Trump Gives Boost To Anti-Immigrant ‘American Holocaust’ Extremists
President Donald Trump speaks during an event with ‘Angel Families’ June 22, 2018 at the South Court Auditorium of Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC. President Trump hosted an event to discuss immigration with relatives of victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images
By Aiden Pink July 2, 2018
If you go to IllegalAlienCrimeReport.com, you will see all-caps headlines blaring the details of crimes allegedly committed by people who are allegedly in the country illegally, like “ILLEGAL ALIEN CHARGED WITH RAPING, IMPREGNATING 13-YEAR-OLD DISABLED GIRL” and “PREVIOUSLY DEPORTED CHILD MOLESTER CHARGED WITH SEXUALLY ASSAULTING BOY IN NEW YORK,” all accompanied by scary-looking mugshots.
You’ll see a dropdown menu sorting articles by subject, including “TERRORISM” and “COP KILLING.”
You’ll see that many of the headlines claim there is a “MEDIA BLACKOUT” on the subject of immigrant crime — though almost all of the site consists of aggregation from local media: newspapers and TV news stations who have reported both on the alleged crime and the accused offender’s immigration status. (The site’s owner, Dave Gibson, says it’s a reference to the national media’s lack of coverage).
You’ll see that despite the name of the website, not all of the crimes written about are alleged to have been committed by illegal immigrants — many of the original articles don’t mention immigration status at all, just feature people with foreign-sounding names. (Gibson claims he’s independently verified their statuses through contacts in law enforcement).
And if you go to the site’s Facebook page, you’ll see something else: footage of the website getting a shout-out during a White House event last week.
“You know, if the public would go to IllegalAlienCrimeReport.com and see the magnitude of crimes being committed against your fellow Americans by illegal aliens allowed to stay in this country, you will be sickened, because the mainstream media does not let you know what’s really happening,” Mary Ann Mendoza, the mother of a Phoenix police officer killed by an undocumented immigrant in a drunk-driving incident, proclaimed from the podium while standing alongside President Trump on June 22.
Mendoza’s praise for the website may have led viewers to a corner of the internet that compares immigrant crime to the Holocaust. The event was the latest example of a Trump event or statement that shares or even promotes the messaging of avowed white nationalists. The president claimed that “some very fine people” had marched in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has repeatedly shared graphics on Twitter created by anti-Semites or members of the “alt-right.”
“Ever since before the 2016 election, we’ve noticed that the winds of xenophobia are blowing across the country, and the administration’s policies and language have certainly been divisive and stirred up anti-immigration sentiment,” , said the associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, Aryeh Tuchman. “And it’s not surprising that white nationalists and white supremacists are feeling emboldened under this administration… It’s something we’re very concerned about.”
Illegal Alien Crime Report “is an honorable site,” Frank Jorge, whose YouTube video “American Holocaust” was posted on the site’s Facebook page the day before the Trump event, told the Forward. “It’s as honorable as any site that reveals the atrocities committed against the Jews. All it does is report facts.”
Jorge’s Holocaust video, which features photos from Nazi death camps, argues that thousands of American citizens are killed every year by undocumented immigrants, either by murder or accident. It suggests that elected officials’ refusal to crack down on illegal immigration and somehow prevent these deaths amounts to “a genociding of the American people by its government.” Academic research, including by the libertarian Cato Institute, has shown that immigration is associated with less crime, not more.
Gibson, who appeared in the Holocaust video, said that Mendoza’s shout-out from the White House event led to such a huge rise in traffic for the website that it crashed multiple times.
The site’s Facebook page is liked by nearly 18,000 people, but its GoFundMe account has only raised $1,797 over nearly three years of existence.
The attention likely helped its cause, Tuchman told the Forward.
“Whenever there are channels to extremist content or extremist ideas that appear in mainstream media, or that are widely shared media content, of course that has with it the danger that people who may not have thought about things in that way may be susceptible to that ideology, will become enmeshed in it,” he said. “That may increase the amount of xenophobia in the country.”
The website also contains a link to a quarterly publication called “The Social Contract,” which Tuchman called a “racist, extreme anti-immigration publication.”
Gibson has frequently contributed to the publication, including an article last summer insinuating that drunk driving in the United States is caused by Mexicans’ supposed genetic predisposition toward low alcohol tolerance. He was adamant that the publication was not racist. All the magazine and its leadership does, he says, is stress that “there is an American culture. It’s a Western culture.”
President Trump’s event on Friday featured parents of people killed by undocumented immigrants.
“You never hear this side,” Trump said. “You don’t know what’s going on. These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones.”
These parents “could fill this stage up every day for the next five months of victims of illegal alien crime, and it would just keep going,” Mendoza said.
Research contradicts this claim. A study in February by the Cato Institute found illegal immigrants in Texas were far less likely than American-born counterparts to be convicted of homicide, sexual assault or larceny. And a study published the following month in the academic journal “Criminology” found that crime tended to decrease in areas with more undocumented immigrants. Trump said at his event on Friday that such claims were “not true,” but did not provide evidence.
“I’ve seen them, and to me, they look like bogus studies,” Gibson said.
Jorge told the Forward that both he and Gibson “may make a claim to be white nationalists.”
“We are white at a time where movements are blaming white people for everything,” said Jorge, who was born in Cuba. “Almost like when the Jews were blamed for everything in Europe.”
But Gibson said the idea that he was a white nationalist was “ridiculous.”
“That label has been thrown around so much in regard to people who just want the border protected, which we have a right to do, and just want the violent criminals off the street,” he said.
Jorge said he supports the creation of a white ethnostate in America, as do many prominent white supremacists like Richard Spencer. But Jorge was adamant that he was not anti-Semitic and did not believe, as many white supremacists do, that elite support for immigration and ethnic diversity is part of a Jewish conspiracy. He said that while individual Jews may be involved in what he views as the destruction of America, the true culprits were big business and political donors, who control elected officials.
“The Jewish experience bears [this] out,” he said, citing the lack of a Jewish state during the Holocaust. “We must have a nation of our own.”
Tuchman of the ADL called Jorge’s comparison between American immigration policy and the Holocaust “absurd and offensive.”
Jorge and Gibson said they understand why Jews might take issue with the comparison, but they both said it is valid.
“Why don’t they find it offensive that the murder of Americans is happening?” Jorge asked. “When a Jewish person goes for the open borders and welcoming the migrants, that’s very offensive.”
Correction, July 3: A previous version of this story quoted Dave Gibson as saying that he believes the leadership of The Social Contract magazine thinks America is a “white culture.” In fact, Gibson said they believe America is a “Western culture.”
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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