Police are investigating after racist fliers purportedly issued by the Ku Klux Klan that directed immigrants to “leave now” and “avoid deportation” were found in several Kentucky cities on Inauguration Day, officials said.
The fliers feature a cartoon image of Uncle Sam kicking at a family of four while holding a proclamation declaring a “Mass Deportation” on Jan. 20 and stating, “Monitor & Track all Immigrants REPORT THEM ALL,” according to images shared by police departments in Ludlow and Bellevue.
The fliers claim to be issued by a Ku Klux Klan group headquartered in Maysville, Kentucky, and advertise phone numbers for regional Klan “realms” in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bellevue Police Chief Jon McClain told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “It was kind of alarming for our community.”
The fliers were reported Monday in Bellevue, Ludlow and Fort Wright, small northern Kentucky cities near Cincinnati, as the nation marked both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Trump has railed against immigrants and pledged to launch a mass deportation campaign upon assuming office.
Authorities condemned the fliers and said they would seek criminal charges against those who distributed them.
“This type of hateful garbage is loathsome and deplorable, does not represent the Fort Wright Community or the values of our businesses and residents, will not be tolerated in the City of Fort Wright and should not be tolerated by our society as a whole,” Fort Wright Mayor Dave Hatter said in a statement.
The Klan has attempted to spread hateful messages in Kentucky before. Local officials in Covington said the Trinity White Knights, a Klan splinter group, were known to occasionally distribute the fliers as a recruiting tactic, northern Kentucky-based Link NKY reported in September. Neighborhoods in Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and Indiana have also reported receiving Klan fliers in recent years.
Anti-immigrant Klan fliers that appear similar to the Kentucky ones were found in northern Indiana in November, South Bend, Indiana-based TV station WSBT-TV reported.
The most recent fliers encourage readers to join the Klan and offer to send respondents information packets and applications for a $1 payment. Another flier found in Bellevue called Martin Luther King Jr. a “fraud” and a “traitor to our country,” according to an image shared by McClain.
No one answered the numbers advertised on the fliers Tuesday evening. A recorded greeting for the Ohio Klan group said, “In January, the world’s going to change for a lot of people, especially the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio,” appearing to refer to the Haitian community that became a target of right-wing attacks ahead of the presidential election.
A Bellevue resident found a Klan flier laying in the snow Monday morning and reported it to police, McClain said.
“He was distressed and concerned,” McClain said. “He said he had some friends who just got their citizenship.”
The Klan fliers found on Inauguration Day appeared to invoke Trump’s campaign pledges to crack down on immigration upon entering the White House. Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day in office. On the campaign trail, he routinely criticized the Biden administration’s management of the U.S.-Mexico border and promised the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history in his second term. Officials have been weighing immigration raids in the days since Trump’s inauguration and hope to encourage undocumented immigrants to “self-deport,” The Post previously reported.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” McClain said of the Klan fliers being distributed on Inauguration Day.
Trump denounced the Ku Klux Klan by name as “repugnant” in 2017 after sparking criticism for initially failing to call out and condemn white supremacists when an avowed neo-Nazi killed a counterprotester at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Trump at the time sought to downplay the incident.
The Ludlow Police Department said in a statement that the “disgusting” Klan fliers were protected under the First Amendment but that the agency would seek criminal charges against the distributors if they were identified. The department noted it had received a harassment complaint about the fliers. McClain, of the Bellevue police, said he would consider charging anyone caught distributing the fliers with littering.
MSN