Lakeway Police Chief Is ICE Guest Lecturer

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on contracted services, which include everything from IT and technical support to chartered flights and ground transportation. Dozens of companies grow rich from giving ICE the tools they need to surveil, incarcerate, and deport an ever-increasing number of migrants.

ICE also pays individuals for services, and among them is Todd A. Radford. A career cop, Radford is currently the police chief of Lakeway, Texas, an 82% white suburb of Austin with a 3.3% poverty rate. Radford has a combination of criminal justice and business degrees, and makes money on top of his police chief salary from giving lectures. The average salary of a police chief for a town the size of Lakeway is about $90,000/year.

ICE has paid Radford an average of more than $11,000 a year for these lectures. One lecture is billed as “a unique training geared to law enforcement management”, and the other is simply described as “law enforcement training”. One can imagine the pearls of wisdom Radford has gained after 30 years of doing capitalism and nationalism’s dirty work. As the police are given more and more money, discretion, and military equipment, ICE is eager to cozy up behind the thin blue line with them.

People who live near the US/Mexico border and people suffering from poverty alike know how militarized cops of all stripes have become. Collaborations like the one between ICE and this police chief can only further harm migrants, racialized people, and poor people as cops of different stripes become more and more comfortable with sharing knowledge and information. This collaboration between Radford and ICE is above and beyond what the infamous SB4 requires of law enforcement. Radford denounced the law in 2015 while he was running for Travis County Sheriff. Unsurprisingly, he does not actually give a shit about the people he criminalizes.

Close the lines of communication between the pigs and open the borders!


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#IdentifyEvropa: Neo-Nazi Student at UT Austin

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

There’s a Neo-Nazi student at UT who works with a national Neo-Nazi organization named Identity Evropa. How’s that for a hook? Although if you’ve been following along with events on campus the past few years, this probably isn’t that surprising. We believe his name is Clayton Ray Leonard, and will explain why & what we have found about him below.

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Scratch a Liberal Arts Rep, a Fascist Bleeds

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

Update 10/25/19: As of Fall 2019, Lillian Bonin has acted as Chairman for the Young Conservatives of Texas. In the year since this article was published, we further uncovered her ties to white nationalists and participation in rape-apologia in pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations. 

[CW: transphobia, anti-semitism, racism]

Over the past few days, we have been investigating the political activities and leanings of Lillian Bonin, a UT Liberal Arts Representative. On Friday, we acquired a screenshot of a comment made by Bonin on an AJ+ video. In this comment, Bonin refers to a white man attempting to unlearn his racism by saying “when the left literally won’t accept you until you fully cuckify yourself.”

Continue reading “Scratch a Liberal Arts Rep, a Fascist Bleeds”