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An Arizona-based immigrant safe haven for asylum-seekers claims it has confronted threats stemming from conspiratorial claims driven by way of right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe and promoted by way of GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake.
The World Rescue Committee, a humanitarian group that runs a migrant safe haven in Phoenix referred to as the Welcome Middle, instructed The Arizona Republic it has observed “increased threats to our staff” after right-wingers O’Keefe, Lake and Elon Musk helped gasoline conspiracy theories about its operation.
You could take into account O’Keefe as the previous head of conservative media workforce Challenge Veritas, which used doubtful video enhancing and shady editorial ways in an effort to depict media organizations and left-wing teams making debatable or in a different way unflattering statements. He used to be axed in 2023 amid allegations of administrative center mistreatment and claims that he spent donor price range on “personal luxuries.” He has endured his paintings independently.
Maximum not too long ago, O'Keefe launched a video to his greater than 2 million fans on X (previously Twitter) falsely alleging he’d “exposed” a “secret migrant center” working in Phoenix, which O’Keefe claimed is “bussing thousands of migrant ‘refugees’ every hour on the hour” to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport.
The truth is the middle isn’t working in secret in any respect. The Arizona Republic reported at the heart in a characteristic final yr, through which officers from the middle, asylum-seekers who had been staying there or even a rep for Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., touted its good fortune.
Musk and Lake replied to the video on-line by way of pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric and suggesting cash spent there's misused taxpayer price range.
Musk expressed surprise at O’Keefe’s declare that the IRC gained a $415 million govt contract (a specifically wealthy response coming from Musk, whose corporations were identified to rack up billions of bucks in govt contracts in one yr).
Lake replied to O’Keefe’s video with bigoted claims, well-liked amongst conservatives, that migrant arrivals represent an “invasion” of the U.S. “Every time I fly out of the Phoenix Airport (which is often) there are busses unloading illegals who pour into the airport & fill planes headed to cities all across the country,” Lake posted on social media. "This is what an invasion looks like." (Lake can not have observed many precise invasions if that is what she thinks one looks as if.)
Nevertheless, right-wingers like Lake have driven the invasion claims and portrayed migrants in the hunt for higher lives within the U.S. as malicious ne’er-do-wells with a penchant for crime. The entire whilst, lately, facilities that area migrants have develop into scapegoats for conservative conspiracy theorists who wish to categorical their anti-immigrant bigotry — the Welcome Middle in Arizona is simply the newest instance.