The Real Threat Uncovered by Armed Civilians at the Border
Here's the New York Times Magazine calling anyone who is actually reporting on what is happening at border a "lunatic".
They are trying desperately to shut down the voice of anyone trying to get the actual images of what is happening out to the public.
The Real Threat Uncovered by Armed Civilians at the Border
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CreditCreditScreen grab from Facebook
By Nausicaa Renner
At times the whole screen is black, except for the darting white disc created by a flashlight. Through that peephole filter adults and children, in slacks and lightweight jackets, with few bags to be seen. They are migrants, possibly from Central America. “See the way they hold their kids?” asks the woman streaming this video on Facebook Live. “I don’t think those are their kids, honestly. They’ve got grips on their wrists, it’s crazy.” The people are sandwiched between Border Patrol trucks, illuminated by flashing lights. “There’s gotta be more like 400 here,” she says.
In fact, it was about 200 people, seeking asylum. They were detained on April 16 for trying to cross the border near Sunland Park, N.M. The woman filming, who identifies herself as Debbie Collins Farnsworth, was there alongside the United Constitutional Patriots, a collection of armed Americans who took it upon themselves to hold the migrants until Border Patrol officers arrived.
The group had an encampment on land owned by the Union Pacific Railroad and had been working, reportedly, alongside the Border Patrol. (Some members also wore badges resembling law enforcement badges. If immigrants “can’t tell the difference,” the group’s “commander” told Buzzfeed, “that’s their problem.”) The Border Patrol denies it tacitly supports the group, but in the video, one of its agents appears to exchange friendly conversation with Farnsworth about how the migrants are all coughing. “Really sick,” a voice says. In the 41-minute video, Farnsworth comments on the migrants’ health several times, as though they constitute an infectious mass. In the background, at one point, you can hear a man broadcasting a separate livestream: “How do you define an invasion?” he asks. “How many people have to come through the border?”
The video streaming from Sunland Park on April 16 didn’t just draw attention to the arrival of migrants; it also drew attention to the presence of armed civilian militias at the border, trying to detain those migrants. The ACLU in New Mexico wrote a letter to the governor and the state attorney general describing the group’s actions as kidnapping. The United Constitutional Patriots’ GoFundMe page was shut down, and the group was notified that it would be evicted from its camp. One member, Larry Mitchell Hopkins, was arrested by the F.B.I. on an outstanding weapons charge, while another, identified only as Viper, got emotional for The El Paso Times: “ ‘I gave everything to my country and this is how they repay me,’ he said as his eyes welled with tears.” It’s very likely none of this would have happened if not for the livestreams. “We have not had any complaints whatsoever,” the police chief in Sunland Park said of the militia — until the videos circulated.
The goal of these videos, obviously, is to maximize a sense of threat — to broadcast to the nation that, in Farnsworth’s words, “Yes, it is real; yes, it is happening; yes, it is in our backyard.” She presents herself as an intrepid reporter working under cover of night, revealing a hard truth that the rest of the country denies or refuses to reckon with. In this sense, she’s working in a classic genre, one that spans from conspiracy theorists breathlessly dissecting evidence to documentarians playing ominous music over hidden-camera footage to the continuous coverage, in conservative media, of a migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico last fall. The tone is something like the moment in a thriller when evidence of a plot is uncovered; the videos manufacture an emotional reaction and then call that reaction the revelation of a shocking truth.
Farnsworth’s overblown language — the references to invasion, the invocation of disease, the mood of threat — prods Americans toward identifying a problem and embracing a solution. “Sorry if I’m a little shaky, guys,” she says, referring to her camera work. “This one got me kinda riled up.” At more than one point, though, her video seems specially addressed to an audience of one: “Share this to the president, share it to the White House, share it to anybody that you can.”
As the video comes to a close, she stands on a ridge, looking down on a file of migrants and monitoring them with her flashlight and camera. The expectation, obviously, is that Americans will join her in this perspective, surveying the scene and seeing a vexing problem — if not a moral one, then at least a logistical one. Her video shows you hundreds of people, somewhere in the desert, and pushes you to ask: What do we do about this? For the militias, the first answer is to round up the migrants and force them to sit on the ground until actual authorities arrive. It’s almost as though the desert is a theater in the round and the migrants a crowd of silent theatergoers. The performance itself is dissonant; the militia members have to convey to viewers that they feel threatened and invaded, while at the same time showing their dominance. They have to telegraph that finding hundreds of displaced people in the darkness is no surprise to them, while at the same time marveling at its shocking importance. They have to convince the viewer that what’s happening is both quotidian and terrifying.
The risk of trying to create alarming videos isn’t just that the viewer might not share your alarm but also that you might call attention to the wrong things. At one point Farnsworth trains her camera on a woman in hot-pink pants, possibly pregnant, walking slightly apart from the others. She worries that the woman might try to escape and that she may not be pregnant but instead be carrying something in her hoodie. The more frightening woman, for many, will be Farnsworth; the urgent problem that announces itself will not be that migrants are crossing the border but that clutches of American extremists are confronting them with guns in hand. Instead of recoiling over the scale of migration, you might recoil instead from the types of control, intimidation and violence dedicated to preventing it and the conditions apparently condoned by authorities to facilitate that control — just as the family-separation policy that had these people clutching children’s wrists made many Americans wonder about not the porousness of the border but what level of cruelty was an acceptable means of dissuading people from crossing it.
The fear and discomfort visible in these migrants — a fear to which they’re clearly accustomed — helps reveal how inauthentic the performance of fear in the militias is. Farnsworth’s alarm doesn’t feel believable, and that disbelief can be clarifying. No matter how astounded they purport to be about what they’ve discovered, it’s the people holding the guns who present the immediate danger. It feels wrong to say the migrants in this video pose a threat — even a hypothetical one. Barely any of them look into the camera. Most are completely silent, as lunatics circle them, pointing flashlights into their eyes and screaming into cellphones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/m...he-border.html
