Latest news with #SantaMonicaHighSchool
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Another right-wing White House aide from liberal Santa Monica?
When people analyze Stephen Miller's rise as a hard-right advisor to President Trump, they marvel that he could emerge from left-leaning Santa Monica. They see a political mutation. I see a throwback. That's because Miller is not the first polarizing advisor to a Republican president to emerge from the town at the western terminus of the 10 Freeway. It's the town that was once the political base of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden and birthplace of one of California's most liberal rent control laws. But long before Miller (and that lefty tilt) came another Santa Monica High School graduate — John Ehrlichman, President Nixon's chief domestic policy advisor. Ehrlichman graduated with the Santa Monica High class of 1942, 61 years before Miller left the campus at 4th Street and Pico Boulevard. He, too, would come to be depicted as one of the villainous advisors to a controversial Republican president. But back in his day, Ehrlichman was less of an outlier. Republican-leaning homeowners and the town's right-of-center Evening Outlook newspaper dominated Santa Monica politics in the 1940s and '50s. The onetime Eagle Scout went from 'Samohi' (also my alma mater) to UCLA and Stanford Law School. During his time at UCLA, Ehrlichman befriended H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman, and the duo soon hitched their futures to another Southern Californian, Nixon. The former congressman and vice president lost in the 1960 presidential campaign and the 1962 California governor's race. When he finally took the White House in 1968, Haldeman and Ehrlichman followed, the former as chief of staff and the latter as another key member of Nixon's inner circle. Ehrlichman also helped Nixon cover up Watergate, the scandal that began to unravel when police caught burglars bugging Democratic Party campaign offices at the Watergate hotel, office and apartment complex in Washington. Ehrlichman's role in the scandal got him bounced out of the Samohi Hall of Fame, though sentiment about giving him the boot was not universal. Most students and residents said Ehrlichman had disgraced the school and deserved to go, according to a New York Times story in 1973. But some others said he should not lose his spot of honor in the Hall of Fame until he had been put on trial. A jury soon convicted Ehrlichman of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury. He went to federal prison for 18 months. 'Although he went on to write novels, work with Native Americans and become involved in environmental issues, his role in Watergate continued to define and haunt him,' said his L.A. Times obituary in 1999, when he died at 73. And he never got back in the Santa Monica High School Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed on dozens of others, including Dodgers star Rick Monday, writer and comedian Sandra Tsing Loh and Olympic shot put gold medalist Parry O'Brien. Miller was also nominated for the Hall of Fame, during Trump's first term in office. But the board of the school's alumni association decided it was premature to judge the Republican, said alumni association President Phil Brock. 'We accept nominations from any Samohi graduate for another Samohi graduate for the Hall of Fame,' said Brock, who is also a past mayor of Santa Monica. 'I think it was premature to consider [Miller] at the time and I would still say that. Let's see how his lifetime accomplishments play out.' The Times' Deborah Vankin explores the luxury world of dog wellness in her latest story. Now we want to know how you pamper your furry best friends. Email us at essentialcalifornia@ and your response might appear in the newsletter this week. Today's great photo is from Times photographer Genaro Molina at the Los Angeles Zoo during a visit from some L.A. Unified migrant summer school students. The Trump administration wants to slash federal funding for programs supporting migrant children — including programs that allow some of California's most vulnerable children to visit the L.A. Zoo twice a week. Jim Rainey, staff writerDiamy Wang, homepage internIzzy Nunes, audience internKevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Old Clip Of Stephen Miller Praising Torture Resurfaces Amid Aggressive Immigration Enforcement
A video of White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller praising torture in 2003 is resurfacing once again amid public backlash over President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration policies. The video, posted by VICE in 2017, captured a high school age Miller sitting on a school bus with a mic in hand arguing for the use of torture during the Iraq war. 17-year-old Stephen Miller: 'Torture is the way to go…Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity.'Of course he said that. Why am I not surprised? — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 16, 2025 'To the issue of the Iraqi civilians. I think that as many of them should survive as possible, because the goal of any military conflict is to kill as few people as possible,' Miller argued. 'But as for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, I think the ideal solution would be to cut off their fingers.' 'I don't think it's necessary to kill them entirely, we're not barbaric people, we respect life.' Miller continued. 'Therefore, torture is the way to go.' The now-White House immigration policy adviser said back then 'tortured people can live' and 'torture is a celebration of life and human dignity.' 'We need to remember that as we enter these very dark and dangerous times in the next century and I only hope that many of my peers and people who will be leading this country will appreciate the value and respect that torture shows towards other cultures,' Miller said with a smile. Former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the video in 2017, telling VICE it was created as a joke. 