Oswego County Deserves to Know what FAIR Really Means

To the Editor:
Oswego County Deserves to Know What FAIR Really Means.
Oswego County residents deserve transparency from the people who claim to protect them. That includes our sheriff, Don Hilton, who recently chose to have the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), represent his lawsuit against New York State’s new limits on civil immigration enforcement. FAIR is not a neutral policy group. It is an organization with documented white supremacist roots, a long history of civil rights scrutiny, and an aggressive legal group designed to undermine lawful immigration systems across the country.
When Sheriff Hilton chose FAIR as his legal partner, he aligned Oswego County with an organization founded by John Tanton, a man whose private writings revealed explicit fears about the “decline” of white Americans and admiration for eugenics based population control. Civil rights investigators and journalists have documented these origins for decades. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated FAIR a hate group, citing its ties to white nationalist donors and its early funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation notorious for promoting race based pseudoscience. FAIR has never fully disavowed these origins. Instead, it has spent years polishing its public image while continuing to push policies rooted in demographic fear and exclusion.
Sheriff Hilton’s lawsuit claims the state has no authority to regulate how sheriffs interact with federal immigration agencies. However, FAIR’s involvement suggests a possible deeper agenda: an effort to expand local participation in civil immigration enforcement, even when courts have repeatedly ruled that states cannot be compelled to enforce federal civil immigration law.
FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, now fully integrated into FAIR, has built a reputation for defending harsh detention policies, supporting state laws that criminalize undocumented presence, and challenging sanctuary policies across the country. FAIR has even urged attorneys general to investigate local prosecutors who adopt “immigration neutral” policies, accusing them of being “anti American” despite offering no evidence to support those claims.
FAIR is not about public safety. It is about ideology. It is about supporting local law enforcement agencies, like the Oswego County Sheriff’s Department, into adopting policies that conflict with constitutional protections and federal and state law. FAIR’s strategy is to create fear, distort public perception, and pressure lawmakers into adopting extreme enforcement measures that harm families, disrupt communities, and undermine due process rights.
FAIR’s involvement in Sheriff Hilton’s lawsuit is another example of that same pattern: an extremist network trying to shape policy in our backyard while pretending to be a mainstream voice.
Immigration policy deserves serious, evidence based discussion. But FAIR’s agenda is not about evidence or reform. It is about exclusion. It is about fear. And it is about advancing a worldview rooted in white supremacist ideology rather than constitutional principles. Sheriff Hilton’s decision to partner with FAIR brings that ideology into Oswego County’s back yard.
Oswego residents deserve policies and practices grounded in truth, humanity, and the rule of law, not the recycled ideology of a founder who believed America should remain demographically frozen in time. FAIR has spent decades trying to convince the public it is a respectable organization. The record shows otherwise.
Sheriff Hilton chose FAIR. Oswego County deserves to know exactly what that means.

Indivisible Oswego County
Paul McKinney