[News] The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep — And Law Enforcement Is Part of It

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    *"Killing, looting, burning, raping, and terrorizing Indians were
    traditions in each of the colonies long before the Constitutional
    Convention. "Militias," as in government controlled units, were
    institutionalized by Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the US
    Constitution, and were used to officially invade and occupy Native
    land. But the Second Amendment (like the other 10 amendments)
    enshrined an individual right. The Second Amendment's language
    specifically gave individuals and families the right to form
    volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land."*

    *From: "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment" by
    **Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
    <https://www.facebook.com/roxanne.dunbarortiz?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARDwyCZE7quDJfoGrRFPKgqlj5xDX_JUgnOoQEgj9EHb__dNXsUHyTf0QNRlyGOILEBzzgPhksBJ_Bbg&fref=mentions>
    *

    *_____________________________________________*
    **

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/23/border-militia-migrants/


  The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep — And Law Enforcement
  Is Part of It

Ryan Devereaux - April 23, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border 
Patrol, provided The Intercept and several other news organizations with 
the same statement when asked about the militia’s operations:

    U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not endorse private groups
    or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands.
    Interference by civilians in law enforcement matters could have
    public safety and legal consequences for all parties involved.
    Border Security operations are complex and require highly trained
    professionals with adequate resources to protect the country. Border
    Patrol welcomes assistance from the community and encourages anyone
    who witnesses or suspects illegal activity to call 911, or the U.S.
    Border Patrol tip line.

While the government might not “endorse” the activities of border 
militias, it’s no secret 
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/> 
that the “assistance” the Border Patrol “welcomes” has long included 
those groups. That’s perhaps due to the fact that the very creation of 
the border, and the genesis of American border policing, is rooted in a 
deep and bloody tradition of vigilantism.


      A History of Frontier Violence

In the summer of 1986, approximately 20 heavily armed men in military 
fatigues stepped into the darkness of the Arizona desert. It was July 
Fourth weekend outside the remote border town of Lochiel and the gunmen 
were on the hunt. They were the Arizona branch of Civilian Materiel 
Assistance, or CMA, a racist and anti-communist paramilitary outfit that 
provided mercenary services to the U.S. government and the death squads 
it backed in Central America. Carrying M-16s and AK-47s, with Israeli 
night-vision goggles strapped to their heads, the vigilantes soon found 
what they were looking for: two carloads of Mexican nationals.

J.R. Hagen, the crucifix-wearing Vietnam veteran who led the operation, 
would later say that the vehicles came to a stop on their own. Other 
members of his team disagreed, telling reporters that they boobytrapped 
the road, tearing the tires of one of the vehicles to shreds before 
opening fire. It was the latest in a series of escalating CMA actions, 
which had also included clandestine forays into Mexico. The militia 
members held 16 men, women, and children at gunpoint for an hour and a 
half before Border Patrol agents arrived to take them away.

At the time, the nation was in one of its periodic bouts of heightened 
immigration and border security obsession. The Reagan administration’s 
dirty wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador were driving 
hundreds of thousands of refugees north. Arriving at the border, those 
refugees’ asylum claims were systematically — and illegally — denied by 
U.S. immigration officials. In response, a network of religious leaders 
in Tucson, the same town where Hagen and his CMA cronies were based, 
began smuggling asylum-seekers into the county by the hundreds and 
moving them to houses of worship. They called it the Sanctuary Movement 
and they provoked a far more aggressive response from U.S. law 
enforcement than the gun-toting extremists ever would.

    The history of the West is full of stories of white Americans taking
    the law into their own hands to beat back nonwhite populations.

More than 30 years later, the country is again divided on the question 
of how to respond to those seeking refuge, and amid a new influx of 
Central American asylum-seekers, border militias have once more entered 
the national discussion.

But there were border militias long before the CMA or UCP stalked the 
deserts of the Southwest. In a line that undersells the extraordinary 
levels of racist violence that have followed these groups, a 2006 
Congressional Research Service, or CRS, report 
<https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33353.pdf> noted that “civilian 
patrols along the international border have existed in a wide variety of 
forms for at least 150 years.” The history of the West, and particularly 
the Southwest, is full of stories of white Americans taking the law into 
their own hands to beat back nonwhite populations. Those efforts have 
been routinely accompanied by tacit or active law enforcement support. 
The fabled Texas Rangers are one example.

