Neo-Nazi groups and the online far right are latching on to the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House in an effort to recruit new supporters and spread their extremism to broader audiences.
After the Republican national convention in July, where supporters waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” placards, it became clear that Trump’s xenophobia has become part of the Republican establishment. Upon his return to X, formerly known as Twitter, Trump released a stream of images targeting Vice-President Kamala Harris’s stance on the border and immigration.
Among them were memes inferring the Democrats will bring rapists into the country and a 2012 photo of men in Karachi, Pakistan, burning an American flag with the caption: “Meet your neighbors […] IF KAMALA WINS.”
In tandem with the Trump campaign’s sloganeering, known figures on the far right and their online denizens are seizing on the open hatred of immigrants from the top Republican and going even more public with their brand of activism.
“At this point, demonizing and lying about immigrants is part and parcel of the far-right scene and a major part of its anti-immigrant messaging,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), an extremism watchdog organization. “Non-white immigrants and refugees are enemy number one for the far-right.”
Beirich warned the current climate is even more dangerous as she’s seeing ideologies, once the sole domain of fringe neo-Nazis, being “mainstreamed by political figures”.
For example, two separate hate groups recently descended on Springfield, Ohio, rallying with masks and uniforms and threatening the approximately 20,000 Haitian immigrants that have arrived in the town since the pandemic. In 2023, tensions among local residents flared up after a bus crash involving a Haitian driver helped make the Rust-belt town a flashpoint in anti-immigration debates.
In August, Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group led by ex-US marine Christopher Pohlhaus, marched in Springfield waving swastika flags (with at least two members carrying rifles) and yelling anti-Black and racist epithets at a jazz festival.
Then, in early September, one of its leaders was granted time to speak at a town forum with local politicians.
“I’ve come to bring a word of warning,” said the leader, speaking under a racist pseudonym. He is believed to be the second-in-command of Blood Tribe, after Pohlhaus, and also a former marine. “Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
The leader then continued, directly threatening local Haitian residents. He was booted from the meeting.
Though he doesn’t seem to have appeared in Springfield this summer, Pohlhaus was part of a 2022 protest in Maine harassing Somali refugees and used his Telegram account to call on “ALL GROUPS AND ORGS” to “HIT SPRINGFIELD, OHIO.”
Pohlhaus refused to answer the Guardian’s questions about his group. Late last week, the “Hammer” as Pohlhaus is known to his thousands of followers, promoted a story from a white supremacist propagandist about a Haitian migrant accused of a sexual assault in Massachusetts.
Patriot Front, another adjacent neo-fascist group, heeded those words and held a rally of its own with a speech in Springfield over Labor Day weekend, denouncing what it called the “mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants”.
An Ohio-based, neo-Nazi Active Club (a sort of racist, mixed-martial arts collective), used the summer tensions in Springfield to recruit new members, too.
“The thousands of Haitian and West African invaders currently being housed in Ohio all have a tribe,” said one of its Telegram posts from August and then providing an encrypted email address with the simple message: “Here’s ours.”
The group followed up on Thursday, posting an image on X of the same report that Pohlhaus promoted, with the caption, “If you are in Ohio, we are forming an organization for activism […] Do not wait.”
Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), has kept tabs on Blood Tribe and Patriot Front and says they are both, “seeking to capitalize on local tension to hold rallies, recruit, generate propaganda footage, and solicit money”.
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Fisher-Birch believes there’s no doubt the current presidential election season factors into their calculus.
“These groups will continue to hold anti-immigration rallies before the November election because they see an opportunity to recruit and gain publicity within the broader anti-immigrant space,” he said. “These extremist groups are not popular but frequently try to gain momentum from culture-war issues in an attempt to stay relevant and recruit.”
While Trump made it clear in a 2018 Oval Office meeting with senators that he considered Haiti to be among a list of “shithole” countries with undesirable immigrants, when it comes to far-right propagandists on the internet – they haven’t been getting cues from the former president, but instead providing them.
After a video, amplified on major far-right Telegram channels and elsewhere, showing alleged Venezuelan gang members carrying weapons in an Aurora, Colorado, apartment complex went viral, Trump repeatedly used it to denounce immigrant criminals entering the country.
On Saturday, the interim chief of the Aurora police department was forced to put out a Facebook video, clarifying the situation at the building was a much “different picture” from the frenzy and rumors surrounding it.
Yet Trump continued referencing the incident, including in a podcast interview days after Aurora police issued their statement.
Other neo-Nazi activists, not wasting the moment for inflaming tensions, shared a video on Telegram allegedly driving through the streets of Aurora with a megaphone and claiming “to take the city back”.
Similarly, on Tuesday, Elon Musk, perhaps Trump’s most devoted fanboy, helped spread disinformation about “32 armed Venezuelans” taking over a Chicago building, which the police promptly disproved. The disinformation emanated from the infamous X account, Libs of TikTok, a known purveyor of dangerous, rightwing propaganda and once the subject of a Twitter suspension when the company wasn’t under the ownership of Musk.
“It’s not surprising to see the far right agitating over a fake story about Venezuelan immigrants taking over an apartment complex in Aurora,” said . “It falsely holds that there is an orchestrated plan, often blamed on Jews or globalists, to replace white people in their home countries.”
Mixed with Trump’s brand of politics, Beirich said, the “lie is seen as true and an existential threat for white supremacists, which is motivating this anti-immigrant activism”.
The Trump campaign inflaming hate crimes and far-right activism is not without precedent. A study out of the University of North Texas on the 2016 Trump campaign, one that held nativist racism at its core, statistically proved that in places where Trump held one of his over 300 rallies there was a “226% increase in hate-motivated incidents”.