On Monday the Department of Justice announced that it was hitting 57 members of white supremacist gangs with charges of kidnapping and drug conspiracies—the result of a drug-trafficking sting in North Texas.
As Newsweek reports, the gang members were members of various groups, including the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, Dirty White Boys and Aryan Circle. More than 190 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized, as well as 31 firearms and approximately $376,587 in cash.
Authorities allege that the white supremacists ran their drug operation from October 2015 to April of this year.
Just last year, 89 white supremacist gang members were sentenced for trafficking meth in North Texas; it was the largest single prosecution of people tied to white supremacist groups in American history, according to Newsweek. As the news outlet reports, white supremacist groups have “increasingly turned to drug-dealing in recent years.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement following the bust.“Not only do white [supremacist] gangs subscribe to a repugnant, hateful ideology, they also engage in significant, organized and violent criminal activity,” he said, apparently forgetting his own racist history. (Well, you know his memory ain’t the best.)
“Under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice has targeted every violent criminal gang member in the United States,” he said. “The quantities of drugs, guns, and money seized in this case are staggering.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also warned last year about the violent threat that white supremacist groups posed. White hate groups “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement,” a bulletin from May 2017 warned.
President Donald Trump has spoken at length about the threat of gang violence but has uttered not a gotdamn word about white supremacist gangs. When the president talks about violent organized crime, he focuses almost singularly on MS-13, a gang with roots in El Salvador, to help bolster his argument for more draconian immigration laws.
Meanwhile, Trump’s presidency has coincided with a surge of white hate groups.
Despite the size of this bust—and warnings that white supremacist gangs have branched out into large-scale trafficking—expect Trump to keep up his tradition of paying attention to violent organized crime only when there are people of color involved.