Note from news poster: As deplorable as the incident described in this
article sounds the Eritrean family involved in this case, given the
confusion around the issue, may be unfairly treated. The Eritrean
community in Idaho may want to look into this issue and offer help if
one is warranted.
"The youngest boy is from Iraq while the older ones, brothers, are
from an Eritrean family that passed through Sudanese refugee camps.
(Most news reports have identified the older boys as Sudanese.) Only
the youngest boy, Loebs said, is alleged to have touched the girl,
though investigators suspect the 10-year-old might have as well; the
elder boys reportedly made a video ... Imad Eujayl, a Sudanese plant
geneticist who serves as spokesman for the local Islamic Center, knows
both the Iraqi and the Eritrean families. The Iraqi boy’s mother is a
widow, he told me, and has five other children. The Eritrean boys have
since been released into their family’s custody, but Eujayl said that
the family is struggling since the eviction from Fawnbrook. Without a
reference from their previous landlord, they couldn’t rent a new
apartment, and with the court case ongoing, they had to stay in town.
They were living in another family’s basement. All the boys are being
represented by public defenders, but the public defenders’ office
won’t release their lawyers’ names. According to Loebs, they
technically face a maximum penalty of confinement in juvenile
detention until age 21, though he adds that with “minors this young
that is almost unheard of.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/sexual_assault_case_involving_refugees_in_idaho_in_the_age_of_donald_trump.html
“If You Want to Live Here, You Need to Live by the Rules Here”
A sexual assault case involving refugee children in Idaho. A microcosm
of America in the age of Trump.
By Michelle Goldberg
Last month, rumors began to ricochet around the city of Twin Falls,
Idaho, that three Syrian refugees had raped a 5-year-old girl. Some in
town said that the attackers, all juveniles themselves, held the girl
at knifepoint. It was said that they urinated on her naked body and
that one of the boys’ fathers high-fived his son when he learned what
he had done.
Michelle Goldberg
Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for Slate and the author, most
recently, of The Goddess Pose.
At a City Council meeting on June 13, several residents of Twin Falls,
population 44,125, questioned officials about the alleged crime; a man
named Terrence Edwards linked it to the terrorist massacres in
Orlando, Florida, and San Bernardino, California. He accused the
police of perpetrating a cover-up. “ISIS is here,” he said. “The
Muslim Brotherhood is here. There’s been violations already occurred
by Muslims here.” The members of the City Council didn’t know what to
make of all this. At that point, the only coverage of the alleged rape
had been a brief mention on local TV news of a police investigation
into a “reported sexual assault around the Fawnbrook apartments,” and
the lurid rumors hadn’t yet reached them.
The council’s failure to provide answers inflamed things. “This was a
pretty violent attack,” Davis Odell told me later. Odell is a
29-year-old who started the Facebook group Justice for Our Children to
demand a political response to the alleged assault. “Where were the
details? Why weren’t they given?” As she saw it, Twin Falls was
protecting the reputation of refugees, even at the expense of the
public’s safety. “The city has an agenda,” she said.
Soon the story of the alleged rape spread beyond Twin Falls. One
resident provided an anonymous report to a right-wing website called
BehindMyBack.org. The anti-Muslim blog Creeping Sharia picked up the
report, and by June 20, it had migrated to Infowars.com, a conspiracy
site favored by Donald Trump. The Drudge Report trumpeted the Infowars
story with the headline “Syrian Refugees Rape Little Girl at
Knifepoint in Idaho.”
The story circulating online was wrong in all its particulars. On June
20, Twin Falls county prosecutor Grant Loebs told the local newspaper,
“There were no Syrians involved, there was no knife involved, there
was no gang rape.” He blamed anti-refugee groups for circulating
misinformation. “There is a small group of people in Twin Falls County
whose life goal is to eliminate refugees, and thus far they have not
been constrained by the truth,” Loebs said.
Yet as wild as the rumors were, they’d grown from a kernel of truth.
