Anti-immigrant extremists are furious over a decision by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to exclude Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), a nativist organization masquerading as an environmental group, from its annual meeting.

In a press release this week, CAPS board member Stuart Hurlbert, an emeritus professor of biology of San Diego State University, raged that AAAS was “openly censor[ing] speech and access to information” and asked why the group “fears any discussion of stabilizing U.S. population by lowering immigration.”

AAAS “fears” nothing of the sort. Spokeswoman Ginger Pinholster told Hatewatch that the group welcomes any “science-focused” entity to apply for exhibit space at its conference. AAAS declined CAPS’ application because “upon investigation, we concluded they were more focused on political issues like immigration than on evidence-based scientific issues,” Pinholster said. ( continue to full post… )

A mysterious anti-immigration group called Blacks for Equal Rights Coalition (BFERC) recently made its debut in Los Angeles with a July 6 “Community Outreach Summit” on “The Impact of Immigration on Black Communities.”

The summit, whose entirely unnamed lineup included “advisors, educators, politicians and activists from the community,” generously offered a free lunch to the first 125 people to sign up.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Though “presented” by BFERC, the summit was sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group whose founder, John Tanton, wrote in a 1993 letter to controversial ecology professor Garrett Hardin, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

This is not the first “black” anti-immigrant group FAIR has sponsored. That honor would go to the now-defunct Choose Black America (CBA), which was billed as a grassroots organization but was apparently a front group funded and founded by FAIR for the sole purpose of putting a black face on the mostly white anti-immigrant movement. FAIR also helped establish other groups that purportedly represented the victims of immigration – the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker, which claimed to be a coalition of blue-collar groups, and You Don’t Speak for Me, the Latino version of CBA. ( continue to full post… )

There’s an old jest in the news business: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Some anti-illegal immigrant zealots in the blogosphere are taking the joke to heart. Two-and-a-half weeks after reporting with no factual basis that members of a dangerous Mexican drug gang had seized two Americans’ ranches near Laredo, Texas, the bloggers still insist their fairy tale is true.

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It had the makings of a dramatic story: Members of a Mexican drug cartel on Saturday took control of two ranches in Laredo, Texas, as the ranch owners fled for their lives.

If only it were true.

The tale, reported by Dan Amato, a Pennsylvania anti-immigration blogger, gained traction throughout the blogosphere. Amato, who blogs under the name of Digger, claimed that members of Los Zetas — dangerous Mexican gunmen heavily involved in the international drug trade and other criminal activities — had crossed from Mexico into Texas and taken over the two ranches in the border city of Laredo. “The source is law enforcement in the area,” Amato wrote from his perch some 1,800 miles away.

In truth, Amato’s source was Jeff Schwilk, the bellicose leader of the virulent San Diego Minutemen anti-immigration group, as Amato subsequently revealed. Schwilk’s home base is about 1,300 miles from Laredo. And Schwilk’s source? Another San Diego anti-immigration diehard, Kimberly Dvorak. She wrote on Saturday at Examiner.com that the so-called ranches takeover “could be deemed an act of war against the sovereign borders of the United States.”

No such pronouncements were forthcoming from the White House or the State Department. Perhaps that’s because the Amato-Schwilk-Dvorak troika appears to be trafficking in pure fiction. ( continue to full post… )

William Gheen, the obstreperous head of the nativist group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, or ALIPAC, has pulled his group out of all June Arizona rallies backing that state’s controversial new illegal immigration law. Gheen said he is doing so because former Colorado Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, one of the country’s most hard-line opponents of illegal immigration, is supporting one event in which racist skinheads and neo-Nazis may be involved.

That rally, scheduled for June 5 in Phoenix, is being organized by Dan Smeriglio, founder of Voice of the People USA, an anti-illegal immigration group based in Pennsylvania. Gheen says it could hurt, not help, the efforts of those supporting SB 1070, the bill signed last month by Gov. Jan Brewer giving police wide latitude to detain anybody they think may be in the country illegally and making failure of non-citizens to carry immigration documents a crime. Critics say the law will subject Latinos, whether citizens or not, to racial profiling and police harassment in a state whose population is 30% Hispanic. President Obama, among others, has criticized the law, and a number of cities around the country have voted to protest it by halting business travel to Arizona and banning contracts with businesses there.