'This is clearly a sketch comedy routine performed by teenagers and for teenagers as part of a video yearbook,' she said. 'This teenage skit does not reflect any policy position, past or present, held by Stephen Miller. This is another comical overreach by the media.' Despite Huckabee's claim the video was created as a comedy sketch, former Santa Monica High School classmates of Miller have come forward detailing his concerning level of cultural insensitivity back in the day. Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the high school student newspaper, told NPR how Miller enjoyed challenging Latino students to speak English and casting those who disagreed with him as unpatriotic. She recalled Miller telling her 'if I don't like it here to go somewhere else.' Jason Islas, a former middle school friend of Miller, told WGBH the two bonded and he was even invited to Miller's bar mitzvah, but lost touch going into high school. 'He gives me this sort of litany of reasons why he doesn't want to be my friend anymore,' Islas told the outlet. 'The one thing that really sticks out in my memory was my Latino heritage.' The video recirculating online comes amid the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration, which led to several people to be deported to third-party countriesor detained at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which many reported to be deplorable. Several influencers and high-following pages have reposted Miller's video online this week, sounding the alarm over who is advising the president on immigration policies. Iconic rock band Dropkick Murphys shared the video on Instagram this week, with a simple clown emoji caption. 'Stephen Miller the tough guy Tennis player,' the band wrote on the post. 'America is laying down for this guy?' Related... Gavin Newsom's Press Office Calls Stephen Miller A 'Fascist Cuck' Amid Rumors About His Wife And Elon Musk OOPS!! Stephen Miller's Fox News Glitch Goes Viral For Most Poetic Reason Army Veteran And U.S. Citizen Arrested In California Immigration Raid
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
She was Stephen Miller's high school class president. Now she's fighting his deportation efforts
Cynthia Santiago, an attorney in Southern California, won her high school presidential class race the same year Stephen Miller, the current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, lost the class speaker race. More than 20 years later, Santiago is trying to fight Miller's mass deportation efforts. Santiago, the daughter of immigrants, has been working to defend immigrants' rights since 2012. But having gone to school with Miller, watching his rise to prominence in President Donald Trump's world, and the actions of the administration he is a senior member of, worried 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 told The Daily Beast. Miller, largely credited as the architect of Trump's immigration policies during his first administration, has seemingly always abided by right-wing ideals and anti-immigration policies. Recalling the day she won her class election at Santa Monica High School, Santiago said that Miller was 'booed' off stage for giving an incendiary speech about picking up trash. A video of the moment, posted online years ago, shows Miller on stage asking his fellow 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 school newspaper clipping, obtained by The Daily Beast, says Miller's microphone was turned off and he was escorted off stage for what school officials said was going 'over time.' Writing for the Santa Monica Lookout in 2002, Miller advocated for all announcements to be written in English only, claimed 'very few' Hispanic students were in honors classes, and asserted that the school's political correctness would make Osama bin Laden 'feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.' The Independent has asked the White House for comment. Santiago said that many of Miller's thoughts are 'things that he digs from history' and that he doesn't have much of a 'perspective of the world we live in today.' But with his status as a close Trump ally, Department of Homeland Security advisor, and deputy chief of staff, Miller is able to bring his thoughts to life. The California lawyer says she is seeing firsthand how some of Miller's tactics are impacting immigrants in Southern California. Santiago told The Daily Beast that one of the ways the government is increasing the number of deportees is by taking pending asylum cases marked as 'favorable' to court and revoking a person's temporary status. 'I saw [ICE ] taking people from courtrooms, sticking them in the van,' Santiago said. 'The person is basically at an undocumented status with no case pending, and they're vulnerable to be picked up,' Santiago said. 'They have no status, no filing, no case opening.' But Miller, and the Trump administration, are pushing to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible to keep good on the president's campaign promise, in whatever way they can. This story was updated on June 13 to clarify that Stephen Miller ran for speaker of the house and Cynthia Santiago ran for student body president.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
I Was Stephen Miller's Student Body President. Now I'm Saving Migrants From Him
