Yesterday, the Maryland-based anti-immigrant organization Help Save Maryland posted a blog about an immigrant day laborer center that was recently moved to a site near a local gun range.
In a single paragraph, the blog’s unnamed author manages to conflate immigrants and driver’s licenses, immigrant workers, and gun violence while also comparing immigrants to abandoned animals:
“Interesting location: CASA’s Illegal Alien Day Laborers are now housed in what I believe was the former County Animal Shelter. And its just a short walk down the road from a very popular and well run gun range. With the Obama Amnesty about to hit, I do not want these illegal alien criminals walking into the gun range with their new Maryland drivers’ licenses requesting range time!”
The day labor center is operated by CASA de Maryland, that state’s largest immigration advocacy organization.
Help Save Maryland has long been the official state-contact group of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the flagship of today’s organized anti-immigrant movement. Through it’s staff of field representatives, FAIR operates the largest network of anti-immigrant organizations working from the state-level on down to malign immigrants and to push for the passing of draconian policies by their state’s legislatures.
Overseeing the FAIR’s collaborations and guiding of groups like Help Save Maryland is Susan Tully, the group’s National Field Director. Tully was recently quoted minimizing ISIS’s persecution of LGBT individuals and claiming that members of the Obama the administration “are all Communist/Marxists.” She has also recently claimed that President Obama is “more interested in supporting those who are trying to hurt and undermine the United States” than anything else. In recent months, Tully has renewed connections with openly bigoted leaders of the Minuteman movement, connections that FAIR let fall quiet for some years in fear of inviting controversy.
Through the years, the Minuteman movement has long proved welcoming to violent, bigoted extremists like Shawna Forde and others.
As evidenced above and across our blog, Tully and Help Save Maryland embody and exemplify the conspiratorial rancor, irrationality, and embarrassing bigotry that fuels the organized and highly coordinated anti-immigrant movement, as it exists in Washington, DC and across the United States.