[csusbpeace] A Group of Former Trump Aides Is Behind Racist and False Anti-Immigrant Ads

From: "raccoon" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ("bigraccoon1")
To: "CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2022 12:47:09 -0700

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/trump-aides-citizens-for-sanity-anti-immigrant-ads/

<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/trump-aides-citizens-for-sanity-anti-immigrant-ads/>

A Group of Former Trump Aides Is Behind Racist and False Anti-Immigrant Ads

And they’re connected to Stephen Miller’s legal organization.

Former adviser to former President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller. Joel
Martinez/The Monitor/AP

Baseball fans in California and Pennsylvania watching the playoffs last
Saturday had to sit through commercial breaks that included racist,
xenophobic ads filled with misleading and false claims. “You worked hard for
what you have,” one of the ads says. “Followed the rules, paid your taxes,
saved and sacrificed for your piece of the American Dream, and now it is
being stolen for you, stolen from your family, stolen from your children. Joe
Biden and his fellow Democrats have erased our southern border, and they have
released a record number of illegal immigrants into the United States, all at
your expense. This giant flood of illegal immigration is draining your
paychecks, wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals, and threatening
your family.”
Behind the ads is a group called Citizens for Sanity, which vows on its
website to “return common sense to America” and defeat “wokeism.” In the
lead-up to the midterms, the organization has been paying for virulent
televised messages and billboards targeting President Joe Biden and
Democratic candidates running in contested senate races. Among the group’s
officers
<https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22309834/citizens-for-sanity-nab-with-full-board-listed-brabendercox-llc-issue-transgender-athletes.pdf>
are three former Trump aides who now work with America First Legal (AFL), an
organization founded by anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller that brands
itself as an “answer to the ACLU” and has sued the Biden administration over
everything under the sun. A Federal Communications Commission document
analyzed
<https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/09/new-dark-money-group-tied-to-former-trump-officials-launches-provocative-ads-ahead-of-2022-midterms/>
by OpenSecrets shows the ex-Trump staffers—Gene Hamilton, John Zadrozny, and
Ian Prior—listed as “chief executive officers or members of the executive
committee or board of directors” of Citizens for Sanity.

Hamilton, AFL’s vice president and general counsel, held positions in the
Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and has been credited as the
architect
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-official-behind-the-end-of-daca-explains-himself>
of the effort to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Zadrozny, now a deputy director of investigations with Miller’s group, served
as a US Citizenship and Immigration Services official and previously worked
for the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform. Prior
used to be a deputy director of public affairs in Trump’s DOJ and is now a
senior adviser at America First Legal, though he told OpenSecrets that
Citizens for Sanity has no relationship with AFL. Prior also leads Fight for
Schools, a group out of Loudon County in Virginia that opposes critical race
theory.

“Citizens for Sanity is not an ideological organization,” Prior told
<https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/16/conservative-nonprofit-midterms-00052081>
Politico. “We stand for reason, common sense, objectivity, equality, the
neutral rule of law, and open scientific inquiry—everything the radical left
now stands implacably against. And we are using these messaging campaigns to
alert Americans to the urgent need to defeat and repudiate woke insanity
before it destroys America.”

One of the group’s ads targeting immigrants is not only blatantly racist, but
also deceiving. “Who is Joe Biden letting into our country?” it says,
suggesting the current administration allowed Christopher Puente, a man
charged with sexually assaulting a 3-year-old girl in 2020, into the country.
But Puente had been in the United States on and off for years before Biden
took office. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to detain him in 2019,
after he was arrested for unrelated charges, but the Chicago police didn’t
honor the agency’s request
<https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/man-arrested-sexually-assaulting-toddler-fast-food-restaurant-should-have-been-turned>
to keep him detained. (Puente has since been incarcerated on the assault
charges.) In another video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTAh9RE_2c>, the
group claims that all senate Democrats voted against hiring more border
agents, despite the fact that Arizona Senators Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema
co-sponsored the bipartisan bill Border Patrol Enhancement Act
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/4775?s=1&r=8> to
raise border patrol agents’ pay and increase their numbers.

Some of the organization’s campaigns are satires mocking progressive policies
and talking points. “No one is free until all pansexuals have free housing,”
said one billboard in Columbus, Ohio. “Vote to keep our borders, jails and
bathrooms open,” read another in New Mexico. One in Spanish placed in Austin
said pregnant Latinx men must be defended this November. “That’s the genius
of it, right?” Prior said on a podcast in August. “Here’s a thing that
progressives and far-left wokeists are probably gonna start saying at some
point. We’re just getting ahead of them and letting people say where is this
going next.” On Twitter, the group boasts of having “disrupted the narrative”
and “triggering crazed reactions from the woke mob and corporate media.” It
has also been placing ads in newspapers and billboards accusing Kelly and
Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of supporting open-border policies and
drug smuggling.

The ads have elicited negative reactions on social media and elsewhere. “I
remain disgusted that Fox continues to air horrid Citizens for Sanity ads
during MLB playoff games,” sportswriter Gordon Edes tweeted
<https://twitter.com/search?q=Citizens%20for%20Sanity&src=typed_query>, “even
though 30 percent-plus players in the game are Latinos.” A Florida-based
environmental nonprofit also called Citizens for Sanity has included a
disclaimer on top of its website clarifying
<https://www.citizensforsanity.com/> it’s “not affiliated in any way with the
extremist group who is spending tons of money on billboards throughout the
country” and “could care less about the messages on their billboards.” In
response to an Oct. 11 edition of the Arizona Daily Sun that included ads
from Citizens for Sanity, a group of Flagstaff residents penned a letter
<https://azdailysun.com/opinion/letters/letter-to-the-editor-group-horrified-by-citizens-for-sanity-ads/article_233f5364-4b1f-11ed-b6b8-1fd4bddb5d41.html>
to the editor asking the newspaper to “reject the blatant effort to stoke
anti-immigrant fears.” The ads, they wrote, are “overtly racist, transphobic
or just plain hateful” and “the inflammatory rhetoric and the dehumanizing
photos stigmatize the immigrants who live in our community and those seeking
asylum and escape from violence.”

[csusbpeace] A Group of Former Trump Aides Is Behind Racist and False Anti-Immigrant Ads

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