There had been an incident involving three boys, ages 7, 10, and 14,
and a mentally disabled 5-year-old girl; Loebs described it to me as a
“very serious felony.” On June 2, an 89-year-old neighbor discovered
the children in the laundry room at the Fawnbrook Apartments, a
low-income housing complex. The youngest boy is from Iraq while the
older ones, brothers, are from an Eritrean family that passed through
Sudanese refugee camps. (Most news reports have identified the older
boys as Sudanese.) Only the youngest boy, Loebs said, is alleged to
have touched the girl, though investigators suspect the 10-year-old
might have as well; the elder boys reportedly made a video.
Because everyone involved in the case is a minor, the records were
sealed. Nevertheless, on the evening of June 20, Twin Falls Police
Chief Craig Kingsbury appeared at the weekly City Council meeting to
update the anxious public as best he could. He announced that police
had arrested the two older boys the previous Friday and that they were
being held in juvenile detention. (Loebs later told me that the
7-year-old was also charged with a felony but wasn’t taken into
custody because of his age.) Kingsbury laid out how the investigation
had been conducted, elaborating the police department’s procedures for
questioning children in sexual abuse cases and explaining why it took
weeks to charge the boys.
At news of the arrests, the citizens who’d packed the meeting burst
into applause. But many of them weren’t mollified. Newspapers all over
Idaho, as well as media outlets nationwide, had reported on the
debunking of the Syrian gang-rape story, but some in Twin Falls saw
the focus on the mistaken details—the ethnicity of the perpetrators,
the presence of a knife—as a way to sweep a true story of Islamic
violence under the rug. Julie Ruf, head of the local chapter of ACT
for America—the country’s largest grassroots anti-Muslim
organization—took the microphone during the part of the City Council
meeting set aside for public comment. “The media swung very left on
this, claiming that everything was inaccurate and that we were liars
and we had no facts, that it never happened,” she said to the
assembly. “And that needs to be addressed.”
In addition to criticizing the coverage of the case, speaker after
speaker stood up to denounce Islam and warn that terror had come to
Twin Falls. A white-haired woman named Vicky Davis said, “The nation
of Islam has declared global jihad on us. And Obama, this
administration, is bringing them in as fast as he possibly can. And
why do you think he’s doing that? Do you think it’s out of the
goodness of his heart? It isn’t! There is a war on the American
people! And you people are allowing the importation of these people,
these people who have declared war on us.”
* * *
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Liyah Babayan, 32, watched the escalating uproar around the sexual
assault case with alarm. The owner of a consignment boutique, Ooh La
La, and a member of the Twin Falls school board, she is one of the
town’s more well-known refugees. After escaping an anti-Armenian
pogram in Baku, Azerbaijan, her family was resettled in Twin Falls in
1992. She is Christian—in fact, her family fled attacks by Azeri
Muslims—but she has been frightened by the growing anti-Muslim
sentiment in town. With her dark hair and olive skin, she’s
experienced hostility from locals who, she believes, see her as
generically Middle Eastern.
“When the story broke out, I knew it was going to be this huge, huge
flame,” she told me. “I became scared thinking there’s going to be
public justice, violence, protest. This is exactly what they’ve been
waiting for. Like, We need them to do one thing. We need one of them
to commit a crime.”
It might seem like an odd idea to bring traumatized foreigners to a
remote, conservative American farming town.
With its cheap housing and 3.7 percent unemployment rate, Idaho is one
of the five states that absorb the highest number of refugees per
capita, with about 1,000 arriving every year. Most of the refugees are
settled in the capital, Boise, but about 300 annually are sent to Twin
Falls, located in an agricultural region known as the Magic Valley.
There, the CSI Refugee Center, a nonprofit run out of the College of
Southern Idaho, helps the newcomers restart their lives. Many in town
are enormously proud of how their city has welcomed outsiders from
around the world. “This is a precious thing in our community,” said
Deborah Silver, an accountant and Democratic candidate for state
Senate. “We are a haven. Our community is a haven for people who have
seen the unimaginable, people who have witnessed things that, thank
God, I will never see.”
