What a shocker: Former high-level staffers from two Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate groups “have obtained high-level advisory jobs at federal immigration agencies in the Department of Homeland Security,” according to CNN. Because when you want to move up the ladder in the anti-immigrant world, where else is there to go but the Trump administration:
Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan.
At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan.
CIS was just recently designated a hate group by the SPLC, which resulted in executive director and noted snowflake Mark Krikorian throwing a hissy fit over at the Washington Post, where he basically claimed that his group can’t be racist because no white hoods or burning crosses are involved. But both CIS and its founder, white nationalist, eugenics-enthusiast, and retired eye doctor John Tanton, have a nasty history:
Papers from Tanton’s library show he “has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era.” And according to Think Progress, “Tanton is a strict nativist who once wrote a paper titled ‘The Case for Passive Eugenics.’” Charming.
At CIS, Feere railed on the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants—or “anchor babies,” as Mr. “I love the Hispanics” called them during the presidential campaign—by falsely saying “that bearing a child on US soil provides an immigrant access to welfare and other social benefits.” A claim later debunked by Politifact. CIS has also “published articles that labeled immigrants 'third world gold diggers' and that blamed Central American asylum seekers for the 'burgeoning street gang problem,’” according to SPLC’s Heidi Beirich.
Kirchner, the other addition to the Trump team, served as the executive director of another Tanton-created, SPLC-designated hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. For years, FAIR received funding from a white supremacist organization founded by eugenicists with Nazi ties, while simultaneously backing California’s notorious Prop. 187, anti-immigrant legislation (later ruled unconstitutional) that would have barred the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants from accessing a public education and health care access:
Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.
FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."
These anti-immigrant hate groups are fringe in that they don’t represent the views of the majority of Americans—who overwhelmingly favor a path to legal status over deportation for undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizen children and deep ties to our country—but they have been brought into the fold by the new administration:
During the Bush administration, a coalition of pro-immigrant groups known as the ICE-NGO Working Group started holding confidential, closed-door stakeholder meetings several times a year with high-ranking immigration officials as an opportunity to express concerns and ask specific questions about enforcement policy, the rights of immigrants and their treatment while in detention.
In February, at the first such get-together under the Trump administration, members of the working group felt blindsided to discover that some anti-immigrant, pro-enforcement groups also were in attendance.
To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when this administration tries to tell you who they are, believe them.
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