Border vigilantes, and the wall they might be watching
Arivaca, Arizona
Border vigilantes, and the wall they might be watching
Rafael Carranza | azcentral.com | USA TODAY NETWORK
It boils down to a question of control.
Who’s in control of the border? More importantly, who’s in control of the vast rural areas of the United States, like this one, just inside the border?
For vigilantes who patrol this thorny countryside as part of a group that calls itself Arizona Border Recon, the answer is: Either we do, or the cartels do.
“Basically the cartel controls at least the first five miles of the U.S. territory,” Oregon resident Mike LaMarte says. “The Border Patrol does the best they can out here, but they’re in and out. And the cartels know the routine and they just operate around them.”
That’s why this team is here. For a week in June, as daytime temperatures hovered above 100 degrees, LaMarte and about a dozen men have paid their own way to camp, train and patrol as volunteers with Arizona Border Recon.
To be certain, the Border Patrol does not affirm the vigilantes’ opinion that federal authorities have no control over the territory.
Still, Border Recon has for the past seven years maintained a presence on this part of the border, conducting weeklong “operations” every other month under the guidance of founder Tim Foley.
Videos on the group’s YouTube channel show “the reality of our unsecured border”: Group after group of men, usually dressed in camouflage, carry large bundles — presumably marijuana — as they walk north.
On this day, as the Arizona Border Recon crew continues its patrol, the men see more evidence of smuggling activity: plastic water jugs, discarded clothes and orange rope. That’s what smugglers use to tie the marijuana bundles together, the group leader explains.
But after three hours, they see no signs of smugglers themselves.
These high peaks and deep, wooded washes will present a big challenge to any engineer tasked with building President Donald Trump’s border wall.
The wall, the president has repeatedly promised, will stem the flow of illegal drugs and immigrants.
Arizona Border Recon volunteers are not so sure.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Foley says. “If they do build a wall, it’ll help, but it’s not going to stop it because you need somebody watching that wall,” he adds. “If they had a wall right here right now, would that stop anybody? There’s nobody here except for us.”
Arizona Border Recon is often described as a vigilante group, one of many armed civilian organizations that decide to take matters of illegal immigration and the illicit drug trade into their own hands.
Foley says he doesn’t care what others label them. He cares about the work they do.
“When people call us vigilantes, well, take the word and break it in half,” he says. “We’ve got a ‘vigil’ that we’re doing here in the border. And then you have ‘ante.’ ... Ante it up, do your part. So we’re doing our part of this vigil on the border.”
Over the past seven years, the group has become one of the best-known, and most media-savvy, armed civilian groups.
Perhaps the best recruiting tool was the award-winning 2015 Netflix documentary “Cartel Land,” which features Foley and other volunteers.
The film is what first motivated Lorenzo Murillo, an emergency medical technician in Southern California, to spend his vacation time patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border. June marked his fourth or fifth time volunteering with the group.
“How many times will I come here? As many as I can,” he says. “I really enjoy being here. I really feel like I’m doing something productive. And I strongly believe in the cause.”
Like the other 200 volunteers the group claims, Murillo was vetted. The process included an online application, phone interview, background check, and notarized waiver clearing the group of liability for any wrongdoing by the volunteer.
Foley claims a majority of the volunteers have military or law-enforcement experience, and that they see this as an extension of the oath they took to protect the country. Murillo was the only volunteer in June without such a background, but he says he shares the same sense of purpose and enjoys the camaraderie.
“It’s a bunch of people that are willing to get off their couch, spend their money, get training, practice all the skills that we learn here, and basically it’s like a job. It’s a volunteer job,” he says. “It’s not because they’re here for a paycheck, they’re here because they want to be here.”
The group has been criticized by humanitarian groups, which see their work as hostile to immigrants, and members of law enforcement, who are wary of civilians taking matters into their own hands.
Foley sees the criticism as evidence they’re making an impact.
Arizona Border Recon is a remnant of a once-thriving movement. Arizona, then the busiest smuggling corridor along the Southwest border, was front and center.
As 1.1 million people poured across the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2005, the Minutemen, which became the most notorious of the vigilante groups, began patrolling the Arizona border. Other groups followed.
“Since its rise ... mistrust of the federal government is certainly a part of it, and they assert that the federal government is unable to enforce its laws,” Centre College assistant professor Willie Costley says of the modern vigilante movement in Arizona. Costley researched the subject as a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona.
Many of the groups made it a part of their mission “to do the job that the government should be doing and can’t do or won’t do,” he adds.
Costley says that over time the armed groups became increasingly violent, culminating in 2009, when members of a militia group that had splintered from the Minutemen broke into a home in Arivaca, Arizona, and killed 29-year-old Raul Flores Jr. and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia.
Three people were convicted of the murders, including the group’s founder, Shauna Forde.
By the late 2000s, the movement had started to die out and many of the groups had disbanded.
One of the Minutemen leaders, Chris Simcox, was convicted in 2016 of child sexual abuse and was sentenced to 19½ years in prison.
Another high-profile vigilante, J.T. Ready, who once led a group called U.S. Border Guard, killed his girlfriend and her family and then turned the gun on himself in Gilbert, Arizona, in 2012.
The sentiments that drove the movement, though, had moved into the mainstream, and into local and state politics, Costley says. He points to passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 in 2010.
