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A man’s crusade in the South

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Rodney Hunt, fresh off work in a starched, buttoned-down shirt, joined the crowd that was streaming into a meeting of the Central Mississippi Tea Party.

It was just after the state primaries, and Hunt, 65, a reserved man by nature, had emerged as something of a Mississippi kingmaker.

Hunt’s organization, the Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, or MFIRE, had endorsed Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, who had just crushed his opponent in the GOP primary and appeared destined to become governor, partly because he was promising voters he’d push for a tough anti-illegal-immigration law -- the group’s signature issue.

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As the tea party members gathered at Flowood City Hall, other conservative candidates made sure to pay their respects to Hunt, an oral surgeon who came out of obscurity to become the citizen leader of this Deep South state’s movement against illegal immigration.

“Rodney, how you doin’?” they said, gripping his outstretched hand.

Hunt and his fellow activists had called their meeting on this muggy August evening to discuss how conservatives might finally wrest control of the state House of Representatives from liberal Democrats. To lure a crowd, the website advertising the meeting noted that the House had “single-handedly blocked Arizona-style immigration legislation.”

Hunt had a copy of that morning’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger rolled up in his hand like a baton. He had underlined a chunk of the front page that described how Democrats were using the headquarters of the state’s main pro-immigrant group as a meeting place to certify results of a local primary.

It was more proof, Hunt said, that Democrats were in the tank for the amnesty crowd. He thought he might bring up the matter tonight, to inspire the troops.

Latinos have moved to the South in growing numbers over the last decade, and their presence has been accompanied by growing anger and resentment aimed at illegal immigrants. If Hunt gets his way, Mississippi will become the latest Southern state to pass a law aimed at driving illegal immigrants out -- establishing the Deep South as the U.S. region with the most-stringent restrictions on illegal immigrants.

In Mississippi, there’s a struggle that goes beyond immigration. Latinos, regardless of legal status, are part of a grand contest to define the state’s future.

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Blacks, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, make up 37% of Mississippi’s population, the highest percentage of any state. Latinos, if they vote Democratic, could one day tip the balance of power in a state where whites -- that is, white Republicans -- have the upper hand.

When Hunt describes this dynamic, it is not in racial terms -- because, he says, these are not the terms he thinks in. Though he is a white Mississippian raised in the ‘60s, he says, “I changed, along with most of the people in my generation. We try to accept people as they are, and not by the color of their skin.”

His public appeals have been based on familiar arguments about illegal immigrants: the jobs they are taking, their flouting of the rule of law, their burden on government coffers.

His broad goal, he said, is not to retain white power in Mississippi. It’s to retain conservative power.

“It has nothing to do with race,” he says.

The crowd poured into Flowood’s council chambers, Hunt among them. They stood for a prayer and the Pledge.

Roughly 90 of the 95 people in the room were white.

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Hunt lives in a sylvan gated community in this majority-white suburb of Jackson, far from the chicken plants and casinos and construction sites that have lured illegal immigrants, most of them Latino, to Mississippi.

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Their lives and his intersect only on rare occasions, he says, such as when he needs work done on his house. At these times, he usually asks a contractor whether he employs illegal immigrants or legal workers.

“I got both kinds,” he recalls one roofing contractor telling him, just after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “Which do you want?”

The state’s illegal immigrant population is relatively small: The state auditor’s office estimates there are 90,000 -- about 3% of the state’s 2.9 million people. (The census estimates that Latinos, regardless of legal status, make up 2.7% of the population.) But the illegal population has been growing fast enough to create a palpable anxiety.

Mississippi liberals suspect the anxiety is fueled by old-school bigotry.

“Remnants of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Bull Connor” is the blunt assessment of Democratic Rep. Jim Evans, an African American and president of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, the state’s main pro-immigrant group.

Bill Chandler, a longtime labor activist and executive director of the alliance, said some whites feared what might happen if Latinos align themselves with blacks. “These kinds of things are scaring ... most of the white folks here,” he said. “That’s why it’s such an obsession in these Deep South states.”

Accusations of racism are commonly hurled by the left at anti-illegal immigration forces, particularly in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, all of which have adopted tough immigration laws in recent months.

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Hunt is dismayed by the accusations. Though his columned, custom home is in the old plantation style, he takes pains to mention that he is no scion of the planter class, but the self-made son of a dry-goods salesman from rural Oktibbeha County.

Hunt says he still identifies with “the working man” -- the legal one, at least -- and that concern for the working class is what fuels his passion. He fears that illegal immigrants lack the cultural background that encourages boot-strapping success stories like his.

“A lot of them come from countries that are Third World countries, where individual responsibility may not be as valued as it is here in the United States,” he said.

“When they come here, they unfortunately get on the entitlement programs, and I think they’ll vote for the entitlement programs,” he added.

