Fox's Laura Ingraham brought on Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and rebut SPLC's identification of FAIR as a “hate group.” Ingraham and her guests ignored the fact that the SPLC, a non-profit organization that monitors hate groups and crimes, attached the label to FAIR in part as a result of the group's anti-immigrant advocacy, ties to white supremacists and the racist rhetoric of the group's founder John Tanton.

On the March 8 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Dane attempted to discredit the SPLC as a “far-left political attack machine” and compared the SPLC's activism to McCarthyism. Before the segment was over, Dane denied the very existence of hate groups, claiming that while hate crimes are real, “a hate group is a concoction, an invention of the politically-left Southern Poverty Law Center.” Watch:

FAIR has a history of holding rallies where immigrants are smeared as “disease-ridden” criminals. One FAIR event featured a guest who had threatened, “We should hang you and send your body back to where you came from.” FAIR also has close ties to the White Nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens and has received over $1 million in funding from a white supremacist group. According to the SPLC, FAIR is “the most important organization” in a network of 13 hate groups founded by John Tanton, who once warned of a coming "Latin onslaught."

This isn't the first time Fox has hosted anti-immigrant hate groups. In 2012, Fox hosted a member of FAIR to smear undocumented immigrants, and recently, Fox News hosted a nativist with ties to FAIR.