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SPLC: Former Head Of Anti-Immigrant Hate Group Joins Trump Administration

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It continues to be clear that Donald Trump meant what he said about immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the new administration has named a former executive director of an anti-immigrant hate group to a top post at the US Customs and Border Protection:

Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has been named chief of staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Kirchner worked at America’s most influential anti-immigrant organization for almost ten years before leaving in 2015 to become an immigration advisor to the Trump campaign.

Since its founding in 1979, FAIR has push an agenda centered on a complete moratorium on all immigration to the United States and defined by vicious attacks on non-white immigrants. Its founder was white nationalist John Tanton, an avowed eugenicist who created the modern anti-immigrant movement in the United States.

“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” Tanton wrote in 1993.

FAIR’s virulent attacks on non-white immigrants and the group’s connections to white supremacists have earned it a “hate group” status from SPLC since 2008. Tanton, “a man with a lengthy record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, a former Klan lawyer and leading white nationalist thinkers, has repeatedly suggested that racial conflict will be the outcome of immigration,” continues SPLC.

Now, “Kirchner’s appointment is only the latest of extremists groups suddenly enjoying a direct line to federal power.”

In recent days, two figures from the anti-immigrant, white nationalist news site Breitbart have also accepted positions within the administration. Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart writer “known for his hardline stances on Islam,” will likely serve on Trump’s National Security Council. Another Breitbart writer, Julia Hahn, has been hired as a top aide to former Breitbart head and current senior counselor to the President, Steve Bannon.

“Breitbart is practically having a merger with the Trump administration,” noted reporter Matt Pearce.