Mapping Far-Right and Anti-Immigrant Movement Alignment with County Sheriffs

“County sheriffs have featured heavily in the right-wing imagination for generations. Their role as elected law enforcement officials ties neatly into narratives of local control and security favored by the Right. The 3,081 county sheriffs ( 90% are White men) oversee jails, which at any given time, hold approximately a third of the total incarcerated population in the United States. While the office of sheriff and law enforcement more broadly has been critical to upholding White supremacy since this country’s founding, there has been a concerted effort in the last decade to mobilize sheriffs towards further supporting and expanding systems of racialized social control and expulsion…”

---

Acknowledgements

Project co-leads: Cloee Cooper and Olivia Lawrence-Weilmann. Cloee Cooper and Ethan Fauré steered data collection and analysis for this map. Lena Gluck, Jess Conger, Marshall Hanig, Julia Cameron, Ari Katzman-Jacobson, and Rodrigo Pimentel supported data collection and fact checking. S. Saenz and Janet Torres advised PRA on data visualization design and procedures. Olivia Lawrence-Weilmann managed the implementation of the data visualization. Juan Thomassie was the web developer behind this map.