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Jake Lang, a January 6 rioter now running for U.S. Senate in Florida, has suggested that the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, and other insurrectionists be deputized to enforce immigration law.
“I would deputize the Proud Boys and the January 6 Patriots to bounty hunt illegal immigrants,” Lang said during a recent interview with Newsweek.
Lang, who spent nearly four years in federal custody for his role in the Capitol insurrection, is running against incumbent Republican Ashley Moody for the Senate seat once held by Marco Rubio. He has positioned himself as a hardline pro-Trump candidate and a self-proclaimed “January 6 patriot.”
Lang's proposal involves working with local sheriffs to deputize far-right civilians to locate, detain, and “make arrests” of undocumented immigrants, offering them bounties for doing so. Legal experts argue that the move would be unconstitutional and dangerous.
“Jake Lang’s plan… is insane and would bring the country much closer to a police state,” Bennett Gershman, a constitutional law professor, said.
On January 6, 2021, Lang stormed the Capitol carrying a baseball bat and riot shield, which prosecutors say he used to assault police officers. Lang was released from custody earlier this year after being pardoned by Trump, and has since cast himself as a political martyr and symbol of the MAGA movement.
“If President Donald J. Trump ever needs the January 6ers ever again, we are here,” Lang said. “We will not ever shrink from the calling of defending our country.”
During the Newsweek interview, Lang doubled down on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, defended the Capitol riot, and praised far-right vigilante action.
When asked whether police were assaulted on January 6, Lang responded, “I don’t believe those are assaults in the legal definition… I believe all the acts that were done on January 6 were justified and therefore legal.”
Lang's Senate bid is set to be a litmus test of the Republican Party’s loyalty to Trump and its tolerance of extremism.
“If voters vote for me, they’re voting for the Trump mandate,” Lang said. “I am a Trump loyalist… I’m symbolic of the political shift from old-school Republicanism to the Make America Great Again movement.”
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