Kellyanne Conway’s strange , unsettling request — that a journalist who questioned the president’s call for his political enemies to be deported to their ancestral homelands should reveal his own ethnicity — was properly denounced as repulsive on Tuesday. But there was another element of the exchange, and of Conway’s attempt to cast Donald Trump’s fixation on the ethnic origins of his critics as perfectly ordinary, that deserves more attention. “We are all from somewhere else ‘originally,'” Conway wrote later on Twitter, by way of explanation. “I asked the question to answer the question and volunteered my own ethnicity: Italian and Irish.” For someone of that heritage, Conway displays a strange lack of awareness that her own ancestors were once excluded from the nativist definition of who belongs in America — and who is entitled to citizenship as a right, not a privilege. What’s more, anyone working for Trump has reason to be aware of just how recently American citizens from Irish and Italian families were viewed with hatred and suspicion by native-born, white Protestants. That’s because the president’s father, Fred Trump, was one of seven men arrested in 1927 at a Memorial Day parade in Queens, where 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan rioted when the Irish-American-led police force tried to prevent them from marching. The arrest was documented in the New York Times two day later, in an account that gave Fred Trump’s name and home address, as the website Boing Boing discovered in 2015.

Although the Klan is better known now for its long campaign of terrorism and murder directed at African-Americans, a century ago, its members were also animated by the perceived threat to white, Protestant America from an influx of Irish and Italian Catholics, suspected of harboring secret dual loyalties to an alien faith. In New York City, the Klan viewed the police department — which was more than 50 percent Irish at the start of the 20th century — as the standing army of the growing Catholic immigrant community. While the Times report noted that the charges against Fred Trump were dropped, and it is unclear whether he was a participant or a bystander, his name also appeared in contemporary reports from three other local newspapers, unearthed by Vice News, as one of the seven men detained after skirmishes that day between 100 police officers and the “berobed” Klansmen.

The now-defunct Brooklyn Daily Star reported that Fred Trump was “dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.” When Donald Trump was asked about this incident by Jason Horowitz of the New York Times in 2015, he gave the self-contradictory answer: “It never happened, and they said there were no charges, no nothing. It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges.”

The names of the police officers cited in the contemporary Times report on the riot underscore that the New York Police Department was by then an established center of Irish-American power. According to the report, the police commissioner, Joseph Warren — whose father was born in Ireland — had been alerted that the Klansmen intended to march in the parade by one Patrick Scanlan, the editor of a Brooklyn Catholic weekly called The Tablet. Two of the officers who played a central role in the events also had typically Irish Catholic names: Deputy Chief Inspector Thomas Kelly of Queens, who determined that the Klansman had broken an informal understanding with the police not to wear robes and hoods, and Patrolman William O’Neill, who was knocked down and kicked by the marchers. The Times report also included the full text of a flyer passed around Jamaica, Queens, after the riot, “apparently giving the Klan’s side of the matter.” Under the headline, “Americans Assaulted by Roman Catholic Police of New York City!” the Klan flyer began, “Native-born Protestant Americans clubbed and beaten when they exercise their rights in the country of their birth.”