The King and I

D.A. King, a notably noxious anti-immigration activist in Georgia, died last week. His legacy lives on in legislation and litigation.

D.A. King

Had I known that the irascible Georgia bigot Donald Arthur King had died a few days before the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, I think I would have had the presence of mind to ask the Southern Poverty Law Center’s leaders about it in person where their impenetrable wall of flacks couldn’t stop me.

People want to blame the living political nightmare of 2025 on Donald Trump — and yes, Trump is a uniquely potent catalyst for chaos — but Trump is also a product of swirling forces that do not dissipate in his absence. Men like King are my evidence for that view.

Over the last two decades, King was the face of the anti-immigrant movement in Georgia and much of the south. Citing the 9/11 attacks and his own observations of Latino migrants around Marietta around 2003, King began reporting undocumented people to ICE, then formed a group called “The American Resistance” as a vehicle for his activism. That group rebranded itself later as the Dustin Inman Society, named for a teenager killed by an undocumented driver who escaped prosecution to Mexico.

When Georgia’s Republican senators Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss signed on to a comprehensive immigration reform bill authored by Ted Kennedy in 2007, King found his moment. At the time, the language of “invasion” and highlighting the “criminality” of undocumented migrants, and using words like “infestation” still had the power to shock, and to draw attention. The two senators backed off.

Georgia politicians — and others — learned from that example.

A string of Georgia laws governing immigration enforcement — a subject that should properly be the purview of the federal government — bears his mark. King took credit for helping draft HB 87 in 2011. The law allows local law enforcement to check the immigration status of people they come into contact with, requires Georgia businesses with more than 10 employees to use the E-Verify system to check the work eligibility of prospective employees and created a set of new crimes like “harboring an illegal immigrant” or “transporting an illegal immigrant.”

Federal courts invalidated some of the law. But immigrant families actively fled places like Gwinnett County after HB 87 passed. Agriculture in Georgia suffered. And very little else changed in terms of illegal immigration numbers in Georgia, something King himself lamented over the years.

The law set up an Immigration Enforcement Review Board. Seven years later, the board had received fewer than than 40 complaints, almost all of which were filed by King himself, almost none of which were substantiated with action.

Gov. Brian Kemp dissolved the useless board in 2019.

The wave of anti-immigrant legislation washing through legislatures across the south is a direct product of groundwork King has been laying for 20 years. Georgia lawmakers considered legislation this year to require cops to collect DNA samples from anyone subject to an immigration detainer notice, to bar undocumented students from dual enrollment in college, and to strip the sovereign immunity of any city pursuing “sanctuary city” policies (which are already against the law). That last bill is still live.

King would have taken issue with a characterization of his work as anti-immigrant, of course, describing himself as anti-illegal-immigrant. That was always spin, given his longstanding opposition to legislation that would create a pathway to legal citizenship for the undocumented.

His response would have almost always been followed up by some vague legal threat, as I received from him more than once. He did that to a lot of people.

The SPLC is currently defending a defamation lawsuit against the Dustin Inman Society, which King founded about 20 years ago. That suit in a federal courthouse in Montgomery, Ala. has gotten farther than any case ever has against the SPLC. Usually, lawsuits against the SPLC run aground on the First Amendment. But Judge Keith Watkins — a Bush appointee who notably ordered Auburn University to un-cancel Richard Spencer’s speech in 2017 — has allowed the defamation case to move forward through discovery with a trial set in October.

Discovery is the game in this case. The suit allows a rightwing organization to see the internal workings of the SPLC for the first time. Groups like the Heritage Foundation hope that a verdict against the SPLC will break the organization in the same way its reporting and legal work broke the Ku Klux Klan.

Margaret Huang, CEO of the SPLC, said nothing about this while she was at a forum at the St. James Hotel in Selma last week. In the shadow of the Edmund Pettus bridge, she framed the moment facing the country in terms of the fights of the south going national.

“This is not new for those of us in the south,” she said. “The bad things that are now being adopted nationally and by the federal government so many times, they get their origins here.”

This is D.A. King’s legacy.

I note that the AJC’s tepid notice of his death omits mention of the correction on Tia Mitchell’s story about Katy Stamper’s campaign for Congress. Stamper is a far-right zealot who had exchanged correspondence with King, as the story noted. She won the Democratic nomination in Georgia’s 11th Congressional District last year largely because liberal voters weren’t paying any attention.

Mitchell’s piece described King’s group, the Dustin Inman Society, as a “Marietta-based anti-immigration hate group,” without other references, which prompted the correction after receiving a legal threat for defamation from the group.

Reporting by the AJC may have led to the defamation case against the SPLC. In 2017, a piece by Jeremy Redmond described King’s ire at the relative fecklessness of Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board. It also noted the group’s connection to white nationalist organizations.

