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<blockquote>
<p> <b>"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."</b></p>
<p><b> From: "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second
Amendment" by </b><b><a class="profileLink"
href="https://www.facebook.com/roxanne.dunbarortiz?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARDwyCZE7quDJfoGrRFPKgqlj5xDX_JUgnOoQEgj9EHb__dNXsUHyTf0QNRlyGOILEBzzgPhksBJ_Bbg&fref=mentions"
data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1069132147&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARDwyCZE7quDJfoGrRFPKgqlj5xDX_JUgnOoQEgj9EHb__dNXsUHyTf0QNRlyGOILEBzzgPhksBJ_Bbg%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D"
data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" id="js_xr">Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz</a><br>
</b></p>
<p><b>_____________________________________________</b><br>
<b></b></p>
</blockquote>
<font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/23/border-militia-migrants/">https://theintercept.com/2019/04/23/border-militia-migrants/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Bloody History of Border Militias
Runs Deep — And Law Enforcement Is Part of It</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Ryan Devereaux - April 23,
2019</div>
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<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the government might not “endorse” the activities
of border militias, it’s <a
href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/">no
secret</a> 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.<br>
</p>
<h3>A History of Frontier Violence</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="right">The history of the West is full of
stories of white Americans taking the law into their own
hands to beat back nonwhite populations.</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33353.pdf">report</a>
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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://refusingtoforget.org/the-history/">Refusing
to Forget</a> 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.”</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="right">A “culture of impunity” allowed
extralegal violence to flourish in South Texas.</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/when-the-frontier-becomes-the-wall">wrote</a>
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.”</p>
<p>Despite all of this, no amount of state violence and
border policing has ever been sufficient to satisfy all
Americans, especially the racist ones.<br>
</p>
<h3>A Tradition of Impunity</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="right">“When our government officials refuse
to enforce the laws of the country, we will enforce them
ourselves.”</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="left">“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.”</blockquote>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-20-mn-7448-story.html">told</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Rancher-convicted-in-immigrant-s-death-2048006.php">convicted</a>
of a misdemeanor and ordered to pay a $4,000 fine.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.<br>
</p>
<h3>Dangerous Kooks</h3>
<p>Over the weekend, New Mexico Attorney General Hector
Balderas <a
href="https://twitter.com/NewMexicoOAG/status/1119672701445005312">announced</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Hopkins’s lawyer, Kelly O’Connell, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/militia-border-new-mexico.html">disputed</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="right">“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.”</blockquote>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-reactid="215">
<p>When footage of the UCP’s operations went viral last
week, <a
href="https://twitter.com/TheTinaVasquez/status/1119242685095849986">reporters</a>
and <a
href="https://twitter.com/eeerox/status/1119258824911622144">immigrant
rights advocates</a> 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/09/16/border-patrol-no-more-deaths-prosecution-arizona-immigrants/">aggressively
prosecuted</a> 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/01/17/no-more-deaths-border-documents-trial/">January</a>,
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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/us-mexico-border-journalists-harassment/">revealed</a>
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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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