The Daily Signal
Tyler O’Neil
March 10, 2024
“We will never know how many of the 182 illegal alien murderers now in the Georgia prison system could have been snagged before they killed innocent Georgians if not for the well-funded, anti-enforcement SPLC lobbying operation,” King told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Friday.”
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Southern Poverty Law Center has repeatedly opposed Georgia bills that would require local law enforcement to report illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they are charged with or convicted of other crimes. This activism has drawn renewed scrutiny in the wake of Laken Riley’s killing, allegedly at the hands of an illegal alien who appears to have slipped through the justice system, and amid a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC.
D.A. King, a Georgia immigration activist who founded a pro-immigration enforcement organization called the Dustin Inman Society, noted that the SPLC opposed two laws that would have improved communication between local law enforcement and ICE.
King is currently suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation after the group branded his organization an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018, around the same time the SPLC registered a lobbyist to oppose an immigration enforcement bill King supported.
“We will never know how many of the 182 illegal alien murderers now in the Georgia prison system could have been snagged before they killed innocent Georgians if not for the well-funded, anti-enforcement SPLC lobbying operation,” King told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Friday.
SPLC registered a lobbyist to oppose SB 452, a bill that would have required courts to check whether, when sentencing a defendant convicted of a felony, that person is also an illegal alien.
The SPLC joined with the organization Project South in opposing the bill, calling it unconstitutional. Project South claimed that law enforcement would violate the Fourth Amendment by detaining illegal aliens “without a judicial warrant or probable cause” after they served time for other crimes.
According to King, the legislation “would have added increased protection in our public safety laws aimed at the organized crime that is illegal immigration.”
Naomi Tsu, an SPLC attorney at the time, registered as a lobbyist on March 1, 2018, three days after SB 452 passed the Georgia Senate. King argues that the SPLC’s activism helped torpedo the measure, which failed in the Georgia House of Representatives.
King also complains that Tsu tried to steal his phone. (The Daily Signal reached out to Muslim Advocates, where Tsu serves as a litigation consultant, for comment.)
In 2020, the SPLC also opposed HB 1083, a bill that would have given Georgia citizens injured by criminal illegal aliens—or Georgia families of those killed by them—the ability to sue local governments with so-called “sanctuary” policies for damages.
“HB 1083 died in large part because of public threats and smears from SPLC lobbyists,” King said.
Before the Southern Poverty Law Center registered Tsu as a lobbyist against SB 452 in 2018, the SPLC told The Associated Press that it didn’t consider King’s organization to be a “hate group.” Yet after Tsu opposed King’s bill, the SPLC branded the Dustin Inman Society an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
King sued the SPLC for defamation, and the case cleared a major legal hurdle last year.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to monitor the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, putting them on a “hate map” with Klan chapters. The SPLC “hate map” includes immigration reform organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies.
Laken Riley
Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University, disappeared last month after she went on a run on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, where she had graduated. Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, an illegal alien from Venezuela, faces multiple charges of murder and assault in Riley’s slaying. Authorities said there is no evidence that Ibarra knew Riley.
Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally in El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 8, 2022, with his wife and her son seeking asylum, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Authorities released him “for further processing,” the New York Post reported…
Read the rest at the Daily Signal here.
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