The first wave of refugees arrived in Twin Falls in the 1980s from
Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, as well as Eastern Europe. They were
followed in the 1990s by people fleeing the war in Bosnia. In recent
years, a growing number have come from the Middle East and sub-Saharan
Africa as well as Asia. According to data from the CSI Refugee Center,
over the past five years, 187 refugees have come to Twin Falls from
Iraq, 72 from Afghanistan, 143 from Sudan, and 144 from Eritrea. The
largest single group, 233 people, came from Bhutan. “The resettlement
program really responds to crises around the world, and so populations
change as time goes on,” said Jan Reeves, director of the Idaho Office
for Refugees.
At first glance, it might seem like an odd idea to bring traumatized
foreigners to a remote, conservative American farming town. Babayan
remembers how baffled she was to find herself in Twin Falls as a
child. “It was night when we arrived,” she said. “The next morning
when we woke up and walked outside of our apartment complex, there was
just silence, no walking traffic, no car traffic. I felt like, ‘This
can’t be America. Where are we?’ ”
But Zeze Rwasama, the director of the CSI Refugee Center and a
Congolese refugee himself, believes smaller towns have advantages for
refugees. “The integration process happens faster than in big cities,”
he said. “In small towns like this, everyone knows everyone. People
are approachable.”
Perhaps more importantly, Idaho’s tight job market and sparse
population means there’s a high demand for refugee labor. “To get a
job is really easy and fast,” said Rwasama. “And most of those jobs
are routine types of jobs; whether you speak English or not, you’ll be
able to get them. And the pay is not bad.” Many of the positions, in
dairies and food processing plants, pay close to $10 an hour, he said,
which goes far in a place where two-bedroom apartments can be had for
$500 or $600 a month. The yogurt giant Chobani has its largest plant
in Twin Falls, and refugees make up about a third of the workforce.
Refugee advocates insist that the vast majority of Twin Falls citizens
support the newcomers. But the spring of 2015 saw an outbreak of
anti-refugee rhetoric and activism in town. It began that April, when
a story in the local newspaper announced that the city would soon see
an influx of Syrian refugees. Immediately, right-wing groups—some from
outside of Twin Falls—began organizing to keep them out. In May,
activists showed up at the College of Southern Idaho board of trustees
meeting: some asking to shut the refugee program down, others
demanding local control over which refugees came to town. Hearing
about this contretemps, Ron James, a recently retired high school
English teacher and supporter of the refugee program, went to the next
meeting, which was held in June. There, he was shocked to see a group
of men in matching black shirts from the militia group known as III%
of Idaho.
One after another, James said, he watched opponents of the refugee
center accuse it of engaging in human trafficking and bringing
diseases into Twin Falls. “I took it very personally,” he recalled.
“Many of the refugees move on to bigger and better things, but at the
same time a large number stay here, too, and over 30 years, they’ve
become part of our community. I know them. They’re my students—some of
my very best students. It’s like, how dare you talk about these people
like this? These are our neighbors.”
In the months to come, there was a constant hum of anti-refugee
activity in Twin Falls. A group called the Committee to End the CSI
Refugee Center made repeated (and repeatedly failed) attempts to put
an initiative on the county ballot calling for the termination of the
refugee program. In August the American Freedom Party, a
California-based white nationalist organization, blanketed Idaho with
robocalls urging listeners to voice their outrage over the arrival of
Muslim refugees, saying that the “nonwhite invasion of their state and
all white areas constitutes white genocide.” In July, local activists
brought Shahram Hadian, an Iranian American pastor and ex-Muslim who
travels around the country preaching about the dangers of Islam, to
speak to two local churches. He returned for another lecture in
September.
In October, III% of Idaho organized a demonstration against the
refugee program in Twin Falls; the Idaho State Journal reported that
nearly 200 protesters, flanked “by gun-toting men in flak jackets,”
marched to the College of Southern Idaho. On Nov. 1, the militia
organized about 100 people to protest against the refugee program on
the steps of the state capitol in Boise. The Southern Poverty Law
Center quoted a III% spokesman shouting into a bullhorn: “Now,
refugees coming from Islamic hotbeds of terrorism, don’t you think
that poses a threat to Idaho communities?” The crowd shouted back,
“YEAH!”
