Thread by @DavidNeiwert

1) Border militias are back in the news, thanks to the most recent incident in which they have detained border crossers.

dailykos.com/stories/2019/4…

2) Where did these border militias come from? What are they really about? And why do they have such a history of criminality and death attached to them?

Long thread follows.

3) The idea of a “citizens border watch” grew out of the longtime embrace by the radical right of vigilante violence, a la the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the very first such operation was organized in 1977-79 by David Duke and Tom Metger.

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

4) Be sure to read @kathleen_belew's superb thread on these early roots of the phenomenon.

https://twitter.com/kathleen_belew/status/1119241942183837696

5) The concept gained new life in the 1990s with the rise of the small-cell militia concept as part of a larger “leaderless resistance” against the federal government.

politicalresearch.org/2008/09/10/lea…

6) The main progenitor of the concept was a California man named Glenn Spencer, who ran an outfit called American Patrol that claimed Latinos wanted to reclaim the U.S. Southwest for Mexico as part of “Reconquista.”

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

7) Spencer moved his operations to Arizona in the early 2000s and renamed it American Border Patrol. That was when things started to take off for him and his border-militia concept.

8) Taking Spencer’s cue, Casey Nethercott, another Arizona resident, started a border-watch operation called Ranch Rescue. They developed legal problems in short order.

9) Nethercott, who had done prison time in California for assault in the 1990s, and some of his fellow Ranch Rescue members in 2003 assaulted two Salvadoran migrants who had crossed the border on foot and wound up on a ranch where the nativist border watchers operated.

10) The migrants were held at gunpoint, and one of them was pistol-whipped and attacked by a Rottweiler. With the assistance of the SPLC, the migrants sued their attackers and won a million-dollar civil judgment against Ranch Rescue.

splcenter.org/news/2005/08/1…

11) Nethercott eventually had a tense standoff with Border Patrol agents at another ranch property; when FBI agents tried to arrest him for his role in that incident two weeks later, they shot the white supremacist who was accompanying him at the time.

kold.com/story/2312063/…

12) Indeed, while the phrase “rule of law” even today is often bandied about by the remaining bands of vigilante nativists, the record demonstrates that this was a peculiarly flexible concept for many of the border watchers and their associates.

13) Another Spencer devotee was a Tombstone man named Chris Simcox, who in 2003 started up a Tombstone Militia devoted to patrolling the border. He shortly changed the name to Minuteman Civil Defense.

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

14) Simcox was a fairly mediagenic young man who quickly attracted a lot of press. Documentarians started showing up at the border, capturing the attitudes of Simcox and his volunteers.

15) What was also clear was both Simcox’s overweening paranoia, as well as the potential for real violence that ran as an undercurrent in everything he did.

16) In 2004, a California nativist named Jim Gilchrist heard Simcox being interviewed on a right-wing radio program and got the idea to make the border watch a national callout that would last for a month on the border. He contacted Simcox and the Minuteman project was started.

17) It all came together in a big media event in April 2005 that really only lasted about a week, but drew tons of national TV coverage, in the border area south of Tombstone.
splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

18) Simcox and Gilchrist, it turned out, hated each others’ guts, and barely were able to maintain a façade for the first couple of weeks. Near the end of it, the Minutemen founders announced they were splitting off into two separate organizations.

19) Simcox was going to keep MCDC going, but with an emphasis on other border-security measures, such as building a fence. This meant a national fundraising effort, which Simcox shortly began.

20) However, the SPLC’s Dave Holthouse and Susy Buchanan did an investigative piece on Simcox in January 2006 that raised all kinds of questions about what kind of person the Minuteman leader really was, including his behavior suggesting pedophilia.

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

21) The fence-fundraising effort continued for a couple of years and was successful in separating rubes from their dollars (about $6 million worth). No fence was ever built. I did an investigation of it in 2008 and found it was almost entirely a scam.

typeinvestigations.org/investigation/…

22) Gilchrist’s half of the split of the organization in 2005 was to keep the Minuteman Project name. His primary objective was to continue to organize border watches in other states and locales.

23) One of the questions reporters posed to Simcox during the April 2005 mediafest was why, if they’re concerned about border security, they only focused on the Mexico border and not the one in Canada. He promised that they would set up northern border watches too.

24) So in summer of 2006, a Washington state “detachment” of the MCDC began organizing border watches in Blaine, WA, that attracted a handful of participants to a site near the border.

