Azadeh Shahshah leading an SPLC-sponsored anti-enforcement rally in Atlanta, Jan 2016. Image: DIS

Avowed enemy of ICE and immigration enforcement. Radical leftist with ties to the communist party through the NLG, which

• Uses the law to promote “basic change in the structure of our political and capitalisteconomic system”
• Has longstanding ties to the Communist Party and its front groups
• Defends all manner of America-hating radicals
• Has consistently opposed U.S. foreign policy while supporting America’s enemies across the globe
• Has consistently opposed post-9/11 national security measures by the U.S. government

Read more about the national Lawyers Guild (NLG) here, from David Horowitz.

“Shahshahani was elected President of the National Lawyers Guild “The NLG has served as my political home. NLG members have been some of my strongest mentors, role models, and friends. There is no other organization like the NLG serving as a base for legal activists. It provides a space to do political legal work and be connected to other movement lawyers, legal workers, law students, and jailhouse lawyers” says Shahshahani. *From Tehran to Atlanta: Social Justice Lawyer Azadeh Shahshahani’s Fight for Human Rights.

Azadeh Shahshahani currently is Legal & Advocacy Director for the leftist ‘Project South The Institution For Elimination of Poverty and Genocide’ in Atlanta and is active in fighting enforcement of American immigration laws – and for “liberation.”

Mission statement from Project South:

“PROJECT SOUTH IS A COMMUNITY BASED MEMBERSHIP INSTITUTE THAT DEVELOPS POPULAR POLITICAL/ECONOMIC EDUCATION AND ACTION RESEARCH FOR ORGANIZING AND LIBERATION. PROJECT SOUTH BUILDS RELATIONSHIPS WITH ORGANIZATIONS AND NETWORKS ACROSS THE US AND GLOBAL SOUTH TO INFORM LOCAL WORK AND TO ENGAGE IN BOTTOM UP MOVEMENT BUILDING FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE.”

Two million dollars in donations in 2017

“Project South” received more than $2 million in contributions in 2017 according to their IRS form 990. You can donate to Shahshahani here, OR you can donate to the pro-enforcement Dustin Inman Society here.

Shahshahani is a race-baiting former Director of the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Georgia. and Detention Watch, which is dedicated to open borders through the prohibition of confinement for illegal aliens.

Image: Gwinnett Daily Post

This below is from a newspaper that happily published my immigration columns for more than a decade.

Archiving two Gwinnett Daily Post articles here in which that newspaper helps pass along the lies and smears from the discredited SPLC et al and one in which it helps a race-baiting politician get more signatures on a hate petition intended to discredit a law and order sheriff and to neuter my pro-enforcement efforts here in Georgia where we have more illegal aliens than green card holders. The Gwinnett illegal alien population is estimated by MPI to be about 72,000 – or about 8% of its total population.

Nobody, including the reporter, Isabel Hughes (“emerging journalist”) and the longtime editor, Todd Cline has ever contacted me in any way for comment on either of these articles. The kicker is that for eleven years I wrote pro-enforcement columns for the Gwinnett Daily Post, and they were published by the same editor, Todd Cline. All of those columns can be seen here.

Contact the GDP here.

Sparks fly at community meeting to discuss Gwinnett jail’s 287(g) immigration program

By Isabel Hughes isabel.hughes

@gwinnettdailypost.com

Jul 31, 2019

“You’re a white supremacist!” one woman shouted from the back left side of the Gwinnett Justice and Administration Center auditorium.

“You’re a coward and a sorry little…” a man yelled several minutes later from the opposite back corner, leaving his sentence unfinished.

The comments, which were directed at two separate panelists, gave voice to tensions that, at times, ran high through GJAC’s auditorium Wednesday night during a “community engagement discussion” about the Gwinnett County Jail’s 287(g) program.

A partnership between state or local law enforcement and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, that allows local jurisdictions to receive delegated authority for immigration enforcement, 287(g) has been a controversial issue in Gwinnett in recent months, largely sparked by Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway’s anticipated renewal — and then official one-year reinstatement — of the program.

Wednesday’s discussion about 287(g), which was organized by Gwinnett County District 4 Commissioner Marlene Fosque and featured six panelists — three from what Fosque called the “benefits,” or pro-287(g) side, and three from the “impact,” or anti-287(g) side — was intended to foster a dialogue between the program’s supporters and opponents, the commissioner said.

“Our sheriff’s department has participated in the 287(g) program for about 10 years, yet no one has brought the two sides together to decide what are the benefits of 287(g) and decide what is the impact,” Fosque said. “I’m a newly elected commissioner, so I’m trying to do new things. I pray at the end of this discussion, (attendees) walk away with a different perspective, or at least a new perspective.”

While Fosque said it remains to be seen whether attendees’ perspectives were ultimately changed, it certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying.