“The Texas Rangers shaped and protected Anglo-America settlement,” 
historian Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2010 book, “Migra!: A 
History of the U.S. Border Patrol.” “They battled indigenous groups for 
dominance in the region, chased down runaway slaves who struck for 
freedom deep within Mexico, and settled scores with anyone who 
challenged the Anglo-American project in Texas. The Rangers proved 
particularly useful in helping Anglo-American landholders win favorable 
settlements of land and labor disputes with Texas Mexicans. Whatever the 
task, however, raw physical violence was the Rangers’ principal strategy.”

While the Texas Rangers, at their birth, operated under the color of 
law, they did so in concert with a broader Anglo-American effort to win 
the West that was rich with vigilante violence. The early years of the 
20th century, from 1910 to 1920, were particularly bloody, with hundreds 
of Mexicans murdered and lynched in the Texas borderlands. “The dead 
included women and men, the aged and the young, long-time residents and 
recent arrivals,” says the Refusing to Forget 
<https://refusingtoforget.org/the-history/> project, an initiative 
started by a collective of border-based historians and researchers. 
“They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes and at the 
hands of local law enforcement officers and the Texas Rangers. Some were 
summarily executed after being taken captive, or shot under the flimsy 
pretext of trying to escape. Some were left in the open to rot, others 
desecrated by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured by means such as 
having beer bottles rammed into their mouths.”

    A “culture of impunity” allowed extralegal violence to flourish in
    South Texas.

Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at Brown University, author of “The 
Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas” and 
co-founder of Refusing to Forget, told The Intercept that a “culture of 
impunity” allowed extralegal violence to flourish in South Texas. 
“Regardless of whether you’re a vigilante acting outside of the law, or 
you’re a state police officer or a local law enforcement officer 
practicing extralegal violence, people were not prosecuted,” she 
explained. “A culture of impunity allowed state police officers and 
local law enforcement in many instances to collaborate with vigilantes, 
but they wouldn’t have called them vigilantes. They would have said they 
were pulling together a posse.”

In 1924, a coalition of nativists and white power activists succeeded in 
getting the government to severely limit the number of immigrants 
admitted into the country. They failed, however, in getting the 
government to impose quotas on Mexico. Big agribusiness won that fight. 
Cheap and exploitable Mexican labor was too valuable to lose. Still, 
there was a bright side for the racist right. The Border Patrol was 
created that same year, marking the beginning of an agency that would 
evolve into one of the most technologically advanced and well-armed 
border security forces in human history. The first generation of agents 
were drawn from communities responsible for the previous decade of 
racist border violence. Many were recruited from the Texas Rangers and 
the Indian Wars rolling through the region at the time.

The work of those early generations formed the basis of a nostalgia that 
persists among agents to this day. “I often heard romanticized stories 
of ‘the old patrol,’ a lament for the days when agents had free rein 
across the borderlands, lighting abandoned cars on fire and ‘tuning up’ 
smugglers and migrants at will,” Francisco Cantú, a Border Patrol agent 
turned author, wrote 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/when-the-frontier-becomes-the-wall> 
recently. “As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied 
places in the desert — a remote pass where earlier generations of agents 
were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their 
corpses, a stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American 
lying drunk and asleep on the road, an isolated patch of scrubland where 
agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them 
loose to walk through the wilderness barefoot and stripped to their 
underwear.”

Despite all of this, no amount of state violence and border policing has 
ever been sufficient to satisfy all Americans, especially the racist ones.


      A Tradition of Impunity

In the late 1970s, Louis Beam, a devout white power activist who boasted 
of killing communists as an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, built a 
paramilitary training camp on 50 acres of Texas swampland. Among Beam’s 
core projects was the Klan Border Watch, a new spin on the country’s 
oldest domestic terrorism organization that used military special 
operations tactics and training to target undocumented immigrants. “The 
patrols functioned both as a publicity stunt and as a way to inculcate 
real anti-immigrant hostility and encourage acts of violence,” Kathleen 
Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, wrote in her 2018 book, 
“Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” 
Beam, whose camp trained hundreds of white power foot soldiers across 
multiple years, told reporters that his teams captured migrants in South 
Texas.

