type: timeline_event
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller publicly attacked the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, suggesting America was better off under the 1920s national origins quota system that favored Western and Northern European immigrants over those from "third world countries." Miller's comments came as the administration exploited a pandemic relief fraud scandal in Minnesota to disparage the entire Somali immigrant community.
The Hart-Celler Act eliminated the explicitly racist national origins quota system that had restricted immigration from non-white countries since the 1920s. Miller characterized the civil rights era reform as a policy disaster, echoing white nationalist talking points about demographic change. His attack on the 1965 law represents one of the most explicit statements of the administration's white nationalist immigration philosophy.
The comments accompanied intensified ICE operations targeting Somali communities in Minneapolis, with agents staging arrests in Target parking lots and Miller and Trump using the fraud scandal to characterize an entire immigrant community as criminal. The targeting reflects the administration's pattern of exploiting individual incidents to justify collective punishment of ethnic communities.