The Ku Klux Klan’s efforts to attract new members in the Manassas area earned strong rebukes from local organizations, which abhor the groups entry into the broiling political debate over illegal immigration.
Fliers and newspapers distributed in the city by the organization last weekend drew strong condemnations from both sides of the local immigration debate.
Ku Klux Klan LLC in Arkansas was merely responding to requests from local residents to get involved, national recruitment director Travis Pierce said Wednesday.
“We had gotten a huge number [of notes] from that particular area that had concerns about quality of life issues, drugs and gangs and pornography,” Pierce said.
The group does not plan to hold marches or rallies in the community and would not release the number of its Manassas-area members, Pierce said.
The suburban community has become a battleground in the illegal immigration debate since July, when the Prince William County Board of Supervisors approved a resolution aiming to deny services to illegal immigrants and make it easier to deport those who break the law.
Leading critics of the resolution said its passage opened the door for racist sentiment.
“Anytime lawmakers pass initiatives that would, in practice, use race, ethnicity and language to single out a segment of the population and try to drive them out of a community, they are laying the foundation for increased bigotry and hatred,” Mexicanos Sin Fronteras said in a statement.
However, supervisors who approved the legislation have said the resolution had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but was an effort to curb the costs of providing services to illegal immigrants and ridding the community of criminals who were damaging the quality of life.
“If Mexicans Without Borders protests [the KKK], we would be right alongside,” said Greg Letiecq, president of the leading local anti-illegal immigration organization Help Save Manassas “They don’t have anything to offer. … It’s not helping at all.”