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller kept pushing for 3,000 immigration arrests a day, a former high school classmate who became a leading immigration lawyer was in court on Wednesday. Cynthia Santiago remembers being on stage with Miller in 2002, when they were both running for student government at Santa Monica High School at the western edge of Los Angeles. She recalls that Miller was as much a deliberately provocative attention seeker then as now, and his microphone was turned off just a few moments into his campaign speech as a candidate for speaker of the house. 'I'm Stephen Miller,' he began. 'I'm the only candidate up here who really stands out… I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do." And then he did just that. '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?' he asked. Santiago might have been more surprised if she had not heard him speak dismissively in class about diversity, affirmative action, welfare, non-English speakers and anyone else who did not completely assimilate to his notion of being an American, all of it derived from right-wing writings. The reaction of his fellow students to his truncated speech presaged the fate of his candidacy. 'They booed him off,' Santiago recalled on Wednesday. 'He lost.' Miller could not have been pleased when Santiago became the school's first Latina student body president. 'He was very vocal about his political views of communities of color,' she noted. 'We celebrated diversity, and we were respectful to our staff and to the custodians on campus.' Santiago went on to Wesleyan University and then Southwestern Law School. She began working immigration cases in 2012, when the Obama administration instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offered a temporary shield to young immigrants who arrived in the United States. 'We were able to help a lot of young folks that could benefit from the DACA program,' she said. But at the same time, Obama was starting to make a name for himself as the 'deporter-in-chief.' 'I also saw the side of many families being put into detention for being turned over by local law enforcement, because there was a very high number of contracts with local law enforcement, including in LA County,' Santiago remembered. She had one case involving a woman in Santa Monica who had just dropped off her child at middle school when she was arrested for driving without a license. The police turned the woman over to ICE, which put her on a bus to Mexico just as Santiago was in court, securing a deportation stay. The driver was instructed to keep the woman aboard when the bus reached the border and bring her back. 'She was returned back that night, so she was able to be reunited with her family,' Santiago reported. Santiago also represented a man on the same bus who had been picked up outside his home on the way to work. He too was returned. When Trump was elected to a first term, her classmate Miller's politics made him a perfect fit for a position at the White House. '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,' she recalled. But Miller's time seemed to pass when Joe Biden defeated Trump. Deportations eased up, but Biden increased them as Trump sought to revive his political fortunes by conjuring fears of an invading horde of murderers, rapists and mental patients across the southern border. After Trump returned to office, he made Miller his deputy chief of staff. Miller had been relatively quiet during the campaign, and Santiago figures he spent the years in exile immersed in right-wing writings such as those that informed his world view during high school, a view that was more of an imagined past than the actual moment. 'A lot of the thoughts are just things that he digs from history, and not very much a perspective of the world we live in today,' she said. 'So, he's trying to repeat history, which is what we see now.' Trump declared that his second term was going to see mass deportations. But that requires more than a Sharpie signature on an executive order. And Miller began to push, push, push for it to happen. ICE had been hunting down actual murderers and rapists but there was not enough of them to deliver a fraction of the 3,000 arrests a day Miller was demanding. Miller declared that even people who followed all the official procedures before crossing the border and applied for asylum are criminals. ICE mounted ever more raids, including at a Los Angeles clothing company on Monday that triggered an impromptu protest, during which police arrested a prominent union leader. An unfounded rumor of another raid led to more protests. Trump used the disturbances as a pretext to activate the California National Guard without the approval of its Gov. Gavin Newsom. As Newsom predicted, the arrival of soldiers on the street only inflamed the situation, though not to the degree that Trump claims. The LAPD said that it could handle the situation without the military, but Trump went ahead and activated a Marine Corps unit to augment the guard who were not needed in the first place. Meanwhile, fear driven rumors reached Miller and Santiago's alma mater. The superintendent of the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District posted a letter on its website. 'I am writing to you today because I understand that many of you are feeling deeply concerned and anxious about recent reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in the greater Los Angeles area,' Superintendent Dr. Antonio Shelton wrote on June 9. 'We have heard the rumors circulating about ICE patrols in and around our schools and the Santa Monica community… As of 2:30 p.m. today, these sightings have not been confirmed, and we can assure you that ICE officials are not currently present in or at our schools.' Shelton went on, 'We recognize that the unrest unfolding across Los Angeles, sparked by reports of ICE raids in public spaces, is unsettling. For many of our families, these fears are very real and can make daily activities like leaving home, using public transportation, or even bringing your children to school feel daunting. We want to emphasize that the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, (SMMUSD), along with the City of Santa Monica and the SMPD, remains committed to supporting and serving every single one of our families.' As the high school was preparing for its 2025 graduation on Wednesday, Miller was at the White House, expecting more arrests. Santiago was at Santa Ana Immigration Court, asking a judge to give her time to study the particulars of a new case. The client has no criminal history, and the judge agreed. That gives the client an interim reprieve. While there, Santiago observed a new tactic by the government to increase the number of deportees. The government has been going back to pending asylum cases that have been filed away as favorable. 