Like ICE, far-right sheriffs defy and undermine democracy

Keith Swank is the new sheriff of Pierce County, Washington state’s second-largest. Besides believing that God told him to run for office, he also calls himself a “constitutional sheriff.”

So it was perfectly in character for Swank, testifying about a bill in the state Legislature to bar most law enforcement from using masks, to register his defiance of state authorities.

“Just for the record, my deputies don’t wear masks,” Swank told the legislators. “But once you pass this law that they can’t, I will not only allow them, but I will encourage them to do so, just to see what you do.

“I don’t recognize your authority to impose these controls over me.”

As Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat observed:

That’s the real significance of the masks. They say: We aren’t beholden to you. Not to state officials, the public, or the basic workings of democracy. You can’t touch us. You don’t even know who we are.

This is indeed the operating ethos of a frighteningly large portion of American law enforcement in 2026, particularly those officers and agencies who don masks to hide their identities. We have witnessed them in operation in Minneapolis, as well as Los Angeles and Portland. And cops who embrace these beliefs range from federal agencies to sheriff’s deputies.

Swank’s remarks set off a firestorm of disapproval among their fellow Washington police officers. The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs announced that it “intends to initiate procedures as required by our bylaws for the board to consider expulsion of Sheriff Swank from the WASPC.”

“[T]he inflammatory comments made by Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank at a legislative committee hearing on January 15 do not represent the views or the approach of WASP,” it explained. “The scope of his testimony went beyond reasonable dialogue and devolved into what could be perceived as threatening to legislators and he challenged their constitutional authority. The manner in which he conducted himself was not in line with the professional behavior we expect of members.”

Westneat is right that this is the MAGA effect, which is why we see it manifesting among Trump’s personal ICE paramilitary as well as with masked officers elsewhere. But it runs deeper than that, since Swank was also asserting the beliefs of far-right extremists who believe they can rewrite the meaning of the Constitution to serve an authoritarian regime. What we’re seeing on the streets is an expression of the underlying anti-democratic radicalism at work here. Like ICE agents, these sheriffs believe they are a law unto themselves and accountable to no one.

People like Swank call themselves “constitutionalists.” It’s a benign-sounding label that journalists often just skip right over. But “constitutionalists” are devoted to the founding documents in the same way that the insurrectionist “Patriot” militiamen are “patriotic” rather than the seditionists they actually are.

In reality, being a “constitutional sheriff” means that Keith Swank is a far-right extremist with ties to insurrectionists (especially Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers), white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and election denialists. Nice work, voters.

These “constitutionalists” believe conspiracist far-right theories that the sheriff of each county is the supreme law of the land, capable of overruling federal and state laws as well as the judiciary itself in determining which laws are “constitutional.”

The underlying claim is that county sheriffs have superior status by virtue of being elected—even though in fact the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of local sheriffs or their powers at any point. This status, they believe, enables sheriffs and their deputies to ignore all federal or state laws they choose, and to only force local laws of their choosing. They are also free to ignore court rulings if they choose.

In reality, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) stipulates that the federal Constitution and its laws are the “supreme Law of the Land”. It ensures that federal law takes precedence over conflicting state and local laws. But so-called “constitutionalists” claim that the Constitution’s power doesn’t extend to local law enforcement—a claim that has failed every time it has been tested in the courts.

The wellspring of these ideas is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, ex-Arizona sheriff Richard Mack’s nationwide organization that promotes these groundless theories, which extremists like Cliven and Ammon Bundy have leveraged to create armed standoffs with federal officers.

CSPOA first gained traction nationally when it became a loud faction of the Tea Party movement, especially through its close association with Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, who themselves loudly promoted “constitutionalist” political theories and talking points. Mack appeared at over 70 Tea Party events, telling audiences that they could save America by electing sheriffs aligned with their ideology.

The core of Mack’s ideology is drawn from the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a leading light of the radical right in the 1960s and ‘70s, famous for his red-baiting books and speeches. Skousen in turn drew most of his ideas from the deeply antisemitic and racist Posse Comitatus movement, though he eschewed obviously bigoted rhetoric himself, as does Mack. But the central Posse Comitatus idea was that sheriffs can usurp both federal agencies and the courts and unilaterally override any laws they choose.

The underlying intent of this ideology—especially the end goal of ending the ability of the federal government to enforce civil-rights and anti-discrimination laws—was clear whenever Mack would appear on mainstream news shows to promote “constitutionalist” ideas. For awhile Mack helped lead the far-right charge against gay marriage as well.

But he became nationally well-known by taking a leading role at Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff with federal agents in Nevada in 2014. Mack was especially noteworthy for promoting a strategy of placing women in the front of the phalanx of marchers at the scene, so that if shooting erupted, they could make ideal martyrs for the movement.

