Former White House adviser Stephen Miller announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging racial discrimination in its distribution of COVID-19 aid.
The ex-aide to former President Donald Trump said in an interview on Monday that his new legal group, the America First Legal Foundation, which he characterized as the “conservative response” to the American Civil Liberties Union, sued in Texas over President Joe Biden prioritizing minority farmers and ranchers for aid in the American Rescue Act.
“[In] the American Rescue Act, … they award farm aid for farmers who’ve been hurt by this pandemic based on skin color. That is fundamentally un-American … and when it comes to getting financial aid, it shouldn’t matter what race or ethnicity you are,” Miller said on Newsmax TV’s Spicer & Co. “You can’t make a more equal country, [and] you can’t make a more unified country if we split and divide based on race. That policy is illegal.”
STEPHEN MILLER GROUP AND TEXAS SUE BIDEN TO STOP ACCEPTING MIGRANT CHILDREN AT BORDER
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act, signed by Biden on March 11, allocated $5 billion to black farmers, a provision some, like Miller, argue amounts to racial discrimination.
“I would argue and my organization would argue that that violates federal nondiscrimination rules,” Miller added.
The lawsuit, which calls the relief program’s racial exclusions “patently unconstitutional,” was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas against Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack. The suit seeks the certification of all farmers and ranchers as “socially disadvantaged” regardless of race, declaratory relief, the enjoinment of Vilsack and his successors from “implementing any racial exclusions or discriminatory racial preferences in Department of Agriculture programs,” and attorneys’ fees.
Miller alluded to another lawsuit America First Legal filed along with the state of Texas last week seeking to stop Biden from accepting migrant children at the border.
“By releasing unvaccinated and potentially coronavirus-infected aliens en masse into the country — aliens who have been smuggled and housed in extremely unsanitary conditions — the Biden administration is sabotaging the public health of Texans and all Americans,” Miller said in a statement.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed the lawsuit in Fort Worth, said Biden’s “outright disregard of the public health crisis in Texas by welcoming and encouraging mass gatherings of illegal aliens is hypocritical and dangerous.”
“This reckless policy change stifles the reopening of the Texas economy at a time when businesses need it the most and when our children need to get back to in-person learning as soon as possible,” he added.
The United States is contending with a large number of migrants, particularly unaccompanied minors, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 170,000 migrants were encountered at the border in March, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and reports indicate that an unprecedented 117,000 migrant children will enter the U.S. by the end of the year. The most recent border surge saw the arrival of 80,000 unaccompanied minors at the southern border in 2019.
Despite initial reluctance, Biden called the surge a “crisis” when explaining his decision to lift the cap on the number of refugees who can enter the U.S.
“We’re going to increase the number. The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people,” the president said. “We couldn’t do two things at once, but now, we are going to increase the number.”
The White House then walked back this statement, with press secretary Jen Psaki saying Biden didn’t view minors crossing the border as a “crisis.”
“The president does not feel children coming to our border, seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships, and other dire circumstances, is a crisis,” she said when asked about Biden’s comments.
Administration officials have largely preferred to call the surge a “challenge” rather than a “crisis.”
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Biden has indicated that he plans to visit the border, but specific travel plans have not been announced. Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to travel to the Northern Triangle in Central America, including stops in Mexico and Guatemala, to discuss the root causes of the migrant surge, and she will discuss the subject with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a virtual conference on May 7.
The Washington Examiner reached out to a representative for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, the plaintiff in the new lawsuit, and the Justice Department for comment.
