About a dozen people dressed in all black gathered on a street corner in a Denver suburb to conduct their first “patrol.” It was March 19, just weeks after this group of vigilantes began organizing on social media. In a video posted online, the crew of mostly young men starts to roam the streets, on the lookout for illegal immigrants and refugees—who they say are out to rape and assault their women.
They call themselves The Soldiers of Odin, and they’ve just arrived in the United States.
Members of the organization—which gets its cryptic name from the Norse god Odin—have been patrolling the streets of European cities since last year, in response to a wave of mostly Muslim asylum-seekers coming through the EU’s porous borders. But, the anti-immigrant group has now spread to the U.S. and is growing like wildfire—with the help of a powerful social-media recruitment program, Soldiers of Odin has now established U.S. chapters in at least 42 states since February.
Vocativ News
