Far-right app lets you ‘earn crypto’ for ‘snitching’ on undocumented migrants: column

MAGA influencers are pushing an app that allows people to take photos of allegedly undocumented immigrants and send information to law enforcement, according to an MSNBC column.

The outlet’s Christopher Mathias noted multiple people in the MAGA-sphere are talking about the app, including self-proclaimed “pro-white nationalist” Laura Loomer and Proud Boys associate Jacob Engels.

“It’s called IceRaid.US,” Engels told Loomer on an episode of her podcast.

According to Mathias, Engels told, “how users could snap photos of ‘illegal aliens.’ The app apparently then sends the photos, including the metadata identifying where and when they were taken, to law enforcement.”

Engels told Loomer, “It’s taking so much off the backs of law enforcement … and we’re doing it as citizens, and you have the opportunity to earn crypto for reporting and deporting illegals.”

The app was created by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jason Meyers and it is not clear how it is coordinating with law enforcement.

Meyers, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to MSNBC’s requests for comment.

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What is clear to Mathias is “that the app’s launch earned coverage across far-right media — including former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s OANN show — and spoke to a growing hunger among the MAGA faithful, cultivated by the Republican Party, to become vigilantes, informants and snitches to target immigrants.”

The “journalist covering the far-right” also claimed the app is “representative of the long history in America of white vigilantes partnering with law enforcement to terrorize marginalized groups.”

He spoke with history professor at the University of Maryland William Horne, who said, “the most worrisome parallel, the closest thing to what we’re seeing now historically, is the assaults on the Reconstruction state governments.”

The Reconstruction era came after the Civil War. It is a time when the Ku Klux Klan, and other white vigilante groups, partnered with law enforcement to target black Southerners — and white Southerners who supported their freedom — with violence and murder.