Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minuteman movement of armed civilians who patrolled the Arizona border looking for undocumented immigrants, has pleaded innocent to charges that he molested three young girls under the age of 10. In court papers, police identified one of the alleged victims as his own daughter.

Simcox, 52, faces two felony counts of molestation of a child, three charges of sexual conduct with a minor and one count of furnishing obscene or harmful materials to a child. According to the Phoenix New Times, Simcox could face life in prison under Arizona law if convicted of a single felony molestation charge. ( continue to full post… )

The anti-immigrant lobby has long enjoyed influence in Washington but in recent years has been forced to defend itself against charges that it represents the narrow interests of white nationalists who fear the “browning” of America.

So it may have surprised some when a new coalition of African-American activists, called the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), announced its opposition to legislation that could provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented Latino immigrants.

In a June 3 letter to members of Congress, BALA claimed the proposed bill “will harm black American workers more than any other group” because “[m]ass immigration and amnesty puts African Americans from all walks of life out of work and suppresses wages, causing them to compete with aliens willing to work in poorer working conditions for cheaper pay.”

What BALA did not say in that letter — or during a press conference in April when it called itself the African American Leadership Council — was anything about its provenance. There’s a good reason for that. It turns out that BALA is simply the latest front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the flagship of a network of anti-immigrant organizations formed by the white nationalist John Tanton. ( continue to full post… )

Chris Simcox, the former leader of one of the largest militia groups patrolling the Arizona border during the peak of the nativist Minuteman movement, has been charged with molesting three young girls.

Simcox, 52, was arrested yesterday after detectives found probable cause that he had molested the girls, all under the age of 10, police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson told Reuters. The charges stem from incidents over the last few months. Simcox has denied all charges, according to a press release from the Phoenix Police Department. ( continue to full post… )

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and just the third person of color to be elected governor of a Southern state.

So, one might think she would want nothing to do with racists and anti-immigrant extremists. Not so, apparently.

In anticipation of her 2014 re-election campaign, the Tea Party darling has put together a 164-member steering committee comprising folks from all 46 of her state’s counties. And on that list is one “Republican leader” and Tea Party activist named Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville.

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Opponents of immigration reform legislation have been trying to steer clear of white nationalists lately, hoping to keep their opposition to citizenship for undocumented Latino immigrants free from the taint of racism.

But they just can’t seem to run fast enough.

Last week, a major Heritage Foundation report about the supposed costs of illegal immigration was pilloried after the revelation that one of its authors, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Jason Richwine, had earlier claimed that there are deep differences in intelligence among races (with Latinos toward the bottom). Richwine resigned from the conservative think tank amid the outcry.

Now, this week, we discover that ProEnglish, a group with white nationalist ties, has launched an ad campaign against immigration reform. The first target is Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, according to BuzzFeed. The group’s minute-long radio ad features a Spanish-speaking character, apparently representing an undocumented immigrant, thanking Graham “for not requiring him to learn English in exchange for amnesty.” ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: On Friday, May 10, the Heritage Foundation, which earlier distanced itself from the controversial views of its senior policy analyst Jason Richwine, said Richwine had resigned from the foundation, according to Politico.

Jason Richwine, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is attracting attention because of a recently released anti-immigration study that is garnering criticism from fellow conservatives, including U.S. Rep. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and anti-tax warrior Grover Norquist. The study, co-authored with Heritage fellow Robert Rector, is a reprise of Rector’s 2007 report (which was also criticized) for the foundation. Both studies claim immigration reform will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, and both were hotly disputed.

The conservative criticism of the new study charges that it ignores immigrants’ upward mobility and suggests that they will always be poor. But in addition to that, a great deal of criticism from other quarters is now focusing personally on Richwine and what he has said over the years about immigrants, race and intelligence. ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: We’ve corrected the attribution of a quote below suggesting that if the attackers were antigovernment they would have attacked a government target, rather than random Americans. The quote actually came from Mike Lackomar of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia. Hatewatch regrets the error, which was the result of an editing mistake.

Who was responsible for the deadly Boston terrorist attack?

The Muslims did it. No, it was an illegal immigrant. Think again – it was a gay guy. Wait, you missed the key signs: Our own government once again pulled off an act of covert terror to promote its nefarious aims.

Fingers have been pointed in all of these directions by conspiracy theory peddlers and professional hatemongers since the bombings Monday.

“It’s a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist,” declared a post on the Tea Party Nation website Tuesday. The obvious cause for the violence? “We have a government that is not committed to protecting America.” Linking Islam with Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” of Communism, the post warned that the Boston bombings are just another event presaging future violence in “an ideological war” that can only be won if we have tougher, more anti-Islam U.S. political leaders. That, of course, would be the Tea Party cabal.

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Federal authorities in New Jersey are ending 2012 with the arrests of two accused white supremacists who allegedly went on a hate-filled assault spree last New Year’s Eve. ( continue to full post… )

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the border-watching Minuteman Project, has never been shy about expressing his opinions, especially when it comes to his many critics. But now his pugnaciousness has cost him dearly in a long-running feud with a former Minuteman ally.

Last month, an Orange County, Calif., Superior Court judge issued a summary ruling in a series of small-claims suits, declaring that Gilchrist had indulged in “Big Lie” tactics by publicly smearing a woman named Deborah Courtney — a former key member of the board of directors of Gilchrist’s organization — and ordered him to pay her $42,501. ( continue to full post… )

Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and the architect of harsh, anti-immigrant laws in several states and cities, made a special trip to Hatewatch’s home state last week to testify in Birmingham before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The statutes pushed by Kobach – among them Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s even more draconian HB 56 – were devised to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they give up and “self-deport.” A lawyer with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, he began crafting anti-immigrant policy while working in John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice. In 2004, he was hired as senior counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), where he devised immigration legislation that would later serve as the basis of the laws in Arizona and Alabama. (IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant hate group that yearns for a return to the days when immigration policy favored light-skinned northern Europeans over all others.) ( continue to full post… )