With businesswoman Andrea Rivera, District 99 State Rep. Brenda Lopez Romero and local attorney Antonio Molina on the anti-287(g) side and Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Deputy Shannon Volkodav, ICE Southern Region Communications Director Bryan Cox and D.A. King, president of the Dustin Inman Society, which pushes for tougher immigration laws but has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant hate group, on the pro-287(g) side, the discussion ranged from quotations of bible verses to racial profiling to what ICE’s presence in Gwinnett will be if 287(g) goes away.

The two sides did agree on one thing, however: fear plays a large role in immigration discussions, though for different reasons.

“This is a conversation about fear,” Rivera said. “People have had encounters that (contribute) to that, but it’s also a fear (of immigrants) that’s been imposed on all of us by politicians and others. But one of the reasons that most our parents and grandparents or great grandparents came here is because they were looking for a different life and for a different way of living.”

For many immigrants, especially ones who are undocumented, their fear is different than what Rivera spoke of — it’s a fear of being targeted because of their skin color or immigration status.

But Cox said much of the immigration-related fear, especially when it pertains to 287(g), is unfounded.

“There is a lot of fear in the community; of that, we agree. Both sides speak to fear in the community,” Cox said. “However, that is based on a significant amount of misinformation. ICE does not do any type of random, indiscriminate enforcement in Gwinnett County, or anywhere.

“When our officers go out for the day to make arrests, they quite literally have in hand a target list. They’re going to a specific place, looking for a specific person.”

Similarly, Volkodav said, 287(g)-trained deputies, or any other law enforcement in Gwinnett, are not asking residents about their immigration status — the only place a county law enforcement officer can question someone’s immigration status is when he or she has been brought to the jail and is charged with a crime.

Then, too, it’s only one of the specially trained 287(g) deputies who can do the questioning.

“The reality is, 287(g) focuses solely on criminal offenders. The only way you’re going to encounter 287(g) is if you’re charged with a crime,” Cox said. “Currently, ICE goes to the jail and takes custody of a criminal offender, and only that criminal offender. The reality is, in the jurisdictions that don’t work with ICE, this agency has no choice but to send ICE officers into the community to find those criminals. With 287(g), we go to the jail, arrest the target and only the target. Without 287(g), you will see an increased ICE presence; the agency will have no choice but to send more officers onto the streets of Gwinnett County to find those same persons.

“The result of that is, when you’re looking for that target, we also would be more likely to encounter other persons in the country who are in violation of federal immigration law,” Cox continued. “So, if your position is that you don’t like ICE and you don’t want ICE enforcement, the reality is, 287(g) is your best friend, because this is a program that focuses exclusively on the subset of (undocumented) individuals who commit criminal offenses.”

While Cox’s words likely didn’t do much to dissuade fear of ICE, Fosque told the Daily Post she felt confident the evening opened the eyes of both pro- and anti-287(g) attendees.

“I think it accomplished an opening up of perspectives on how 287(g) operates, as well as the emotions about the impact,” Fosque said. “That was my whole point — for both sides, the benefits as well as the impacts, to really understand each other. That’s what I think it did, and I think it accomplished that goal. It didn’t necessarily change minds, but it (offered) the opportunity just to listen to different viewpoints and educate people.”

Entire report with photos here.

_ More below

National Review

The SPLC Fires Its Co-Founder, and Its Own Intolerance Is Exposed Again

March 15, 2019

“For fair-minded observers, this has been a bad week for the credibility of the two most aggressive (and punitive) “watchdogs” of the right — Media Matters and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Thanks to Peter Hasson at the Daily Caller News Foundation, we discovered the stunning hypocrisy of Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. The man who helms an organization that combs through the past of every conservative public figure looking for evidence of hate and bigotry has his own history of hateful posts….” Here

Center for immigration Studies
Dan Cadman blog

March 7, 2019

Democrats, the SPLC, and CAIR Argue Against Collecting Data on Alien Prisoners in Georgia

By Dan Cadman on March 7, 2019

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, then how much truer that is where immigration politics is concerned. The most recent proof of that was occasioned by a public hearing on an amendment to a bill introduced into the Georgia House of Representatives.

The bill is short and straightforward: It would require the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) to maintain statistics regarding the number of alien prisoners in its custody; what percentage they compose of the total population of state prisoners, with breakdowns by nationality; and, importantly, those against whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has filed detainers with the intent of taking them into custody to begin deportation proceedings upon release. It would also require those figures to be made publicly available.

At the hearing, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was joined by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to argue against the bill, which we know courtesy of D.A. King, who attended the hearing and took a photo of the sign-in sheet.