* * *
This mounting demonization of refugees in Twin Falls has coincided, of
course, with the rise of Donald Trump, who has called for a ban on
Muslim immigration and has said that Syrian refugees are “probably”
part of ISIS. People in town regularly repeat Trump’s oft-disproven
claim that there’s no vetting process in place for refugees from the
Middle East. “We can take in some of the refugees, just not all of
them,” said Eric Odell, 35, the husband of Davis Odell, founder of the
Justice for Our Children Facebook group. “They’re not vetting them, so
some of them don’t care about our laws,” he said. “They don’t want to
conform to our laws. They want to live Sharia law. And those are the
ones we don’t want here, where they believe rape is acceptable, and a
woman’s place is underneath their feet.”
Trump speaks to some residents’ sense that they are being besieged by outsiders
The Odells take pains to differentiate themselves from some of their
more intolerant neighbors. Eric told me he “can’t stand” ACT for
America, describing the group as “pure racists.” Davis used to work at
the Chobani factory—she left after a viral illness incapacitated her
for months—and knows many refugees who she considers wonderful people.
Recently, she said, she and Eric joined Iraqi friends for Ramadan
dinner. All the same, they believe that the influx of Muslim refugees
into Twin Falls puts them in danger. “Terrorists are already here
hiding among them,” Eric said of the town’s refugees. “Eventually
something bad is going to happen.” The anxiety in town is so high,
according to Davis, that some in Twin Falls were scared to demonstrate
in solidarity with the alleged Fawnbrook victim, fearing it would make
them targets. “A lot of people are afraid of backlash from the migrant
population coming after us for standing up for this one little girl,”
Davis said.
Trump speaks to their sense that they are being besieged by outsiders,
and to their resentment that they can’t speak up without being called
bigots. “Trump is making progress in Idaho because he’s saying what
everybody’s thinking,” Davis said. “Is he going about it the right
way? He could be a little more tactful, but he’s not a politician. He
is somebody who understands. The refugee movement here, yeah, it’s a
problem.”
For refugees in Twin Falls, it’s frightening that more people now feel
empowered to say that publicly. “What was happening here happened
before Trump got hyped up,” Babayan said. But, she added, “when Trump
came in, it definitely gave more clout, a legitimacy, to those
emotions.” Suddenly, she said, people opposed to refugees thought,
“There’s a presidential candidate who sees it like us, and he’s saying
the things that we’re feeling. And then you see the videos of the
rallies. You’ve got a leader saying, ‘Get those people out.’ That
energy spills out into the community, where the community says, ‘Get
’em out!’ ”
Babayan has felt the growing anti-refugee animus in her daily life.
People have left her angry voicemails; in one, a woman complained
about how much it cost her to have her “throbbing” tooth extracted
while her tax dollars paid for refugees’ medical bills. Babayan’s car
was keyed; she’s had nasty notes left on her windshield. In June 2015,
she says, a woman who had been selling clothes at her boutique
abruptly pulled all her merchandise, saying, “I want to do business
with Americans.”
Later in the summer, she says, a woman who had overheard her speaking
to her son in Russian walked into Ooh La La and said, “If you want to
live here, you need to live by the rules here. You need to speak the
language of this country.” The woman threatened to deface the store’s
front window and told Babayan she would have her deported. (Babayan
showed me the notice of trespassing she filed with the police to have
the woman banned from the property.) In November, three men marched in
to Ooh La La, one of them saying to Babayan’s sales clerk, “We’re just
looking to see if you have an American flag displayed in here.”
