Here is the AP story from Saturday published at the Eagle Tribune.
The timing of the arrest is suspicious (is the FBI helping Hillary again, will she bring it up in the debate on Wednesday as an example of right wing extremism?), but otherwise we will wait and see what comes of this.
For background, you might want to see our archive on Garden City, KS (click here) where Tyson Foods has long been a draw for cheap refugee laborers. For more information on refugee resettlement in Kansas generally, go here.
One of my all-time favorite posts on Garden City is one from 2010 where Somali Muslims wanted a taxpayer supported cemetery to set aside a section just for Muslims so they wouldn’t have to be with infidels even after death.
For serious students of the history of Somalis and Tyson Foods in Kansas see our entire category on Emporia, KS by clicking here. It is a classic case of how a flood of refugees pushed a town over the edge. (Tyson ultimately closed the plant and moved refugees elsewhere.)
This is a bit of the AP story from over the weekend.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Three members of a Kansas militia group were charged Friday with plotting to bomb an apartment complex that’s home to Somali immigrants in the western Kansas meatpacking town of Garden City, a thwarted attack prosecutors say was planned for the day after the November election.
The arrests were the culmination of an eight-month FBI investigation [suspicious timing?—ed] that took agents “deep into a hidden culture of hatred and violence,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tom Beall said.
A complaint unsealed Friday charges Curtis Wayne Allen, 49; Patrick Eugene Stein, 47; and Gavin Wayne Wright, 49, with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. Their first court appearance is Monday.
Prosecutors said the men don’t yet have attorneys. Publicly listed phone numbers for the men couldn’t immediately be found.
The men are members of a small militia group that calls itself “the Crusaders,” and whose members espouse sovereign citizen, anti-government, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs, according to the complaint.
Continue reading here.
It looks like it is Catholic Charities that is resettling refugees (including many Muslims) in to Garden City. See here.