This brings us back to that question of strange bedfellows, in this case, the SPLC and CAIR. Consider:

The SPLC is prone to denunciations of a host of other organizations or individuals whose views it does not share as racists, anti-Semites, hate groups, homophobes, xenophobes, you name it. Sometimes this gets the SPLC into hot water — for instance, when it was obliged to apologize to Dr. Ben Carson for having added him to its “extremist watch list”, or when it labeled Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist” and was forced to settle a lawsuit for more than $3 million, plus a public apology. There have been op-eds in liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post suggesting that the SPLC has lost its credibility, and even the liberal journal Politico has asked the same question. Even so, the SPLC, with a huge war chest from donations of earnest liberals, remains unrepentant. (Disclosure: the Center for Immigration Studies, of which I am a fellow, is suing the president of the SPLC, and the head of its “hate” operation, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act (RICO) for having labeled our organization as a hate group.)

CAIR is a very different organization. It was an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal action against the Holy Land Foundation, a donation-collections front for the HAMAS terrorist organization. The United Arab Emirates lists CAIR as a terrorist organization because of its links to HAMAS and the Muslim Brotherhood. As recently as last April, a Los Angeles CAIR official found himself scrambling after he was exposed by the media for comments likening Israel to the brutal Islamic State, which during its brief reign over swathes of Iraq and Syria, tortured, beheaded, crucified, and stoned to death unbelievers, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals (the very kinds of people SPLC claims to want to protect).

It would seem, then, that the only thing that these organizations share is an antipathy for any form of immigration enforcement, or anything that exposes to the light the kind of data that the bill might require.

Returning to the Georgia bill, King notes that one Democrat arguing against the bill went so far as to predict “race wars” in Georgia’s penal institutions (listen at 7:10 here).

Race wars? Really? Over the collection of data? I’m astounded, and reminded of the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo for having the temerity to use astronomical facts to establish the shape of our world and the nature of our solar system. Of course, if you choose not to subscribe to facts, you can always join the Flat Earth Society…. More here.

Thanks, Ev!

Image: Wikipedia

WSB News,

I am a friend of D.A. King and have been a neighbor of his for the last thirty-five years here in Marietta. I have learned that you have passed on an absurd Southern Poverty Law Center “report” that D.A.’s non-profit group is somehow a ‘hate group” and attacks immigrants. Passing on false and slanderous attacks from the SPLC is no way to run a news outlet.

As a black American, I am disgusted with the SPLC’s endless race baiting and their shameless attacks on honest, patriotic Americans like us who want secure borders and to see our immigration laws enforced. I have been on the board of advisors of the Dustin Inman Society since its creation in 2005 and am proud to see D.A. fight against illegal immigration. I am amazed to learn that you never even interviewed D.A. King before you spread the SPLC smear.

It seems that you may be working on the same agenda as the SPLC.

Everett Robinson
Marietta

Board of Advisors
D.A. King (President)
Billy Inman
Kathy Inman
Inger Eberhart
Fred Elbel
Francisco Jorge
Lupe Moreno
Everett Robinson
John Litland
Maria Silvia Montoya
Mary Grabar
Catherine Davis

 

Image: Wikipedia

 

 

 

Note: Mary tells me her letter resulted in a phone call from WSB Executive Producer Brad Stone who apparently indicated there would be a future report on SPLC/DIS. In May.

“It is also my understanding that responsible news organizations will contact individuals under discussion.” Mary Grabar, American citizen and proud immigrant.

I write in outrage over WSB TV’s news report that repeats the smears of the SPLC’s latest list of what they call “hate groups” and the inclusion of the mainstream Dustin Inman Society.

As a news organization, you should know that the SPLC has repeatedly been found to target groups with which it has ideological disagreements as “hate groups”—with no evidence to back up the charges. For this reason, they are being sued by numerous individuals and organizations.

It is also my understanding that responsible news organizations will contact individuals under discussion. I learn from D.A. King that you have not even bothered to contact him, and after linking to a report that profiled him (with lies) at length.

The SPLC has been exposed countless times as a scam. They actually lobby at the Gold Dome against legislation that would require reporting illegal aliens that have already been convicted of crimes to ICE. Is there a mention of this fact in your “reporting”?

The false headline from the SPLC hit piece on the Dustin Inman Society tells readers that DIS “focuses on vilifying all immigrants.” As a proud immigrant and a member of the board of advisors of the Dustin Inman Society for years, I can testify that this is a whole cloth and easily disproved lie.

I went to hear D.A. King speak just last week and listened to him tell the packed room that the media will paint anyone who supports secure borders, immigration enforcement and sanity in the number of legal immigrants we allow in to the USA as somehow “anti-immigrant.” I can tell you that D.A. won resounding applause from the multi-racial and multi-ethnic audience.

You should report those kinds of facts rather than the libelous smears from the SPLC.

Sincerely,

Mary Grabar.