* * *
Even after it was revealed that the story of knife-wielding Syrians
wasn’t true, attention to the alleged attack in Twin Falls kept
increasing. On June 22, the right-wing writer Michelle Malkin
published a syndicated column titled “Horror and Hush-Up in Twin
Falls, Idaho.” “Something wicked happened in Idaho’s rural Magic
Valley,” Malkin wrote. “The evil has been compounded by politicians,
media and special interest groups doing their damnedest to suppress
the story and quell a righteous citizen rebellion.” (Loebs told me
that Malkin never contacted him to check any of the facts in her
piece; if she had, he would have told her two of the boys were already
in custody by the time it was published.) Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out
Malkin’s column, asking, “Where’s the outrage for this 5 year old
girl???”
Two days later, Wendy Olson, United States attorney for the district
of Idaho, attempted to ease the febrile speculation about the Twin
Falls case only to end up fanning it. Her office issued a statement
that read in part, “The spread of false information or inflammatory or
threatening statements about the perpetrators or the crime itself
reduces public safety and may violate federal law.” This was
constitutionally dubious. As Eugene Volokh pointed out in the
Washington Post: “There is no First Amendment exception for
‘inflammatory’ statements; and even false statements about matters of
public concern, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, are an
inevitable part of free debate.”
Olson’s warning redoubled suspicion on the right that an official
cover-up was under way. A Breitbart headline screamed: “Idaho Refugee
Rape: Obama Justice Official Threatens Americans Who Criticize Migrant
Programs.” Amid the national uproar, Olson issued a follow-up
statement to try to clarify her intent: “The statement was not
intended to and does not threaten to arrest or prosecute anyone for
First Amendment protected speech.” It was too late. The narrative of a
politically correct whitewash was further entrenched.
The template for this narrative came from Europe, where in several
cases authorities have been accused of hiding information about sexual
assaults by Muslim migrants so as not to stoke jingoist reaction. In
Cologne, Germany, police investigating mass sexual assaults on New
Year’s Eve—many by Muslim men—were reportedly told to keep the word
rape out of their initial report. Earlier this year in Sweden, an
investigation was launched into charges that police had covered up
sexual assaults at a Stockholm music festival. “[S]ome officials said
the police force was concerned that assault reports could have boosted
the far right,” Reuters reported.
“I have to get out of here I don’t feel safe living here anymore,” the
alleged victim’s mother texted me.
For the anti-refugee right, Twin Falls demonstrated that this pattern
had come to America. On July 5, the right-wing site WorldNetDaily ran
a story about another reported rash of sexual assaults at a music
festival in Sweden. “Activists in Twin Falls, Idaho, have warned that
the beginnings of migrant sexual assaults have been unlocked in their
community due to the liberal refugee policy supported by President
Obama and the GOP-dominated Congress,” it said. WorldNetDaily and
other right-wing sites continue to publish frequent updates on the
Twin Falls case. Pamela Geller, co-founder of the group Stop
Islamization of America, made plans to speak in Twin Falls, only to
cancel her event shortly after it was announced due to “security
concerns.”
Members of the City Council, as well as the city manager, have been
deluged with furious emails. The local Times-News quotes one that
police forwarded to the FBI: “Have you any idea how many Americans are
hoping and wishing your daughter, wife, mother, sister, aunt, or niece
gets gang raped by those (expletive) piece of (expletive) sand
(expletive) you’re so (expletive) enamoured with.” According to the
Times-News, the Twin Falls’ mayor’s wife, as well as two faculty
members at the College of Southern Idaho, received voicemails accusing
them of bringing “humanity’s lowest common denominator, essentially
human garbage, from Africa and the Middle East, into the Twin Falls
area.” The caller referred to Jo Cox, the British MP murdered in June
by a man who shouted, “Britain first!”
* * *
For “Lori” (not her real name), the mother of the allegedly victimized
5-year-old girl, the narrative about Muslim predation makes sense of
what has happened to her family. A stay-at-home mom who also has a son
with autism, Lori told me via text that she suffers from serious
physical and psychological difficulties, including autoimmune
hepatitis and debilitating anxiety. Over the course of the five days I
spent in Twin Falls, she agreed to meet with me several times, but
each time either canceled or temporarily stopped responding to
messages. At the same time, she occasionally texted me unprompted and
suggested I friend her on Facebook. Since June 2, her feed had been
full of stories from conservative sites about Muslim violence. Said
one of her texts: “In the USA you have to follow our laws and
obviously him raping my daughter in their country is OK.” (I have
corrected her spelling and punctuation.)
