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Editors of Tom Klingenstein.com: Revolutions often do not announce themselves. They build networks, seed rhetoric, and turn policy into theater. Immigration has become one such theater, where identity politics is the costume and demographic change the stage. What looks like advocacy for immigrants often masks a radical project — part of a cold civil war between Americans who wish to preserve their country and a destructive Left determined to tear it down.

This investigative report from Kyle Shideler reminds us that illegal immigration is not merely a policy dispute but a political strategy. The Hispanic vote is cultivated as both shield and sword: mainstream legitimacy for the radicals, and the muscle to advance them. Conservatives must know that immigration is not simply a matter of policy; it is a weapon in a larger and more decisive struggle.  

Who is behind America’s illegal immigration machine?” A question many Americans ask but rarely hear answered, obscured by a web of activist groups and political theater. For decades, the American Left has wrapped radical activism in the language of identity politics, presenting it as advocacy for Hispanics or immigrant communities. In reality, many of these groups function merely as vehicles advancing the agendas of foreign-aligned radicals.

Demographics have turned these groups into some of the Left’s most effective weapons. Hispanics represent the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, and conservatives, wary of alienating voters, have grown hesitant to confront these organizations directly — making them doubly valuable to the Left. They serve two purposes at once: generating agitation in the streets and presenting themselves as the voice of a powerful electoral bloc. And these groups don’t just agitate; they stage. Every protest is a performance, calculated for cameras and scattered throughout sympathetic media.

Following this summer’s Los Angeles riots (targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers), the funding question surfaced yet again. Frustrated conservatives’ hubbub even reached the halls of Congress, where Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) issued a series of letters to groups singled out as alleged instigators — namely the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and Unión del Barrio.

But the funding question only scratches the surface. To truly understand these groups, we have to follow not just the money but the ideas and networks that sustain them.

The first and most prominent example is CHIRLA, born out of Los Angeles’s activist priesthood and radical organizing tradition. CHIRLA’s founder and first director was Father Luis Olivares, an organizer for the radical Left and longtime priest of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, better known as La Placita. A devotee of the Saul Alinsky-style organizing method and close friend of United Farm Workers organizer Cesar Chavez, Olivares was known as a hero of the “Chicano Movement” and a leader of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s.

The Chicano Movement, founded in the 1970s and modeled after the Black Panthers, views Americans of Mexican heritage as an indigenous people native to the American southwest — and entitled to a separate nation state, known as Aztlán. The Chicano Movement was strongly influenced by the Communist Cuban Revolution, and several Chicano leaders travelled to Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigades (VB), the Cuban intelligence program to recruit U.S. students as long-term assets. Current Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — who has extensively supported protests against the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda — was a well-known and high-ranking VB member, if that tells you anything.

Small wonder, then, that the next wave of resistance — the Sanctuary Movement — would be driven by many of the same ideological currents. Led by a handful of left-wing activists, including clergy, the Sanctuary Movement was the first organized resistance to enforcement of immigration laws, emphasizing civil disobedience and deliberately harboring illegal aliens, almost exclusively Central Americans fleeing civil war between U.S.-backed governments and Soviet-backed Communist guerrillas…..

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