The Dustin Inman Society — which reported $50,000 or less in gross receipts last year — solicits donations through another organization called US Inc., a Michigan-based educational foundation founded by John Tanton. The SPLC has called Tanton the "racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement." The SPLC, which operates an Immigrant Justice Project, fought Georgia's HB 87 in federal court.

Tanton and US Inc. — which focuses on overhauling the immigration system and promoting English as this nation’s common language — did not respond to requests for comment. King pushed back against the criticism of Tanton and the Dustin Inman Society, calling the SPLC “discredited and agenda-driven.”

“For the SPLC, pretty much everyone who opposes their political agenda is attacked as ‘racists’ or ‘haters,’ ” he said. “That smear campaign isn’t fooling many thinking Americans.”

Heidi Beirich, who directs the SPLC’s efforts tracking hate groups and extremists, said she was going to take a new look at the Dustin Inman Society after learning from the AJC about its ties to US Inc.

“Hearing about this US Inc. connection, I think we at the SPLC have to take a serious look at King’s outfit as possibly a hate group,” Beirich said, “because there is no one more extreme than John Tanton and his crew on immigration in the United States.”

This was good reporting. Tanton isn’t some edge case on matters of racism and white nationalism; he is a eugenicist at the center of a constellation of organizations promoting white ethnic hegemony, with a history of racist commentary that the SPLC has been tracking for a long time.

Just to be clear: D.A. King didn’t just take Tanton’s money. He described him as a “personal friend and a personal hero.”

King’s early writings for the overtly-racist (and now defunct) VDare were aligned with Tanton’s views. King asked for his writings to be removed from VDare once it became clear that the association might harm his political efforts in Georgia.

“King treated VDARE very badly, but he was a patriot and I'm sorry to see him gone,” said Peter Brimelow, VDare’s white supremacist founder in condolences on X.

I am reasonably certain I first met King at Wild Bill’s in 2006, when Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minutemen “border security” militia group, came through Gwinnett County waving endorsements around. (A Maricopa County jury convicted Simcox of child sexual abuse in 2016 for molesting a 5-year-old girl and he is serving a 19.5-year sentence.)

King was fond of name calling, taunting — whatever would draw attention. We came to loggerheads in 2019, when he was a speaker at a forum by then-sheriff Butch Conway in Gwinnett, discussing his support for the 287(g) program. The program allows deputized local law enforcement to perform functions usually carried out by ICE: checking immigration status, issuing immigration detainers and Notices to Appear that begin removal proceedings, or transferring people to ICE.

At that point, King’s ties to white nationalist organizations were clear enough. "To give him a platform is to give air to every closeted Klansman in the state who wants their politics reflected in policy,” I wrote.

Conway and I were friends, but I called him on this one on social media. King and I went through a labored back-and-forth about his intentions and motivations, including the requisite threats of legal action and my joyful recitation of Georgia’s robust Anti-SLAPP laws in reply.

Ultimately, he challenged me to a debate. I accepted, conditioned on what I think are reasonable terms: Oxford rules. Neutral ground. Sources presented ahead of time for review to prepare rebuttal. I was feeling Christopher Hitchens-like about it, honestly.

King regularly, gleefully shared nonsense from the Center for Immigration Studies or NumbersUSA or other groups where the ultimate source of the data is “we made it up.” I gave him the privilege of naming the question, which is a tremendous advantage in a proper debate. I was looking forward to an opportunity to show just how thin his armor is.

King’s response to a challenged accepted was to move the goalposts, because a bully and coward isn’t interested in a fair fight. The debate never materialized.

Conway lost re-election in 2020, as did King’s other favorite, paleoconservative local sheriff Neil Warren in Cobb. He lamented how the state had become “Georgiafornia.” I lamented the death of honest argument.

We were two people pulling at opposite ends of a chain. We were not friends.

When I Tweeted about newly-elected sheriff Keybo Taylor’s decision to end Gwinnett’s cooperation agreement under 287(g), King’s replied “OK by me if the first person killed by the captured illegal aliens released by these puppet politician sheriffs is you.”

“D.A. King is weak,” I wrote. ‘These are the last gasps of a failed ideology.”

I sincerely wish the latter half of that comment had turned out to be true.

I saw less from King in the subsequent years, perhaps because so many others had adopted his schtick and pushed him out of the way. Two years ago, Facebook weirdly struck a post I had written about King’s publications on VDare for violating community standards, as a "misleading post." Never mind that his writing is still available to be seen for what it is.

Last year, Georgia signed the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act of 2024 into law. Local law enforcement agencies are now required to accede to agreements like 287(g) with federal immigration enforcement agencies on pain of losing state financial support.

King’s hand was at work there. We are living in the world those hands created, and it may take years to unmake that work.