'So they can put them back into court and try to deport them,' Santiago said. 'Every angle they can, they're doing this.' Then, having brought the asylum seeker into court and revived the case, the government asks the judge to dismiss it. And that removes the temporary protection asylum seekers receive when they successfully apply pending the ultimate outcome. 'The person is basically at an undocumented status with no case pending, and they're vulnerable to be picked up,' Santiago said. 'They have no status, no filing, no case opening.' And in several instances on Wednesday, ICE agents in their usual plainclothes attire of flannel shirts and jeans were waiting in the hallway of the courthouse to make an arrest and take the prisoner out to a van in the parking lot. 'I saw [ICE ] taking people from courtrooms, sticking them in the van,' she told the Daily Beast. 'It's very sad.' The sight was in keeping with the Miller she and her classmates knew back in high school. What she could not have foreseen is that a president would encourage him to do it. 'I don't think anyone imagined that there would be an administration like the one we have,' she said. When she is not in court, the 2003 president of the Santa Monica student body travels California in a van of her own, advising as many people as she can of their rights. 'I'm just, you know, trying to do my best to see who I can help,' Santiago said.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Obama Aide Lays Into ‘Weirdo' Stephen Miller in Fiery Clash
Ex-Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau continued his beef with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Tuesday after the pair got into a very public name-calling spat a day earlier. Favreau celebrated the Trump administration's first 100 Days by posting a video highlighting some of Miller's apparent accomplishments. Among those was the administration's deportation of a 4-year-old child with cancer. 'The words 'normal' and 'human' aren't typically used to describe Stephen Miller, my White House predecessor and current Twitter bestie,' Favreau said in the clip, titled, 'What @StephenM has accomplished in 100 Days.' The two had argued on X on Monday night over the span of six hours; Miller calling Favreau a 'remorseless sociopath' and Favreau retaliating by calling him and the Trump administration 'insecure little b---hes.' Favreau reiterated Miller's 'remorseless sociopath' accusations on Tuesday, pleading with viewers: 'let's not give Stephen Miller what he wants. Make sure he knows we're not afraid of his bulls--- and we're not afraid of a guy who got stuffed in one too many lockers at Santa Monica High School.' He finished by labelling Miller a 'f---ing weirdo.' It all started when Favreau slid his way into a back-and-forth argument on X between Miller and Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, with the Trump aide berating McBride for being transgender. 'The lead healthcare spokesman for the House Democrats is a man pretending to be a woman,' he wrote on X. Their argument came to a close when Miller claimed he 'won't stop protecting American children' from abuse in the form of 'mutilating trans surgeries, disfiguring medical amputations and irreversible chemical castrations.' That's when Favreau stepped in, reminding Miller: 'You just deported a 4-year-old citizen with cancer so it doesn't seem like you give a shit about protecting American children.' Less than an hour later, Miller responded: 'Jon: you supported a president, Joe Biden, who imported child rapists and trafficked half a million children. The Trump Administration ended child trafficking across the border.' He added how 'your shrill, lying propaganda will not erase or reduce your complicity in these monstrous crimes.' Favreau didn't back down, instead advising Miller to 'spend less time on your deportation porn lawn signs and more time on your legal arguments now that a Trump judge has asked you to dispel his 'strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.'' The comment was a reference to the bizarre stunt the administration pulled Monday, which left the north lawn of the White House littered with mugshots of undocumented migrants staffers claimed were arrested during Trump's second term. The posters were strategically placed along 'Pebble Beach,' which is the background for many tV correspondents' live shots. A White House official told Axios that their goal was to have them show up on air. Miller took insult to this jab, telling Favreau that he thought his predecessor was just a 'hapless moron,' but now sees he's a 'remorseless sociopath.' 'The photos you find so amusing, Jon, are the mug shots of illegal aliens who raped and tortured women and children — the illegals that Democrats are fighting to protect' Miller wrote. Favreau fired back: 'Yeah, we didn't litter the White House lawn with photos of criminals deported under Obama because we weren't insecure little b---hes.' 'Not sure why you think any of us need protecting from a 4-year-old cancer patient or a pregnant mother but I guess that's why you're so beloved,' he quipped. But the argument wasn't over. Miller added a 'PS' claiming that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 'honors' migrant's requests to bring their children home with them. Favreau couldn't help himself from responding with his own 'PPS,' citing evidence of a mother being forced to be deported with her U.S.-born children. 'You're lying like you lie about everything, which is why you keep causing your boss to lose in court over and over again, even in front of judges he appointed,' he said. Miller was already fighting hard Monday against polls from various news outlets that showed Trump's disapproval ratings sitting at around 55 percent. 'I don't want to make things awkward for you, John, but it is our opinion that Fox News needs to fire its pollster,' Miller told Fox News anchor John Roberts Monday, who described the president's approval ratings as 'well underwater.'