Mack also participated in a 2015 meeting with right-wing U.S. senators, notably Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, and Martha Blackburn, to discuss immigration issue—one that followed a morning of protests by their supporters outside the White House, men who demanded President Obama be lynched (“Hang the lying traitor!” one of them shouted). One of the organizers of the gathering was future White House adviser Stephen Miller, who at the time was an aide to Sessions.

After Trump’s election, CSPOA’s profile receded, though their allies in the Oath Keepers and the III% militias proceeded to take a leading role in the Trumpist invasion of liberal cities by armed right-wing paramilitaries like the Proud Boys. They reemerged as a major force again after Trump lost in 2020 and the MAGA army—which included an array of CSPOA devotees, often affiliated with the Oath Keepers—invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the months and years following, the CSPOA took a leading role in promoting Trump’s election denialism theories, especially after a “constitutional sheriff” in Michigan attempted to seize voting machines in order to prove the claims of irregularities. By 2022, they were organizing to seize more vote-counting machines in that fall’s election, and in short order had formed an explicit alliance with MAGA election denialists like True the Vote and Mike Lindell’s MyPillow-funded organization, as well as Christian nationalist figure Mike Flynn, the onetime Trump National Intelligence chief.

Mack and his allies organized a “call to action” gathering in Las Vegas in 2022 to “encourage citizens and Sheriffs across the US to open an investigation” into supposed 2020 election fraud—a claim predicated almost entirely on the “evidence” presented in Dinesh D’Souza’s fraudulent pseudo-documentary, 2000 Mules. They announced a strategy to deploy sheriffs around the country to guard against “election fraud.”

The gathering prominently featured four well-known election denialists close to Donald Trump: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, and the top officials at the far-right “election integrity” organization True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips—both of whom play central roles in d’Souza’s film.

Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, marveled to the audience about how the election denialists came to form a coalition with the CSPOA, regaling them with descriptions of how they had found that the FBI and state governments had stonewalled their efforts to open investigations into supposed ballot-box stuffing by “mules” based on their “evidence,” which in fact was a farrago of misconstrued and inappropriately applied data, along with absurdly false and hyperinflated claims.

She told the audience that she had finally figured out how to surmount the problem when she was contacted by Mack and “constitutionalist” Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, and informed of their interest in the 2000 Mules claims: “The lights went on: ‘It’s the sheriffs! That’s who can do these investigations, that’s who we can trust, that’s who we can turn over information to.’”

Engelbrecht proclaimed that True the Vote would be partnering with CSPOA and another far-right law-enforcement group, Protect America Now, to get “eyes on those drop boxes in states where they still exist.”

She later hopped back on the mic to praise the assembled sheriffs. “If we would know about you guys back in 2020, things would have been a little bit different,” she said.

The alliance later went on to proclaim that they were forming an “army of poll watchers” to prevent fraud in the 2022 election. But that election came and went with no incidents being reported on their conspiracist network. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2024, they were warning that that they were prepared to patrol polling places and conduct investigations into election fraud if they disapproved of the results—which in fact turned out in their favor, at which point they went silent.

A key CSPOA figure working behind the scenes in all this is the organization’s CEO, Sam Bushman. Before he joined the organization, Bushman had a long history of association with white nationalists and other bigoted extremists, notably in the orbit of 1990s militia organizer Col. James “Bo” Gritz. More recently, he appeared on a podcast hosted by a white nationalist publication whose host has spoken of his admiration for Hitler.

Now the same gang is out hitting the stump, warning crowds at evangelical megachurches—just as they did in 2022—that the same “fraud” is looming in the 2026 midterm elections. The campaign is currently focused on the theme: “Save Our Sheriffs.”

Their primary headline event was held Jan. 9 in Puyallup, and as IREHR reports in detail, it featured an array of far-right figurers ranging from Mike Flynn to Keith Swank.

Swank expanded on the remarks that landed him in hot water with the state police officers’ group. Swank—who touted his background in deescalation tactics while running for sheriff—told the audience: “I’ve been working on my escalation tactics lately.”

[IREHR video]

He then went on to claim that his views are widely shared among sheriffs and other police officials around the state:

“So some people say to me, ‘Well, Sheriff Swank, you have lots of sheriffs on the east side of the mountains, and they’re conservative and they’ll really just stand up and defend you.’ Guess what? There’s a couple. The rest of them, who are members of the Washington Sheriff’s Association and the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, say to me, ‘We should compromise with them. We’ll write up our own bill of qualifications, and then they’ll accept that.’ And I told them they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know politics. They don’t know Democrats. And they try to tell me, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. And I say to them, and I’m saying to you again, I won the election of a county of a million people. I know what’s going on politically, and you can count on that. So, I decided I’d start an organization of sheriffs myself, it’s called…Washington State Sheriffs with Spines. And I got one member tonight. January 15th, they’ll be discussing this bill down in Olympia. I suggest you all go down there. I’m going to change my schedule around to go down there. I’m going to wear my uniform. Uh, I’m going to wear my gun belt.”