Gheen supports the law and initially favored the June 5 rally. But he notified supporters on Tuesday that ALIPAC won’t be attending or promoting any rallies scheduled next month in Arizona to support SB 1070. “We will have no future dealings with Dan Smeriglio or retired Congressman Tom Tancredo due to the neo-Nazi connections and this disaster they have cooked up in Arizona that puts our issue at risk,” Gheen wrote.

Gheen became concerned after a Philadelphia-based anti-hate group called One People’s Project criticized ALIPAC for associating with Smeriglio, who it said was working with racist skinheads. Gheen checked and concluded that was true. He learned, for example, that among the “friends” that Smeriglio listed on his Facebook page was Steve Smith, a regional coordinator of Keystone United, a Pennsylvania racist skinhead group with several chapters. Smith’s Facebook page also indicated he’s a fan of a Swedish white nationalist singer named Saga, whose ditties have included “Goodbye, David Lane.” Lane, a convicted terrorist who died in 2007 while serving a 190-year prison sentence, remains one of the most revered figures in the white nationalist movement. He came up with the famous “14 Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” ( continue to full post… )

To hear San Diego Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk’s crony and fellow nativist extremist Ray Carney tell it, Schwilk’s alleged defamation in December – for the second time – of a civil rights activist was no case of mistaken identity. In fact, Carney says, he warned Schwilk that a video in which a woman admitted she was a “prostitute” and a “hooker” was not in fact Joanne Yoon, a nemesis of both men. Schwilk sent a mass email with a link to the video anyway, Carney said.

“I researched the video and found that the girl in question was in fact not Yoon and was done by some girl who resides in Canada,” Carney wrote in a letter to Yoon’s attorney in San Diego, Daniel Gilleon. “I notified Jeff of my findings and told him not to use the video … he did not listen to my advise [sic].”

Schwilk did not immediately respond to a Hatewatch request for comment. ( continue to full post… )

San Diego Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk is the adult equivalent of a small child who burns his finger on a stove and – learning nothing from the experience – does it again.

Last May, Schwilk was ordered to pay $135,000 to Joanne Yoon, a Korean-American civil rights activist who had helped monitor Minutemen rallies for the ACLU. Yoon sued Schwilk and a former Minutemen spokesman for defamation after the men circulated photos of her accompanied by comments referring to “the Korean anoroxic ACLU slut.” The images were posted to a Yahoo group titled “Korean Kommie Kunt.”

Today, Yoon sued the perpetually peeved Schwilk again for defamation. ( continue to full post… )

ACLU observer Joanne Yoon, who won a large defamation judgment against San Diego Minutemen founder Jeff Schwilk earlier this year, wants a cut of the settlement money Schwilk received from the California Department of Transportation.
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San Diego Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk announced that Caltrans agreed to pay his group $157,500 and issue a formal apology to settle a free-speech lawsuit over the handling of the SDMM’s participation in a state highway clean-up program.
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A leader of Shawna Forde’s nativist extremist group acknowledged that he killed an Arizona man and his daughter, according to two Arizona newspapers.

Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush confessed to the May 30 shootings shortly after his arrest two weeks later, according to reports this week in the Arizona Daily Star and the Green Valley News. He also reportedly named additional suspects besides Forde and Albert Gaxiola, who have also been charged in connection with the homicides. Despite his confession, Bush — along with Forde and Gaxiola — pleaded not guilty on June 30.

Forde is accused of masterminding the murders of Raul Flores, 29, and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia. Police say she wanted to steal money from the Flores family to help finance her border patrol group, Minutemen American Defense (MAD).

Her arrest sparked major infighting within nativist circles that has escalated in the past two weeks. In an effort to distance themselves from Forde, anti-immigrant leaders are lobbing numerous accusations and counter-accusations at each other that often devolve into harsh personal attacks.

In a July 2 advisory to his supporters, William Gheen, leader of the North Carolina-based Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said he’d added Glenn Spencer’s American Patrol (which is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group) to a list of organizations that activists should avoid. The list already included Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project, which had defended Forde after she claimed to have been the victim of shootings and assaults in and near her home in Everett, Wash. “Both Gilchrist and Spencer have been highly negligent in who they have associated themselves and their organizations with by supporting and assisting Shawna Forde long after it was clear to many others that she should be cast out of our movement,” Gheen wrote. ( continue to full post… )