Forgotten godfather of Trump's immigration campaign

He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman. Stephen Miller? Absolutely. But every time I hear the chief architect of President Donald Trump's scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn't thought of in awhile.

For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 LA riots and thinking, "Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control."

Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an "invasion" and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country.

American Patrol's home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans. A "Family Values" button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption "Sink-hole de Mayo."

Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, "Viva Mexico!" On the morning Villaraigosa, the future LA mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California. "I don't remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology," said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. "But he never had the balls to talk to me in person."

Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time. "California (it) has often been said is America's future. Let me tell you about your future," he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999. Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like "Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?" and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist. He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer "foresaw millions of converts" to his anti-immigrant campaign, "only to see his temple founder."

Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the US-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the US-Mexico border on their own. By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn't bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight. He was so forgotten that I didn't even realise he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer's hometown Sierra Vista's Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life's work as bringing "the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public's consciousness."

That's a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer's picket fence. We live in Glenn Spencer's world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government's efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings. Spencer "stood out among a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a tornado supercell on radar," said Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Department's Commission on the State of Hate and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. "What's frightening now is that hate like his used to be well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal policy." I first found out about Spencer in 1999 as a student activist at Chapman University. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union High School District's decision to sue Mexico for the cost of educating undocumented immigrants' children, describing those of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being nice. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a "scourge" and a "sickness."

His website was disgusting, but it became a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants.

And here we are. Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That's why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019. I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump's planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187's demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico's president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo.

When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn't regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives "would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do (to) defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration," Spencer wrote. "Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No." Levin hadn't heard about Spencer's death until we talked. "I thought he went into irrelevance," he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer's legacy in the era of Trump.

"We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray," Levin concluded, now somber. "And now, we have cancer."