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For most of his life, Hunt did not intervene in public matters. He was building his medical practice, raising a family and coaching youth baseball.

His was the last generation of Mississippi apartheid, but he, like many others, sailed through his all-white high school and his all-white Mississippi College somewhat isolated from the violence and unrest that surrounded him: Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered by a white supremacist a few miles from Hunt’s high school in Jackson in the summer between his junior and senior years.

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To this day, Hunt insists, he was out of the state, in professional school in Tennessee and Georgia, during “the main parts of the civil rights movement.”

As an adult, politics was way down on the list of things to talk about when he’d go deer hunting with his old friend Ken Jones, an ophthalmologist. Then out of the blue one day, Hunt brought up illegal immigration. Jones recounted the conversation:

“You ought to come to one of our meetings,” Hunt said. “We’ve got this organization, MFIRE, and we want to get a handle on this illegal immigration before it gets out of hand down here.”

Later, Jones said, he thought: What came over him?

Hunt has told the story of the life-changing event numerous times.

Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, federal immigration officials brought a man to his office who’d had his jaw broken by detainees at a jail after the man, according to Hunt, “allegedly made derogatory comments about the U.S.”

Hunt said he later learned from news reports that the man was an “Israeli Muslim” who had “overstayed his visa and had been in our country illegally for 2 1/2 years.” It spurred him to co-found MFIRE.

Others dispute some of the story’s key facts.

The man he operated on, Uzi Bohadana, was Jewish, not Muslim, according to two of his attorneys at the time.

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One of the attorneys, Stephanie Ice, who now works with MIRA, said Bohadana was an Israeli army veteran who had been in the country for less than six months on a tourist visa. He had been detained on suspicion that he was working for pay, in violation of the visa’s terms, Ice said. (Harry E. Moran, a friend of Hunt’s and head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s state office at the time, remembers it differently. He recalled that the visa had expired.)

Bohadana could not be reached and the disposition of his case is unclear. In previous interviews, he said he was beaten not for making anti-American statements, but because he looked Middle Eastern and the detainees figured him for a terrorist.

Shortly after the incident, Hunt teamed up with Moran, who also was growing concerned about illegal immigrants coming to the Southeast. They began knocking on the doors of state politicians, asking for action. The Democrats, Hunt said, wouldn’t meet with them. The Republicans would meet but then not do anything.

One of the few who took action was Phil Bryant, the current gubernatorial front-runner, who was then state auditor and looking to move up the political ladder.

In November 2005, a Bryant aide joined Hunt and two other men in founding MFIRE. Three months later, Bryant’s office released a report estimating that illegal immigrants were costing Mississippi taxpayers $25 million per year.

In 2007, Bryant successfully ran for lieutenant governor, hammering illegal immigration as a major theme. In one television ad he told voters: “I’m going to lead the charge to stop illegal immigration in Mississippi.”

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Bryant handily defeated a Democratic opponent.

Hunt took MFIRE online; he said he had signed up about 220 members on his website. They pushed lawmakers to pass a law that made Mississippi one of the first states to require employers to check employees’ immigration status against the federal E-Verify database.

Hunt concedes that some people have been attracted to his cause for the wrong reasons. And there is some fodder for those Mississippians inclined to question MFIRE’s intentions.

State Sen. Joey Fillingane, a high-profile MFIRE supporter who introduced the Arizona-style immigration bill, was documented as having attended a meeting of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens in 2000, when he was a House member. (He says he unwittingly attended what was billed as a “revival service.”)

The original MFIRE website featured a photo of three young Latinos throwing gang signs, according to the Associated Press, and some posting comments on the current site have more on their mind than the competition for jobs. One complained about illegal immigrants who “take over our city park benches on weekends” and “look at us like WE need to leave.”

Another pinpointed the problem as the “master TYRANT LINCOLN,” and urged secession from the union.

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At the tea party meeting, the candidates were given a chance to stump a little before the main order of business. Lee Yancey, a state senator running for treasurer, touted his involvement with Hunt’s group.

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“I was in MFIRE before I was in the Senate,” he said. “I just think we need to know who’s here legally and who’s not.”

There was a murmur of assent.

Only legal Mississippians, he said, should be eligible for benefits.

Then came vigorous applause.

Hunt never unrolled the newspaper to say his piece, and at a break, he slipped out. The campaign he had helped set in motion was rolling along fine on its own.

“I like this, but I think meetings should be held to one hour,” he said. “Like church.”

He drove past the Lowe’s and the Hobby Lobby and the Chik-fil-A, to the stacked-stone gate of his subdivision.

He pressed a button on the remote. The gate swung open soundlessly, welcoming him home.

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richard.fausset@latimes.com

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