Today, Arizona Border Recon might be the only vigilante group with a continuous presence on the Arizona-Mexico border.
It’s difficult to know for sure because there is no definitive way to track the groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a list of 276 active anti-government militia groups in the U.S. since 2015. Arizona Border Recon is not among them.
Costley says he sees the type of conditions now that are ripe for a resurgence in the movement. Vigilante groups have become more savvy in the way they present themselves, he says.
“A couple of years ago, I would have said that the movement was ... in a downturn and it was probably going to be that way for a while,” he says. “But with Trump in office, I think it has become politically and socially acceptable to be anti-immigrant in a way that it hasn’t been in a very long time in the U.S.”
The movement’s decline hasn’t ended the backlash.
Arizona Border Recon has faced significant resistance, and members believe that forced them to relocate in the past few months.
In March, the group announced on its Facebook page: “After calling Sasabe home for the past 5 years it saddens us to say we are not being granted a lease renewal for the place we have fixed from uninhabitable to an actual modern home.”
Foley says he was given no reason for termination of the lease. But he believes it’s because they were successful in deterring drug smuggling and angered the cartels on the Mexican side, which he accused of having deep ties in the unincorporated community on the American side, though he offered no proof.
Several months later, the group moved to Arivaca. There, too, Foley says, they face resistance from the local community.
“There’s a lot of harassment towards us, a lot of slander, a lot of defamation of character,” he says. “They’re putting out fliers and things that have nothing to do with us, or if they do, they’ve turned everything around. They have all their facts all messed up.”
Sometimes the resistance even comes from their own family members.
LaMarte came from Portland. He supported Trump for president and that caused friction with certain family members. Taking part in the patrols along the border opened an even greater rift with one of his sisters. He says she has cut ties with him over it.
“Part of that, in her mind, we’re fifth-generation Mexican immigrants. So my great-, great-grandfather came from Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1870s,” he explains. “And so what she told me was that by coming out here, I’m forgetting where I came from. And that I’m basically doing a disservice to our heritage, which I don’t agree with.”
LaMarte told her his loyalty lies solely with the U.S., and that as a veteran he took an oath to defend his country.
“I’m down here to defend my country from whoever is coming across that border,” he says.
Despite the hostility, Foley views his group’s work as essential.
“I can walk away and get a job tomorrow, but I’ll always be sitting there thinking, ‘What’s going through (the border) today? What didn’t I stop, what didn’t I do?’ ”
The U.S. Border Patrol keeps its distance from groups like Arizona Border Recon. But at the same time, agents routinely encounter or must work around their volunteers.
In the past, when the group has found smugglers or stranded migrants, Foley says it calls Border Patrol and holds them until agents arrive to take them into custody. But he adds that they don’t do it at gunpoint, and that they haven’t had any problems with that practice to date.
Foley adds that Arizona Border Recon has developed guidelines in place that all volunteers must follow to reduce the risk of violence, including going out on patrol in groups and limiting the type of weapons they can bring to operations. But in these remote areas of the border — often far from the eyes and ears of law enforcement — the actions of vigilante groups can go pretty much unchecked.
Officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Arizona did not respond to requests for an interview regarding Border Patrol’s protocols for dealing with vigilante groups. Instead they issued a statement.
“CBP does not endorse or support private groups or organizations taking border security matters into their own hands,” the statement reads.
The statement notes the federal agency has made “historic investments” in people and resources, strategically placed to combat human and drug smuggling along the border.
The agency disputed Arizona Border Recon’s assertion that cartels control U.S. territory within five miles of the border and pointed to factors that make arrests that close to the border more challenging.
“Apprehension points may be several miles from the actual border, depending upon the first point of tactical advantage for the agents,” the statement reads. “Even though detection has been made and monitored using technology, the apprehension may be made within several hours after the detection.”
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada is a vocal critic of Arizona Border Recon, saying such groups can do more harm than good to local law enforcement’s efforts ability to police their jurisdictions.
“We just don’t want them in the way,” he says.
After tracking footprints without finding smugglers, the five-man crew heads back to camp, a collection of tents in a wash a mile north of the border.
It’s their last full day before heading home.
LaMarte says he’s happy with what the group has accomplished during the week, temporarily stemming the flow of drugs though this part of the border.
But he knows it’s a short-term solution. So unlike some of the other volunteers, he’s completely behind Trump’s plan to build a physical barrier across the lands he’s been patrolling.
“What we’re doing now, what we’ve done in the past is not working,” he says. “And President Trump had some different ideas. So at this point, we know what doesn’t work, so let’s try something else, and see if that does work. And I support that.”
As the rest of group settles into lawn chairs to rest from the three-hour trek, LaMarte heads back to his tent.
He removes his camo gear and lathers up with a wet towel, changing into civilian clothes, a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. He packs his belongings: his weapons and combat gear, camping equipment, his clothes.
After he finishes, he heads back to the group, which is chatting in the shade of a large tent, to say his goodbyes.
The next operation is two months away, but his wedding and honeymoon will prevent him from being there.
The group offers its congratulations.
But LaMarte promises he’ll be back.
“The reason I keep coming back here … the mission is important to me,” he says.
https://www.usatoday.com/border-wall...der/559753001/