“When our government officials refuse to enforce the laws of the 
country, we will enforce them ourselves,” he said, articulating a 
justification that is still common among border militia members today.

    “When our government officials refuse to enforce the laws of the
    country, we will enforce them ourselves.”

In an interview on Monday with The Intercept, Belew said the history of 
vigilantism on the border is intimately entangled in the birth of U.S. 
border policing. “The blurry line between state and vigilante 
enforcement of the border goes back as long as there is a border,” she 
said. “In some ways, groups like the Border Patrol and the Texas Rangers 
come out of this tradition.” As for the militias’ oft-repeated claim 
that they are simply stepping in to help law enforcement do its job, 
Belew said those arguments ring hollow.

“Even as they are saying they are supporting the state, they are 
outfitting as paramilitary armies, carrying out violence against 
different kinds of people and doing a whole bunch of revolutionary 
actions that is fundamentally opposed to state sovereignty,” she 
explained. “That is not just neutrally carrying out the work of the 
state, even when they claim to be doing that.”

Though Beam’s Texas training camp was eventually shut down, paramilitary 
border militia operations continued to expand through the end of the 
20th century. CMA took its operations even further. Not only did the 
organization’s Arizona chapter cross into Mexico, CMA mercenaries led by 
former Marine Tom Posey traveled to Nicaragua to provide weapons and 
support to the Contra forces waging war on the Sandinista government. 
“In Nicaragua, CMA acted covertly on behalf of the U.S. government — it 
was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military,” Belew noted. 
In 1984, a helicopter carrying CMA mercenaries was shot down over 
Nicaragua; two died, four escaped. “The helicopter crash was a 
precipitating event in the public’s discovery of the Iran-Contra 
scandal,” Belew wrote, exposing a scheme overseen by the Reagan 
administration and the CIA to circumvent Congress and the law by 
supplying the Contras with weapons and support, allowing the 
counterrevolutionaries to continue killing, torturing, and disappearing 
Nicaraguan men, women, and children by the thousands.

    “There’s a climate of violence that’s being created by the presence
    of armed agents, infrared sensors, helicopters with night-vision
    scopes and guns.”

A decade after the scandal, the Border Patrol, under President Bill 
Clinton, embarked on a new strategy to secure the international divide 
with Mexico. Prevention Through Deterrence, as it was known, 
concentrated security infrastructure and personnel around key border 
cities, funneling migration flows into the Sonoran Desert. Virtually 
overnight, the number of migrants dying in the desert exploded. While 
the vast majority were killed by the elements, a handful of others died 
at the hands of border vigilantes and private citizens. “There’s a 
climate of violence that’s being created by the presence of armed 
agents, infrared sensors, helicopters with night-vision scopes and guns 
— a real sense from the U.S. government that there’s actually a war 
being waged,” Sasha Khokha of the National Network for Immigrant and 
Refugee Rights, told 
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-20-mn-7448-story.html> 
the Los Angeles Times in 2000, following the killing of Eusebio de Haro, 
a Mexican migrant, who was gunned down by Texas rancher Sam Blackwood 
after asking for water. Blackwood was later convicted 
<https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Rancher-convicted-in-immigrant-s-death-2048006.php> 
of a misdemeanor and ordered to pay a $4,000 fine.

According to CRS researchers who investigated border militias, the 
migration patterns created by Prevention Through Deterrence influenced 
the geographic dispersion of vigilante groups. Their report noted that 
the groups ranged from ranchers patrolling their property with armed 
volunteers to more organized paramilitary units. In 2005, the efforts of 
one of the groups, the so-called Minuteman Project, exploded into the 
national press. With nearly 1,000 volunteers, the Minuteman Project 
coincided with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the spiraling of an 
illegal war in Iraq, and a plummeting in public support for the Bush 
administration’s “global war on terrorism.” This, says New York 
University historian Greg Grandin, marked a critical turning point in 
the story of the border and the vigilantes who shaped it.

In his new book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border 
Wall in the Mind of America,” Grandin argues that the notion of a 
limitless frontier into which the nation could forever channel its 
aspirations and unload its demons has met its demise. Vigilantism was 
“central” to that historical arc, Grandin told me. “The Mexican-American 
War was basically the beginning of a kind of institutionalization of 
vigilantism against Mexicans and then what became Mexican Americans, and 
there was very little distinction between fighting that war then what 
later becomes settlement of the West, and then what later becomes 
vigilantism,” he said. “It’s a very fine line that separates all of this.”

