Perdue. IN – As ICE and its mass deportation campaign continue to murder innocent people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Geurrero, Indiana politicians are hosting former Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) commander Greg Bovino for a rally where he and others will argue that ICE has still not gone far enough.
The rally will be hosted by Save Heritage Indiana, a nonprofit considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be an anti-immigrant hate group. It will also feature recorded remarks from Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith.
Bovino became notorious as the face of ICE and CBP after Trump’s second term began. The blowback came at the beginning of this year, after agents under his command murdered Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. His removal was one concession wrung out of the Trump administration by the unprecedented mass mobilization of Minnesotans against “Operation Metro Surge.”
Bovino is leveraging his notoriety on a tour of the country in preparation for a potential presidential run in 2028, using the narrative that he was forced out by a feckless administration unwilling to do “real” mass deportations. Bovino claims, per the “Heritage Rallies” website, that there are over 100 million “illegal aliens” in the country needing to be deported, nearly a third of the U.S. population.
These false claims are being backed up by a coterie of far-right Indiana politicians, the most prominent of course being Lieutenant Governor Beckwith. Beckwith has long courted controversy: he has always referred to himself as a “Christian Nationalist” and most recently called Islam “demonic” and “more dangerous than Nazism.”
Another speaker will be Brandon Harnish, founder of the Pat Buchanan Society and self-proclaimed member of the “New Right” and county councilor for Wells County. The third speaker will be Anthony Rubin, founder of the website Muckraker, who produces anti-immigrant propaganda similar to that of Youtuber Nick Shirley, whose staged reporting in the Twin Cities was used as a pretext by the Trump administration for Operation Metro Surge.
The host of the event, Save Heritage Indiana, is run by Daniel Poynter. A Purdue alumnus, tech industry businessman, and self-proclaimed descendant of Patrick Henry and Mayflower passengers, Poynter got his start in the non-profit world with Carbon Neutral Indiana, which is dedicated to finding ways to mitigate climate change. Last year, Poynter pivoted to co-founding SHI with Nathan Roberts, a far-right college student, because, according to their website, they “realized the world we grew up in is being destroyed.” SHI’s website is a litany of thinly-veiled racism but makes its violent white supremacy clear when they state their goal of “reversing mass migration.”
Save Heritage Indiana is but one part of a larger nationwide alliance called the Mass Deportation Coalition. According to its website, this coalition includes partners ranging from institutional heavy hitters to private individuals. The former includes the likes of the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 infamy) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (a longstanding anti-immigration think tank cited by both Democrats and Republicans in making policy) with the latter including Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince and former ICE head Mark Morgan.
This “movement” for mass deportations is indicative of a contradiction within Trump’s ruling coalition. This contradiction is between the tendency of the monopoly capitalist base to seek ever larger numbers of precarious, super-exploitable workers from the world’s oppressed nations to immigrate, and the tendency of the white chauvinist superstructure to prevent immigration. The contours of this contradiction became immediately clear even before Trump had begun his second term, in a bitter debate over H-1B visas.
The racist position, espoused by Stephen Miller, was that these visas should be eliminated and that the jobs filled by these visa holders go to Americans instead. The monopoly capitalist position, argued by Elon Musk, was that there simply are not enough sufficiently trained workers in the U.S. to fill the jobs and that the immigrants coming through H-1Bs are qualitatively different “desirable” immigrants. Trump sided with monopoly capital and, in the end, left H-1Bs alone.
The stakes involved in the struggle are all too clear in the wake of ICE’s most recent murders, and thankfully, the mass movement against ICE repression and for legalization for all continues to gain momentum.
A coalition of local organizations in Indiana has already planned a counter-march: the Hoosier Hospitality March. The coalition includes Indivisible chapters from all over central Indiana, Indy Resistance, Voices 4 Democracy, Somos Latinos, and Hamilton County Food Not Bombs.
Since Save Heritage Indiana (SHI) refuses to disclose to the public where their event will be held, the protesters’ coalition will be marching from Holland Park to the Municipal Center, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on the day of SHI’s Bovino rally. The march will be a show of support and solidarity to the members of the community that SHI and Bovino seek to terrorize.
If you want to join that fight, look for local affiliates near you of the Legalization for All (L4A) Network, or local Chicano rights organizations. If you have any information as to where SHI’s rally will be held, do not hesitate to reach out to the organizations named above, or to FRSO Indiana.
#PerdueIN #IN #ImmigrantRights #ICE #Bovino
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