Fanatical Factions

California Coalition for Immigration Reform

The California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) is headed by Barbara Coe, a woman who has referred repeatedly to Mexican immigrants as "savages." Coe founded CCIR in 1994 as a co-sponsor of California's Proposition 187, a ballot measure that was ultimately struck down by the courts, which, in aiming to deny social and medical benefits to illegal immigrants (for which they were largely ineligible to begin with), would have required children to turn their parents over to the authorities..

She once claimed to have exposed a secret Mexican plan to take over the American Southwest, favors using the military to seal the U.S.-Mexico border, and charges that a shadowy "New World Order" is being imposed on America by "globalists."

CCIR, which has an extensive website linked to many other anti-immigrant groups, worked closely with Glenn Spencer's American Border Patrol.
Coe and Spencer have staged annual Fourth of July rallies that have drawn prominent neo-Nazis. Coe's political activities convinced the Orange County Weekly to once name her one of the "scariest" people in Orange County.

CCIR has sponsored billboards along the Arizona-California border which read, "Welcome to California, the Illegal Immigration State. Don't Let This Happen to Your State." More recently, she attacked the Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, accusing him of seeking to return Southern California to Mexico.

In a newspaper profile of her close friend and former presidential candidate, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the article stated that Coe described speaking to, and belonging to, the Council of Conservative Citizens. That group, which has called Blacks "a retrograde species of humanity," has long been listed by SPLC as a hate group - as has Coe's own California Coalition for Immigration Reform.