Grandin contends that the mid-2000s explosion in border militia activity 
was a reflection of the Bush administration’s failed effort to continue 
outward expansion of the frontier. What followed in the wake of that 
failure was a rebirth in nativism and white power activism, visible from 
the Minutemen to their tea party successors, that helps to explain how 
the current occupants of the White House came to power. Following his 
2004 re-election, Grandin writes, Bush borrowed a move from the Reagan 
playbook, putting “forth legislation that would further militarize the 
border but also allow, for those undocumented residents who qualified, a 
one-time path to citizenship.”

“The opposition to George W. Bush’s immigration reform started with all 
of these militia extremists and nativists extremists,” Grandin 
explained, revitalizing what he describes as the “old nativist caucus 
that was always latent within the Republican Party.” Bonded in 
opposition, this was the anti-immigrant wave that President Donald Trump 
would later ride in on. As Grandin put it, “the nativists took over the 
Republican Party,” and much of it was thanks to the politics of the 
militias wandering the border with their guns.


      Dangerous Kooks

Over the weekend, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas announced 
<https://twitter.com/NewMexicoOAG/status/1119672701445005312> the arrest 
of Larry Mitchell Hopkins, the 69-year-old leader of the United 
Constitutional Patriots. “This is a dangerous felon who should not have 
weapons around children and families,” Balderas said in a statement. 
“Today’s arrest by the FBI indicates clearly that the rule of law should 
be in the hands of trained law enforcement officials, not vigilantes.” 
Court documents unsealed on Monday revealed that Hopkins had been on law 
enforcement’s radar since at least 2017, when the FBI learned that his 
group was “training to assassinate George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and 
Barack Obama because of these individuals’ support of Antifa.”

According to the complaint against Hopkins, a pair of FBI agents 
following up on a tip paid a visit to the Lakeside Ranch trailer park in 
Flora Vista, New Mexico, in October 2017. There they met with Hopkins, 
who also goes by the alias “Johnny Horton Jr.” and calls himself the 
“commander” of the UCP. Hopkins invited the agents into his “office” (a 
room in a trailer), where they observed “approximately 10 firearms 
leaning against the wall in a closet in plain view.” Hopkins reportedly 
said that the weapons belonged to his “common law wife.” Agents later 
discovered that the militia commander allegedly planning the murder of 
several prominent public figures had previously been twice convicted of 
illegally possessing a firearm, as well as impersonating a peace 
officer. The complaint offered no indication of a deeper investigation 
into Hopkins or the UCP following these revelations.

Hopkins’s lawyer, Kelly O’Connell, disputed 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/militia-border-new-mexico.html> 
the allegations in the complaint Monday, asking why, if his client was 
such a threat to the public, he wasn’t arrested sooner. It was a fair 
question.

While Hopkins’s arrest was welcome news to many, he was not arrested for 
being a vigilante, kidnapping migrants, or plotting assassinations. Like 
J.R. Hagen, the man who led CMA’s Arizona chapter in the 1980s, Hopkins 
was taken into custody on weapons charges. This is common in the history 
of the white power movement, Belew said. She cites two reasons for the 
lack of prosecutions targeting extremist militia members for their 
actual contributions to the cause. First, she said, there’s been a 
persistent problem of local law enforcement or prosecutors feeling 
sympathetic to the motivations of the accused. Second, she said, is the 
fact that “because this occurs on the border, the people that they are 
attacking are uniquely vulnerable.”

    “You see these events prosecuted through things like firearms
    charges because there are not protections for the people who should
    be able to find justice.”

“We’re talking about a mass kidnapping and holding of people at 
gunpoint, hundreds of people,” Belew explained. “This is a shocking 
event that should be very easy to prosecute, but over and over again, 
you see these events prosecuted through things like firearms charges 
because there are not protections for the people who should be able to 
find justice.”

