Thread: 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

• May 8, 2019

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

SHUT THE WHOLE BORDER DOWN NOW TRUMP!!!

"Put Them All In A Gas Chamber," A Militia Member Allegedly Said While Stopping Migrants At The Border

"Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them?" the militia member allegedly said.
Salvador Hernandez BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on May 7, 2019, at 6:43 p.m. ET

[IMG]https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-05/7/15/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-03/sub-buzz-2068-1557259092-1.jpg?downsize=700%3A%2A&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto&downsize=360:*[/IMG]

Paul Ratje / AFP / Getty Images Members of the Constitutional Patriots New Mexico Border Ops Team militia, Viper and Stinger.

Not satisfied with just detaining hundreds of immigrants at the border, a member of a heavily armed militia cited Adolf Hitler and suggested "lining them up and shooting them," according to a police report of the incident and a member of the group.
The jarring comment was made while members of the militia group known as the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP) observed several migrants crossing the US–Mexico border in New Mexico, prompting the man, who was already armed with a handgun, to run to his car and grab an AR-15 rifle.

"Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them?" Armando Delgado Gonzalez, 52, allegedly told a militia member known as "Viper." "We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber."

The following day, "Viper" — identified by police in the report as Steven Brant — reached out to Sunland Police to report the incident. Members of the UCP, he told police, asked Gonzalez to leave the group immediately.

The exchange was first reported by the Young Turks, which obtained the police report of the incident. The incident was verified to BuzzFeed News by a member of the group, who said the comments raised alarms within the militia and prompted them to contact police.
In a phone interview with BuzzFeed News, Gonzalez denied making the comments and said he left the New Mexico camp two days after the alleged incident.

"I never said that," he said. "That conversation never took place."

Gonzalez said he left feeling "frustrated" and "betrayed" by what he described as limits placed on the group and Border Patrol agents to stop immigrants from entering the US.

"I fought a war to fight for our rights, and this is what they do with it?" Gonzalez said. "If I was to haul an illegal in my vehicle I would get all sorts of charges dropped on me. Border Patrol ain't allowed to touch them. They're just letting them through."

Another member of the group, Jim Benvie, told BuzzFeed News the group decided to contact police because Gonzalez's comments "were a red flag."

"So we immediately asked him to leave," Benvie said. "None of us knew him. He just showed up at the border. When he started talking crazy, we made a decision that he had to go."

Gonzalez said he was aware that police were looking into the incident after being contacted by a law enforcement official, but he hasn't returned their calls and texts.

Known as the United Constitutional Patriots, the group is not the only paramilitary group to descend on the US–Mexico border to detain undocumented immigrants. Prompted by news reports of migrant caravans headed to the border and the Trump administration's push to send military personnel to the border, dozens of unregulated militias have called on members to help in the effort.

Militia groups, who often refer to themselves as part of the “Patriot” movement, have drawn a variety of supporters into their ranks over the years, including anti-government extremists, gun rights advocates, conspiracy supporters, and anti-immigration advocates.

Groups monitoring extremist organizations saw a resurgence in militia membership in 2008 after the election of Barack Obama as president, with many groups expressing anti-government views and goals. Some of those groups have remained active and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, many have refocused their attention on “perceived adversaries” such as Muslims and immigrants.
According to documents obtained by Newsweek, the Defense Department estimated there were about 200 armed militia groups operating at the border at the end of 2018.

[IMG]https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-05/7/15/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-05/sub-buzz-18391-1557259153-1.jpg?downsize=700%3A%2A&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto&downsize=360:*[/IMG]

Paul Ratje / AFP / Getty Images Larry Hopkins, the leader of the Constitutional Patriots New Mexico Border Ops Team militia, speaks with "Viper."

After months in New Mexico, however, United Constitutional Patriots caught national attention after video of their operations posted online suggested they were detaining hundreds of people crossing the border at gunpoint without authority.

Pictures and videos of the incidents showed members of the group in full camouflage gear and carrying rifles and handguns.

Reports of the incident raised concerns about the militia and prompted the New Mexico attorney general to rebuke the armed group.
Shortly afterward, the group issued an order to all members that they would no longer be carrying long guns during their operations at the border, only handguns, a "political" decision Benvie said was made to ease concerns of local officials.

Yet the group has continued to raise alarms. Its leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins — who went by the name Johnny Horton Jr. and was referred to as "commander" by members of the group — was recently arrested by the FBI for being a felon in possession of a gun.
According to court documents, Hopkins had come to the attention of federal officials in 2017 when they received information that the New Mexico resident had allegedly been training his group to assassinate President Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and billionaire George Soros.

Last month, the United Constitutional Patriots were evicted from their campsite near the southern border that they had been using sporadically for months to detain migrants.

Now, Benvie said those who were at the border with the group are trying to distance themselves from UCP and forming their own organization. The new group has set up camp on a new site that he declined to identify for security reasons, he said.
Though he defended militia groups and their actions at the border, he said the new group would not be a militia, but a group of volunteers named the Guardian Patriots.

"Our mission is going to be really simple," Benvie said. "It's going to be citizen journalism. It's going to be assistance."

State officials however have publicly condemned the groups operating at the border.

"These individuals should not attempt to exercise authority reserved for law enforcement," New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said in a statement last month.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also expressed concern, and called on New Mexico's governor and attorney general to investigate the militia.

"Their actions undermine the legitimate efforts of our state’s law enforcement officials to keep New Mexico families safe and they erode community trust," attorneys for the civil rights organization said in a letter. "We cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum."

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...s-chamber-hate

Guardian Patriots- Watch Out For This FAKE NEWS!