Where Do They Get These People Anyway? (Answer: the Biden DoJ)
Former federal prosecutor Maya Wiley said on MSNBC Monday that an estimated 11% of U.S. military personnel are white supremacists or extremists.
The Supreme Court on Monday granted the Trump administration’s request to lift restrictions on immigration raids in Los Angeles, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurring that the judiciary “does not set immigration policy or decide enforcement priorities.” During a segment on “Deadline: White House,” Wiley said America could be approaching a “reckoning” if its institutions fail to confront rising authoritarianism and racial profiling.
“We may come to that reckoning very soon in this country, where our own military says we won’t do it anymore,” Wiley said. “The other thing that we have to remember, and we have veterans who have been calling this out for a while and saying that the military has to take more action even before this administration came into power is we have a lot of military, who are deeply concerned and troubled and don’t want to do this. But there is by some estimates 11% of military that are white supremacists or other white extremists in the military.”
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WATCH:
The administration urged the justices in August to block a district court order that barred immigration agents from considering race, location, type of work, or Spanish language use during stops. They argued the judge had no authority to “micromanage” immigration enforcement, particularly in a region where one in 10 individuals is in the country illegally.
Wiley said the Supreme Court’s failure to draw a firm line on racial profiling risks undermining the nation’s entire system of checks and balances.
“If we don’t have a red line with the Supreme Court, we have lost a major part of our balance of power. But I think it’s so important to ground this in everyday experience because, yes, people who look Latino or who speak a language like Spanish as a first language are being racially profiled,” Wiley said. “We have many people in this country who are here lawfully, who have violated no laws, and have certainly contributed nothing but good things to this country, who are being harassed, pulled over. But what we’ve seen in D.C. and what we’ve seen in other cities, we’ve seen it in New York. It isn’t only Latinos. It’s any black people.”
Wiley pointed to what she called widespread racial profiling on city streets, adding that police increasingly target minorities without cause.
“We have seen blockades in city streets for no reason deciding who to pull over, and it is people who are Asian or Pacific Islander or Native American or black. It is racially profiling, but it is coming for everyone,” Wiley said. “And the point here about the military is going to become much more crucial. Because as we’ve seen in other countries that have faced this kind of authoritarianism, it is when the military says we won’t do it anymore.”
The Associated Press reported in 2024 that a Pentagon-funded study found no widespread presence of white supremacists in the U.S. military. The study said that extremists with military ties make up only a tiny fraction of the armed forces.