On top of all that, there’s the historic problem of the cases the state 
does choose to pour resources into — and the ones it does not. In the 
mid-1980s, federal authorities in southern Arizona launched a sprawling 
undercover investigation. The target was not the armed vigilantes 
accosting migrants in the desert, but rather the priests, nuns, and 
parishioners involved in the Sanctuary Movement. Informants were 
dispatched into houses of worship. Hundreds of hours of tape involving 
private conversations and sermons were secretly recorded. Sixteen 
members of the movement were charged with 71 counts of conspiracy 
related to their smuggling operations, which the movement had been 
public about since day one. Eight members of the movement were found 
guilty, though, amid an enormous public outcry, their sentences were 
largely probationary.

When footage of the UCP’s operations went viral last week, reporters 
<https://twitter.com/TheTinaVasquez/status/1119242685095849986> and 
immigrant rights advocates 
<https://twitter.com/eeerox/status/1119258824911622144> were once again 
quick to question how federal law enforcement was using its resources on 
the border. Since coming into office, the Trump administration has 
aggressively prosecuted 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/09/16/border-patrol-no-more-deaths-prosecution-arizona-immigrants/> 
border-based humanitarian aid volunteers. Scott Warren, a volunteer with 
the faith-based organization No More Deaths, is currently facing 20 
years in prison for providing food, water, and shelter to two 
undocumented men over three days in 2018. In January 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/01/17/no-more-deaths-border-documents-trial/>, 
four other No More Deaths volunteers were convicted of federal 
misdemeanors for leaving jugs of water for migrants crossing a remote 
federal wildlife refuge. While authorities have cracked down on 
humanitarian aid providers in Arizona, an Intercept investigation in 
February revealed 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/us-mexico-border-journalists-harassment/> 
a sprawling Department of Homeland Security intelligence-gathering 
operation in the San Diego-Tijuana area targeting journalists, 
immigration attorneys, and advocates working in close proximity to the 
migrant caravans that have drawn Trump’s outrage.

“Surveillance resources have always been disproportionately targeted at 
the left,” Belew said. While groups on both the political right and left 
have been targeted with undercover investigations, she added, “there are 
way more agents per capita on the left than the right, way more money, 
way more prosecutions, and way more surveillance that ends in violence.”

Mentioning militias to veteran border journalists or immigration 
advocates in places like southern Arizona often elicits an eye roll. 
While it might be a tantalizing story for an out-of-town reporter, 
prominent militia activists and groups are typically viewed as 
self-aggrandizing kooks who rely on the press to inflate their mystique 
and influence. It’s a generally understandable and often reasonable 
approach. At the same time, however, the bloody legacy of border 
vigilantism cannot be dismissed nor can the very real threat they pose 
today.

It was not that long ago — May 2009 — that Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene 
Bush, and Albert Robert Gaxiola entered a trailer in Arivaca, Arizona, 
in search of drugs and money to fund their “Minutemen American Defense” 
militia. Instead of drugs, the vigilantes found a family. Raul Flores 
Jr., 29, and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Ylianna Flores, were shot 
dead. Gina Gonzalez, Raul’s wife and Brisenia’s mother, was wounded but 
survived the attack. The impact of the killings reached deep into the 
tiny border community and lingers to this day. More recently still was 
the case of J.T. Ready, a former Marine and neo-Nazi leader of the “U.S. 
Border Guards,” who once boasted that his Arizona-based group was the 
“Minuteman Project on steroids,” armed with “assault weapons” and ready 
to “use lawful, deadly force when appropriate.” In May 2012, Ready 
killed himself, but not before murdering his girlfriend, her daughter, 
her 15-month-old granddaughter, and another man. Inside Ready’s home, 
investigators found two handguns, a shotgun, and six grenades. Following 
the murder-suicide, the FBI revealed that Ready was the subject of an 
ongoing domestic terrorism investigation, though no action had been 
taken against him.

Downplaying the dangers militias pose carries significant risk, Belew 
said — risk that will be borne by vulnerable migrants in remote places 
in the desert. “Since the 1990s, the prevailing understanding of 
militias is that they are somehow more neutral than a group like the 
Klan or neo-Nazis or even the Minutemen,” she explained. “That’s maybe 
partly because they look like police or they look like they are helping 
law enforcement in various moments, but militias are actually part of 
this very, very extremist social movement that includes a whole bunch of 
people who are not neutral.”

-- 
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