Trump 'backs Stephen Miller' amid accusations of racist ideology

White House senior adviser reportedly maintains support from president despite growing calls for his resignation

Donald Trump continues to support a White House adviser facing accusations of holding white nationalist views after a trove of his emails to a right-wing website were leaked this week, according to a new report.

Stephen Miller has faced demands from prominent Democrats on Capitol Hill to resign from his post at the White House after the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Hatewatch investigative team published an array of emails he sent to Breitbart, while serving as an adviser to former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, and later on the president’s 2016 campaign.

The 38-year-old encouraged a Breitbart reporter who shared the emails with Hatewatch to publish story angles in line with views espoused on white nationalist sites, often linking to them throughout his exchanges with the outlet’s editorial staff.

On Saturday, the Daily Beast published a report citing an anonymous senior White House official who said Mr Trump continued to fully support Mr Miller in spite of the growing calls for him to leave the administration.

“Stephen is not going anywhere,” the official reportedly told the news outlet. “The president has his back.”

The emails were shared with Southern Poverty Law Centre by Katie McHugh, a Breitbart staffer and former right-wing figure who has since denounced the alt-right. She noted how Mr Miller would send her stories to right from popular sites among white supremacists, including one called American Renaissance.

“I remember being stuck by the way he called it ‘AmRen,’ the nickname,” she told Hatewatch.

Mr Miller appeared to frequent white nationalist sites and develop supporting material to back what critics say has become a hard-line, anti-immigrant agenda he now spearheads at the White House as the president’s go-to adviser on immigration.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent New York Democrat elected to the US House of Representatives during the 2018 midterm elections, has shared a petition calling for the senior adviser’s dismissal from the White House, writing in a tweet on Friday: “He’s a verified White Supremacist controlling US immigration policy, which has now detained over 70,000 migrant children.”

“This is not to be dismissed”, the congresswoman wrote. “People’s lives are at risk.”

Several Democrats running for the White House in 2020 have also called for Mr Miller’s resignation, from Amy Klobuchar to Bernie Sanders, who described Mr Miller’s “white nationalist views” as “a danger to the American people” in a statement.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.