Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach didn’t leave Birmingham Friday after offering testimony at a contentious U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing on the impact of restrictionist immigration laws like those enacted in Alabama and Arizona.

Instead, the nativist lawyer and author of the abovementioned bills, remained in the state to speak Saturday at an event hosted by Alabama’s Eagle Forum, a chapter of Phyllis Schlafly’s ultraconservative national organization.

Strolling in about 30 minutes after his speech was scheduled to start, a grinning Kobach was met with a standing ovation from the crowd of about 60 people – mostly senior citizens, and mostly white – who had assembled at a Marriott hotel near Birmingham to hear their champion speak. ( continue to full post… )

John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, the immigrant-bashing Los Angeles radio personalities who were suspended earlier this year when they referred to Whitney Houston as a “crack ho” and marveled that the late pop singer “took this long” to die, are back on the air and up to their old tricks.

In the August 3 edition of the “John & Ken Show,” the duo took up for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group since 2008 because of its virulent and false attacks on non-white immigrants.

“The Federation for American Immigration Reform, I think, has been defined by some of these think tank organizations as a hate group,” Chiampou said. ( continue to full post… )

In mid-2009, nativist leaders scrambled to distance themselves from Minuteman American Defense (MAD) founder Shawna Forde, after the immigrant-bashing former child prostitute was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the slaying of an Arizona man and his 9-year old daughter.

Few were as adamant in their repudiations of Forde – who now sits on death row for the murder of Raul and Brisenia Flores – as Minuteman Project (MMP) President Jim Gilchrist. Within hours of the announcement of her arrest, he stripped MMP’s website of its many laudatory references to Forde’s group, extended his “condolences” to the victims and “all those who have been affected by the alleged incident,” and wrote, “Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project, Inc. is not affiliated with the Minuteman American Defense or Shawna Forde. The Minuteman American Defense is an independent patriot organization which participates in systematic border observation and reporting operations.” ( continue to full post… )

Loudon County, Va., Board Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio has already been widely called out for his furious attacks on LGBT people — most notably in 2010, when he referred to transgender people as “it” during a public meeting. That brought an official rebuke from five of his colleagues on the county governing board for his comments, given as head of the gay-bashing Public Advocate of America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group since last year.

What’s far less known is Delgaudio’s anti-immigrant vitriol. In recent years, Delgaudio has attacked immigrants in a number of extremist venues. ( continue to full post… )

Former Arizona state Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of his state’s draconian anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070, is notorious for making outrageous claims about the supposed dangers posed by immigrants – both documented and not.

In major speeches at least, Pearce usually tries to maintain some modicum of decency. In private (or at least semi-private), his taste has long been known to run even more extreme than he lets on. That’s likely one reason he became, last November, the first sitting state senate president in the U.S. and the first ever Arizona state legislator to be defeated in a recall election.

Now, a series of E-mails – released to a coalition of civil rights organizations that filed a public records request with the state of Arizona – shows just how deep his loathing of immigrants runs. ( continue to full post… )

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the anti-immigrant hate group behind draconian immigration enforcement laws in Arizona, Alabama and elsewhere, appears to have misled law enforcement officers about a training program it’s sponsoring in Texas, Hatewatch has learned.

In an invitation E-mailed to an unknown number of sheriffs earlier this month, FAIR wrote that its “border school” had been approved by the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program (HIDTA), a program of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) that facilitates cooperation among local, state and federal law enforcement officials. A flier distributed by FAIR bears HIDTA’s official logo, and FAIR notes in the invitation that travel and lodging costs associated with the Sept. 21-22 event in El Paso “may be covered by your agency’s HIDTA funding.” ( continue to full post… )

Peter Mangs, who went on trial in Sweden this week for allegedly killing three people and attempting to kill 12 others because he hated immigrants, apparently did business with America’s leading neo-Nazi organization at least once.

Mangs is believed to have shot his victims, who included many Muslims and other immigrants in his home city of Malmo, during a seven-year spree that stretched from 2003 to 2010. In October 2010, police asked the public for help in locating a gunman who they feared was targeting immigrants in the city, where some 40% of residents or their parents were born outside Sweden, and a tip led to Mangs. Police found a pistol, a silencer and a vest for carrying a spare gun barrel in his home.

Two years before the shooting spree began, Mangs, who is now 40, made a purchase from the National Alliance, which was then the most important neo-Nazi group in America, and one that was well known to European radicals. Records obtained by Hatewatch do not show what Mangs bought, but the group’s National Vanguard Books at the time had only a few items matching the total Mangs spent, $11.95, on May 10, 2001. One of them was Hunter, a novel written by the late Alliance chief William Pierce that depicted the nighttime murders of mixed-race couples using a silenced pistol. ( continue to full post… )

J.T. Ready, the infamous neo-Nazi and border vigilante who killed himself and four others last week in a suburban Phoenix home, was the subject of a federal criminal domestic terrorism investigation into activities on the border, an Arizona television station has reported.

James Turgal, the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Phoenix, told KPNX-TV that Ready had been under an investigation dating to his days as a swastika-wearing Nazi targeting ethnic groups. Turgal also confirmed that the FBI had looked at arresting Ready but was never able to develop enough evidence.

“He certainly … rode the edge of that dividing line between protected speech and criminal activity,” Turgal said. ( continue to full post… )

Investigators examining the bloody scene near Phoenix where an anti-immigrant neo-Nazi murdered four people, including a 15-month-old baby girl, turned up “chemicals and military grade munitions,” authorities just announced.

J.T. Ready, a 39-year-old former National Socialist Movement leader who formed the nativist, militia-like U.S. Border Guard, was the apparent shooter before taking his own life in the murder-suicide, Gilbert Police Sgt. Bill Balafas said in a statement released today. ( continue to full post… )

Updated 5.04.12

Nativist extremists and white supremacists wasted little time responding with half-cocked conspiracy theories to the news that J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi border vigilante, had died in an apparent murder-suicide outside Phoenix. For some, the blame lay with Mexican drug cartels. For others, it was the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG, once again silencing a critic. ( continue to full post… )