Arizona nativist Laine Lawless, chief of the vigilante group Border Guardians, pitched a fit in 2006 after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report published the contents of an E-mail she apparently sent to a high-ranking member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) to urge a campaign of violence and harassment against Latino immigrants.

“Steal the money from any illegal walking to the bank or check cashing place. … Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school,” the E-mail to “SS Commander” Mark Martin of the NSM’s western Ohio chapter said. “Be creative. … Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status.”

Lawless, who refused to comment prior to the publication of the Report’s 2006 article – even after being sent copies of the E-mail over her signature to Martin – later told the media that the message was fabricated. In a long rant on her blog, she declared that the SPLC is part of an “essentially EVIL … Communist conspiracy” intent on destroying America. She was no neo-Nazi or racist, she insisted.

So it was particularly enlightening to learn that she took some time out from immigrant-bashing last Thursday to go to a speech by British writer David Irving in Phoenix. Irving, author of an infamous and ahistorical Hitler apologia called Hitler’s War and some 20 similar books, has cultivated a reputation as the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier. In 2000, at the conclusion of an exhaustive British trial in which he accused a Jewish scholar of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier, the judge of the London High Court ruled flatly against him. The judge concluded that Irving “displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias” and is “an active Holocaust denier” who “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” Later, in 2006, Irving served time in an Austrian prison for denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He has been barred from entering Australia, New Zealand and Germany for similar reasons. More recently, he has suggested that the Jews’ best friend in 1930s Germany was Hitler. ( continue to full post… )

An Arizona jury has handed down a second death sentence in the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter, who were targeted by border vigilantes two years ago as part of a plot to steal money and fund an increasingly militant operation against immigrants along the border.

Jason Bush was sentenced to death Wednesday, a month after being convicted of murdering Raul Junior Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia Flores. Bush, known as “Gunny,” was part of Minutemen American Defense, founded by Shawna Forde.

Led by Forde, Bush and another man, Albert Gaxiola, went into the Flores home in Arivaca, about 50 miles southwest of Tucson, believing that Flores was a drug dealer and would have plenty of cash on hand. Prosecutors charged that Bush was the gunman who shot Flores dead before shooting his wife in the leg. He then walked over to Brisenia, who was sleeping with her puppy on the couch, and shot her twice in the head at close range. ( continue to full post… )

Jason Bush, the man who prosecutors say shot and killed a man and his 9-year-old daughter as part of Minutemen American Defense founder Shawna Forde’s plan to rob immigrants to fund her organization, was sentenced to death by a Pima County, Arizona jury after two days of deliberation.
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Shawna Forde, the anti-immigrant vigilante leader who orchestrated the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter, will receive the death penalty, a Pima County, Ariz., jury decided today.

The decision is binding on the judge hearing the case.

The case of Forde, a one-time member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps who went on to found her own Minuteman American Defense (MAD) group, didn’t get much attention from the national mainstream media. But among immigrant rights groups, Forde has become a symbol of the vicious hatreds that seems to lie just beneath the surface of the contemporary nativist movement. Forde targeted the family in the hope of stealing money to fund her MAD organization. ( continue to full post… )

Concluding a three-week trial that exposed the most unsavory side of Arizona’s militant border vigilante movement, a jury on Monday found Shawna Forde guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for the May 2009 killings of Raul Flores, 29, and his 9-year-old daughter in the border town of Arivaca, Ariz.

The jury deliberated for seven hours over two days before reaching a guilty verdict Monday. On Tuesday morning, after hearing arguments from both sides, they unanimously pronounced Forde eligible for the death penalty. They cited the facts that Forde was motivated by money, participated actively in the robbery, and intended the murders to take place as factors that warrant the ultimate punishment.

It is now up to Pima County Superior Court Judge John Leonardo, who presided over Forde’s trial, to review all the arguments and evidence and determine whether Forde should be executed or sentenced to life in prison.

Prosecutors said Forde, head of the border vigilante group Minuteman American Defense (MAD), and two accomplices – MAD Operations Director Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush, 34, and Albert Robert Gaxiola, 42, a local MAD member – planned the May 30 home invasion because they thought they would find drugs and cash to fund their group’s operation. According to prosecutors, the three broke into the victims’ trailer, where Bush shot Flores, his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and their daughter Brisenia. Gonzalez, who survived, managed to return fire with her own gun. “Oh my God,” she can be heard shouting on a 911 tape. “I can’t believe they killed my family.” Bush and Gaxiola will each be tried separately this spring. ( continue to full post… )

Nativist extremist Shawna Forde will not testify in her trial, in which she is charged with planning a 2009 home invasion that resulted in the murders of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter.
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A 911 operator and a U.S. Border Patrol agent gave the first testimonies in the death penalty trial of Shawna Forde, who is charged with carrying out a May 2009 home invasion that resulted in a double murder.
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FBI reports may lead to an investigation of a possible fourth suspect in a 2009 Arivaca, Arizona double murder after anti-immigrant crusader Shawna Forde, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola were indicted in the case.
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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… )

Laine Lawless, the Mexican flag-burning leader of the vigilante group Border Guardians, has been one of the few anti-immigration leaders to support accused nativist killer Shawna Forde.

Soon, those who can’t get enough of justiceforshawnaforde.com, Lawless’ unabashedly pro-Forde website, will be able to read her book about the case. The soon-to-be-released Blonde on the Border: The Government’s Case Against the Minutemen promises to dish out more dubious defenses of Forde, who is charged with murder in the killings of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter during a home invasion on May 30 in Arivaca, Ariz. Forde led Minuteman American Defense (MAD), an Everett, Wash.-based splinter group of the Minuteman movement, whose adherents conduct armed patrols of the border.

Based on a short excerpt that’s published online, the book appears to rehash Lawless’ theory that Forde is the victim of a government conspiracy and a racist, sexist media campaign. Lawless, who asserts on her website that Forde was “racially profiled” and that she is a “political agenda prisoner,” again suggests in the book’s title that Forde’s prosecution is the result of a government vendetta against the Minutemen. In the excerpt, she also calls the details about Forde’s alleged involvement in the killings a “left-wing media-manufacture.” Lawless is virtually alone in this view: After the murders, Minuteman leaders scrambled to distance themselves from Forde, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the gruesome double murder. Even before the deaths in Arivaca, Forde was a controversial figure in Minuteman circles because of her supposed efforts to take on dangerous drug smugglers and because of her claims — never substantiated — that she’d been the target of a series of violent attacks. (Lawless also has been a lightening rod: In 2006, she privately wrote the nation’s largest neo-Nazi group urging members to harass and assault undocumented immigrants. She later told the Arizona Daily Star that the E-mail was fabricated.) ( continue to full post… )