Correction, Aug. 2, 2026: This story originally reported that the Aug. 1 Save Heritage Indiana rally was held in a cornfield in Greenfield, in Hancock County. The event was held on private property in Clinton County. Indy Politics regrets the error.
Photos: Facebook
The event promoted as the first mass deportation rally in American history was held Saturday night under a rented pole tent pitched in Clinton County in the rain, before a crowd that photographs from inside the event indicate numbered well under 100 people.
Save Heritage Indiana had advertised the Aug. 1 rally for Fishers since mid-July. The group never disclosed the venue publicly, saying on X that it was withholding the location because of harassment and threats. Ticketholders were instead emailed staging instructions the day of the event, directing them to a parking area in Greenfield by 6 p.m., where they would show identification and proceed to the site in small groups.
The keynote speaker was Greg Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large who directed federal immigration operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis before retiring in March. The rally also carried remarks from Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita. Photographs taken inside the tent show those remarks were pre-recorded and played to the crowd from a laptop onto a television mounted on a truss frame.
Tickets ran $50, with a $500 VIP gathering in Carmel the night before. Executive Director Daniel Poynter declined to release ticket sales figures ahead of the event, telling The Indiana Citizen last month that organizers expected a packed house.
Poynter told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that two news outlets were granted exclusive access to the rally. He declined to identify them. Current, which requested transcripts and photographs, reported it could not independently confirm that the event had moved out of Fishers.
The photographs came out anyway. An attendee took pictures inside the tent that were posted to Facebook and shared widely from there. A second attendee streamed roughly 40 minutes of the program live on the platform.
Those images show rows of folding chairs on wet grass, a speaker’s riser at one end of the tent, and vertical banners hung along the tent walls. One banner reproduces a passage from John Jay’s Federalist No. 2 describing Americans as a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language and professing the same religion.
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Save Heritage Indiana as an anti-immigrant hate group. The organization says its mission is to reverse mass migration and preserve what it describes as an Indiana heritage eroding under weak enforcement.
The group lost a co-founder, Nathan Roberts, on July 31. Roberts announced his departure publicly, citing a difference in strategy, after the organization attacked U.S. Sen. Jim Banks online for declining to tape video remarks for the rally.
Several hours before the rally, a counter-demonstration organized by Fishers Resists under the banner “Hoosier Hospitality” drew a considerably larger crowd to Fishers, marching from Holland Park to the Fishers Municipal Center. Organizers estimated attendance at more than 1,000. A planned vigil afterward was called off as storms moved in. State Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-Indianapolis, told the crowd the rally echoed the playbook of the Ku Klux Klan, which held political power in Indiana a century ago.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois.