Swank was hardly the only mainstream Republican official in attendance, as IREHR details. Only one other sheriff from Washington attended: Bob Songer, the notorious sheriff of Klickitat County, who has applied CSPOA ideology in refusing to enforce state wildlife laws regarding the hunting of mountain lions.

But a broad array of Republican elected officials from around the state were in attendance: Washington State Senator Jim McCune, Rep. Matt Marshall, Pierce County Council member Amy Cruver, Pierce County Republican Party Chair David Mullen, Snohomish County GOP chair Steve Mosman, and various local legislative district GOP chairs.

Their political alignment with Trump’s ICE secret-police force is nearly absolute, both in terms of their desire to resist losing the ability of officers to mask as well as their agreement with MAGA’s Nativist immigration agenda. Songer complained to the Puyallup audience that Washington attorney general Nick Brown had placed him under investigation for violating a state law barring local cooperation with ICE. Songer claimed such laws were “unconstitutional.”

“I will call ICE anytime I feel like calling ICE,” Songer declared, openly defying state laws. Songer added that if Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan came to the state, “he could ride shotgun and we’ll go out and pick up some illegals.”

This kind of defiance of the normative power structure in American democracy is a major feature of the MAGA assault on our institutions, and its underlying attitude of utter disrespect has infected law-enforcement operations across the nation, from federal agencies like ICE to the sheriff’s departments in multiple locales, both rural and—is in Swank’s case—urban precincts.

Rather than flee the associations with radical extremists and flaming bigots, they embrace them defiantly and dare anyone to hold them accountable. Remember when policer officers were exposed as members of the Oath Keepers after Jan. 6—and then unblinkingly doubled down and insisted that there was nothing wrong with belonging to an organization whose leader faced trial for (and was later convicted of) seditious conspiracy. CSPOA-affiliated Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, said that he “appreciate[s] those guys standing up for the rule of law, the Constitution and freedom.”

He also defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “Just because somebody was there doesn’t necessarily mean they’re guilty,” he said, adding: “I guarantee you [the rioters] are very loving, Christian people. They just happen to support President Trump a lot.”

All of these officers are revealing their own extremism in part because they don’t see “patriot” beliefs as extremist—even though such essential tenets as the view that sheriffs are the supreme law of the land with power superseding federal and state authorities, as well as the notion that the Second Amendment nullifies any and all gun regulation, are readily debunked nonsense whose only believers are right-wing extremists.

“Some people might have joined Oath Keepers with a minimal understanding of the group,” University of Albany Assistant Professor Sam Jackson, who wrote a book on the Oath Keepers, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “But if you had any real level of engagement with the group you would see their promotion of conspiracy theories, their calls to prepare for violence… Do we really want members of our law enforcement community to be absentmindedly joining civic organizations even if they ... aren’t a pernicious extremist organization like the Oath Keepers? I would hope that the people who we are entrusting with firearms and arrest privileges have better discernment than that.”

However, journalist Jessica Pishko, in her book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, has exposed how broadly and deeply this extremism has infected the nation’s law-enforcement agencies, notably among sheriffs who buy into the “constitutionalist” garbage ideology. Sheriffs, she explained, enjoy virtually “unchecked power,” and the public has been slow to recognize the threat they pose to democracy when radicalized like Keith Swank.

In particular, their claim to be able to enforce election laws—which are not actually in their purview, since they are created and enforced by the states—poses a potential danger to the ability of government officials to maintain security for free and fair elections. This is especially the case when they mount investigations that target minority populations and leaders, often harassing those communities in the process.

“They would say, ‘Oh, we’re deterring voter fraud’,” Pishko says. “But what they’re actually deterring is people voting or being engaged with the government, and that’s the goal.”

This danger is growing acute. The Trump FBI’s recent raid on Fulton County election offices in Atlanta—ostensibly in search of fraud from the 2020 election—makes clear that his MAGA minions are working feverishly to seize control of the nation’s voting machinery before they can be ousted from office by voters in 2026 and 2028.

As Jacquelyn Lopez explained at MS NOW:

Let’s be clear about where our society could be headed. This fall, we are increasingly likely to see a president commanding the federal law enforcement apparatus to seize ballots and voting equipment, prosecute election workers, intimidate voters and election officials and interfere with the counting of ballots and the certification of election results.

And their most potent allies may turn out to be men wearing masks and refusing to acknowledge any restraint on their behavior by the public they believe they rule over. Because they’re already out there,