Human Rights Campaign Chief Compares ICE Patrols to Lynch Mobs
28th September 2026
Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson Saturday compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols to lynch mobs and likened current political battles over LGBTQ issues to the civil rights movement.
HRC, the nation’s largest LGBTQ activist group, has sharply criticized Trump’s policies on transgender issues, including restrictions on military service for people diagnosed with gender dysphoria and opposition to transgender medical procedures on minors.
“This is a dark time in America,” Robinson said at the HRC annual dinner in Washington, D.C. “They say that history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes, that the ghosts of our unsettled sins continue to haunt us.”
“The story of Nolan Wells echoes the story of Emmett Till,” she said. Wells, an 18-year-old, mysteriously died in Georgia this summer, while the 14-year-old Till’s 1955 murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement. “The ICE patrols look a little too similar to lynch mobs. The purging of the voter rolls looks just like poll taxes, and the attacks on our trans children, they are just as haunting.”
Robinson repeatedly framed current conflicts over transgender policies as a continuation of historic civil rights struggles, arguing that government actions targeting transgender identities echoed forms of discrimination previously directed at black Americans.