The Southern Poverty Law Center said Tuesday it has received nearly 900 reports of hate incidents in the 10 days immediately following Election Day.
“Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success,” a report from the SPLC reads.
The organization said most instances of reported harassment were verbal or in the form of graffiti vandalism, such as an Episcopal church in Indiana that was spray-painted with the phrases “Heil Trump” and “fag church” in addition to a swastika.
Though the SPLC excluded incidents that “authorities have determined to be hoaxes” from its report, it said it could not confirm the veracity of all 867 reported incidents it tracked.
A plurality of the incidents reported to the SPLC, 280 in total, were aimed at immigrants. One woman in Florida, for example, allegedly told a Hispanic family crossing the street that they “should all be deported.”
A startling 183 incidents were reported to have taken place in K-12 public schools, second only in number of reports to those that occurred in public spaces. Chants of “Build the wall!” have been reported in school cafeterias and gymnasiums, and many students have been told that a Trump presidency would lead to their deportation, according to the SPLC.
One public school teacher in Los Angeles was reported to have told one student, “I have your phone numbers, your address, your mama’s address, your daddy’s address; it’s all in the system, sweetie.”
Some of the 867 incidents reported to the SPLC and its #ReportHate page were physically violent, the organization said. The report also recorded 23 anti-Trump hate incidents since the election, but acknowledged that Trump supporters “may have been unlikely to report incidents to the SPLC.”
