Santiago stated.

“The person is basically at an undocumented status with no case pending, and they’re vulnerable to be picked up,” Santiago stated. “They have no status, no filing, no case opening.”

But Miller, and the Trump administration, are pushing to deport as many undocumented immigrants as doable to maintain good on the president’s marketing campaign promise, in no matter means they will.