Lori told me that Julie Ruf, the ACT for America activist, is a close
friend. She asked me to help publicize a GoFundMe account that Ruf
created to raise money so that Lori’s family could leave Fawnbrook.
The families of the alleged offenders were served with eviction
notices shortly after the older boys were arrested, but while the
Eritreans had left, the Iraqi boy and his family had remained. “I have
to get out of here I don’t feel safe living here anymore,” Lori texted
me.
Fawnbrook is a collection of pale-yellow two-story apartment buildings
in the thick of Twin Falls’ centerless sprawl, surrounded by fields
but a short walk to both Costco and Target. On the Saturday that I
visited, a handful of members of the Liberty Defense Team—a
“survivalist-slash-prepping group,” in the words of founder Robert
Miller—had come to walk through the grounds in a show of support for
Lori’s family. Earlier, 20 or so members of the group had rallied on
the Perrine Bridge, which spans the spectacular Snake River Canyon on
the edge of town. They held giant American flags and hand-lettered
signs: “Where Is America” and “What if It Was Your Daughter: What
Then!?” Perhaps surprisingly, Miller disdains the provocative tactics
of III% of Idaho, telling me, “They try to make the news, we don’t.”
At Fawnbrook, his group was deliberately low-key. There were few
residents outside when the Liberty Defense Team arrived, and no
confrontations.
Members of the Liberty Defense Team pointed out an apartment where,
they believed, the 7-year-old Iraqi boy and his family lived. A woman
wearing a black hijab was bustling around the open door. When I said I
was going to try to speak to her, one of the Liberty Defense Team men
warned me to be careful.
“Salaam alaikum,” I said to her, and she beckoned me inside.
Unfortunately, that pretty much exhausted my Arabic, and she didn’t
speak English. (I hadn’t been expecting to speak with her and hadn’t
brought an interpreter.) She called a little boy over to translate. I
don’t know if he was the alleged offender or not; regardless, I wasn’t
going to try and question a child about what happened in the laundry
room. Instead, I asked where they were from. Baghdad, the woman said.
Then I asked whether they were moving. Clinging to his mother’s side,
the boy said they were, as soon as the new house is ready.
Imad Eujayl, a Sudanese plant geneticist who serves as spokesman for
the local Islamic Center, knows both the Iraqi and the Eritrean
families. The Iraqi boy’s mother is a widow, he told me, and has five
other children. The Eritrean boys have since been released into their
family’s custody, but Eujayl said that the family is struggling since
the eviction from Fawnbrook. Without a reference from their previous
landlord, they couldn’t rent a new apartment, and with the court case
ongoing, they had to stay in town. They were living in another
family’s basement. All the boys are being represented by public
defenders, but the public defenders’ office won’t release their
lawyers’ names. According to Loebs, they technically face a maximum
penalty of confinement in juvenile detention until age 21, though he
adds that with “minors this young that is almost unheard of.”
Lori texted me the address of the 89-year-old who had discovered her
daughter with the boys. She lives directly behind the Iraqi family. I
knocked on her door. The woman, who asked that her name not be used,
said she’d initially noticed the older boy outside the laundry room,
using his phone to take pictures of something inside. At first, she
said, she thought he’d never seen a washing machine before, but when
she went inside, she found children without their clothes on. “All I
saw was little bare bottoms, and the little girl so scared she didn’t
know what was going on,” the woman told me. “And she’s still scared.”
She said the girl was crying and the room stank of urine. “It was the
saddest thing I ever saw,” she said.
