Chairman Crowley to ICE Director: Unacceptable For You to Address Hate Group
(Queens, NY) – Today, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley (D-Queens, the Bronx) wrote a letter to Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan expressing dismay over the ICE director’s plan to address a known hate group.
Homan is scheduled to address the Center for Immigration Studies, a racist anti-immigrant hate group that has a long track-record of demonizing immigrants, on Tuesday. Crowley told Homan that it is disqualifying for a government official, especially one charged with interacting with immigrant communities, to address the group.
“It is highly inappropriate for a senior official of a federal agency to engage with a group that spreads such abhorrent viewpoints, including white supremacism and anti-Semitism, and I urge you to immediately retract your plans to speak,” Crowley wrote.
The Center for Immigration Studies is part of a network founded by white nationalist John Tanton, and in a wide-ranging study, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that CIS has circulated “white nationalist content thousands of times” and has a “record of publishing reports that hype the criminality of immigrants” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Lending legitimacy to a hate group and splitting children from families does not in any way protect national security and public safety, nor does it demonstrate the integrity and fairness that is expected of a federal agency. Instead, it fosters an environment in which extremist viewpoints come to be seen as acceptable and justified by the highest levels of your agency,” Crowley wrote. “Speaking to a group like this is disqualifying for a federal official entrusted with acting in the best interests of the general public.”
You can read the letter here.
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