Now that an unabashed white supremacist occupies the Oval Office, anti-immigrant activists and other radicals have infiltrated branches of the U.S. government at an accelerated rate. Today, that radical cabal is down one, following the resignation of former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyst Ian M. Smith over connections to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, according to emails revealed to The Atlantic.
Smith “had in the past been in contact with a group that included known white nationalists as they planned various events,” reports Rosie Gray. “On one of the email threads, the address of the alt-right white nationalist leader Richard Spencer is included, as well as Smith’s. Another group of recipients includes Smith as well as Jared Taylor, the founder of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, who calls himself a ‘white advocate.’”
Spencer, the punchable neo-Nazi who helped organize the deadly Charlottesville rally that resulted in the tragic murder of Heather Heyer, was a college mentor to White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of some of the administration’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies. Miller now denies knowing Spencer, and a DHS spokesperson claimed that Smith’s “radical ideology runs counter to the Department’s mission of keeping America safe,” but DHS knew exactly who they were hiring. Just check out his previous employer.
Smith “used to work for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an anti-immigration legal organization associated with the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), FAIR is an anti-immigrant hate group that was founded by eugenicist John Tanton, and a group that is in favor of some legal immigration, so long as they’re white. Oh, and what was Smith’s job at DHS? “A policy analyst working on immigration,” The Atlantic continues. Oh boy.
Other emails “show Smith included on threads with people associated with white nationalism, such as Marcus Epstein, a former Tom Tancredo aide who entered an Alford plea in 2009 for assaulting a black woman in Washington, D.C., in 2007.” Gray notes that “though the emails don’t show Smith and Spencer interacting, some of the messages indicate a familiarity on Smith’s part with Spencer’s projects. In another email, sent on March 7, 2015, Smith refers to an event held by “NPI,” the acronym for the National Policy Institute, Spencer’s white-nationalist nonprofit, saying he had missed it because he was out of town.”
In another email, Smith expressed a desire to “talk to people like Matt Parrot [sic].” Parrott, The Atlantic reports, “is the former spokesman for the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party.” But DHS still insists it rejects “all forms of violent extremism”? Sure, Jan. As of last week, Smith no longer works at DHS. That should give him all the time he needs to get to all those events he so sadly missed.