The woman said she took the boys outside and made them stay put while
she called the police. Initially, according to what Police Chief Craig
Kingsbury said at the June 20 City Council meeting, the call that came
in was for something “a lot less serious than a sexual assault or lewd
and lascivious conduct.” But then Lori discovered what had happened
and called the police herself, requesting medical aid. At that point,
medical personnel and detectives were dispatched. Lori’s daughter was
taken to the hospital and the police seized the boy’s phone, which
contained a video of the laundry room encounter.
The case will likely turn on what’s on the video. According to Lori,
while they waited for the police to arrive, the boy who recorded it
handed his phone over to her fiancé, who watched the recording. Her
fiancé, she said, told her it showed oral sex as well as their
daughter being urinated on. I asked her if she knew why the boy had
been willing to show this recording to his alleged victim’s parent.
“Maybe it’s what they do in their country, I don’t know,” she
responded. “But I do know that the kids in that country can and are
used as sex slaves.”
Loebs, however, told me that the girl’s father only saw a “tiny bit”
of the recording. The prosecutor was indignant at all the
misrepresentations still swirling around about the case. “I’m a
lifelong conservative Republican, and the behavior of the right-wing
alternative press on this is atrocious,” he said. “All of this makes
this so much more difficult for this child to recover from this.”
* * *
July 11 marked the fourth City Council meeting since the Fawnbrook
story broke, and once again the case dominated the proceedings. The
first speaker was Lance Earl, a Second Amendment activist and local
newspaper columnist, who argued that the federal government has no
constitutional authority to settle immigrants in Idaho. “I would like
to know why you have not opposed this federal abuse here in Twin
Falls,” he said to the council.
Earl was incensed that local police had invited the FBI to investigate
threats made against Twin Falls officials, arguing that the
involvement of federal law enforcement violates the Constitution.
Turning to Kingsbury, seated in the back of the room, he shouted,
“What part of the Constitution allows the federal government to be
involved in policing activity inside the states?” Why, Earl wanted to
know, hadn’t the City Council demanded Kingsbury’s resignation? “If he
is going to violate the Constitution of the United States, he is an
empty uniform, and he should not be here,” he said.
The City Council tried to impose a five-minute limit on speakers, but
when Earl’s time had finished, the next speaker ceded his time so Earl
could continue. The city’s lawyer was brought in to consult on whether
this was allowed; it was ruled that it was not. Nevertheless, Earl
spoke for another minute. “If you people would go back to
constitutional principles, the people that would be coming here would
be the cream of the crop. They would be coming here to work, and to
integrate, and to be American citizens.” The man who’d tried to cede
his time then took the microphone and demanded the resignations of
every City Council member.
Next up was ACT for America’s Ruf. She said she was bringing Brigitte
Gabriel, ACT for America’s founder, to Twin Falls on Aug. 4 and would
save front-row seats for everyone on the council. Gabriel is one of
the country’s most influential anti-Muslim activists; her group claims
280,000 members. She’s warned that “tens of thousands of Islamic
militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending
our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government.”
Ruf argued that the council members have a civic duty to hear her
speak. “Out of respect to the community, I’m asking you to attend the
meetings of the people we bring into this community,” she said. “And
that way at least we know that you’re actually trying. You’re trying
to understand these bizarre people that come from a totally different
position than you do.”
Then Shane Brown, a tall, broad-shouldered bald man with a goatee,
stood up. He said he was born and raised in the Magic Valley, and
began talking about his guns. “I have a shotgun and a rifle, and I buy
shells every couple of years because that’s all I need to get my
limit, fill my tag,” he said. Recently, though, outsiders have
threatened some of his friends in the community. “And for the first
time in my life, I considered and I went and I bought a pistol for
protection. There is a group of people that have come into our
community, and have infiltrated our community, and have changed it
from what I have been born and raised in. These people have brought
fear, and anger, and ignorance.”
Brown, who teaches English and theater at the College of Southern
Idaho, then condemned the “outside political groups” who have
exploited his town’s tragedy. Only at that moment did it become clear
that he was talking about the anti-refugee movement, not the refugees
themselves.
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Received on Tue Aug 02 2016 - 09:05:16 EDT