25) It was not exactly a serious operation. This is what the Canada border looks like there. It’s the green ditch between the two roads.

26) The only border crossers they ever caught were people sneaking into Canada from the U.S. Mostly there was a lot of posing for the press, just like in Arizona.

27) The border watches were extremely unpopular in the Blaine/Bellingham area, and the Bellingham city council held a hearing on their activities. Simcox flew up to participate, and he told the councilors that the Minutemen were like Martin Luther King Jr.

28) A hairdresser from Everett named Shawna Forde was one of the people drawn to these events. In short order, she more or less appointed herself the press secretary for the Washington MCDC. She escorted Simcox around town.

29) When a the state's PBS network held a “town hall” session on immigration in Yakima, Forde was the person who represented the Minuteman perspective. She was also listed as a FAIR representative, which the organization later denied.

30) About the same time, Shawna (who secretly had a rap sheet as long as your leg) was caught rummaging through the private effects (pharmaceuticals) of the border watch operation host at his home, and was fired in early 2007.


heraldnet.com/news/trouble-f…

31) Barely skipping a beat, she announced she was forming her own border-watch organization, and called it Minuteman American Defense (MAD). She invited Jim Gilchrist to Everett for an anti-immigration rally and organized her own Arizona border watches the summer of 2007.

29) After she hosted Gilchrist again in early 2008 for an Ellensburg appearance, he became enamored of her work and named Forde the Project’s “border patrol coordinator.” MAD’s website became a sub-page of the Project’s main site. More border watches in Arizona ensued.

30) They met up again that summer at Glenn Spencer’s Arizona ranch, where they surveyed Spencer’s collection of model planes he uses for patrolling the desert.

31) That December, desperate for money, Forde sent her then-boyfriend to the home of her husband, John Forde, who was in the process of divorcing her. He shot Forde five times. Forde, however, managed to survive, though he was in a coma for three months.

heraldnet.com/news/4-years-l…

32) Shawna in the meantime moved back into her old home, and then claimed that she was raped in the home by Mexican cartel members who wanted to silence her. Two weeks later, she was shot in the fleshy part of her arm and claimed it was the cartels again.

heraldnet.com/news/leader-of…

33) Then she quietly vanished to Arizona and began organizing border watches in the Altar Valley again. This is when she met Albert Gaxiola, a cartel operative in Arivaca, and began working on her scheme to create a border-militia training compound.

seattleweekly.com/news/cover-sto…

34) Her plan, according to her brother, was to rob drug smugglers on the border at their safe houses and use the proceeds to purchase a ranch in the borderlands she could convert into her envisioned training compound.


tucson.com/news/local/bor…

35) That May, a notice appeared on the MAD and Minuteman Project website announcing that Forde had hired an experienced combat veteran known only as “Gunny” to be her “operations director.”

36) It later turned out that “Gunny” was a Wenatchee white supremacist named Jason Bush who had done multiple stints in prison but had never served in the military. He had, however, been closely linked to a couple of murders in Washington state already.

heraldnet.com/news/community…

37) The morning of May 30, Forde, Bush, and Gaxiola went to the home of a small-time marijuana smuggler named Raul Flores Jr. pretending to be Border Patrol. After being let in, they shot the 3 people inside, including a 9-year-old girl named Brisenia.

typeinvestigations.org/investigation/…

38) Flores’ wife, Gina Gonzalez, survived and eventually drove the invaders out of her home with gunfire. An unbelievably horrifying 911 recording captured it all.

crooksandliars.com/cltv/2009/06/v…

39) Forde, Gaxiola and Bush were all captured in less than two weeks. All three went on trial in 2011, and all three were convicted. Forde and Bush are on Death Row, while Gaxiola is essentially serving life with no chance of parole.

40) Brisenia Flores and her father were buried in Sahuarita, south of Tucson, where Gina Gonzalez grew up.

41) National leaders of the Minuteman movement — particularly Simcox and Gilchrist — hastily tried to put distance between themselves and Forde and her group. To this day, Gilchrist tries to claim that he had little to do with her.

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014…

42) But while Forde’s conviction severely damaged the border-watch movement — as one ex-MCDC leader put it, “A lot of people felt, well, you’re a Minuteman, you’re a killer” — that was not the end of it.

43) In April 2012, one of Forde’s associates in the desert, a Tucson man named Todd Hezlitt, was charged for an affair he had with a 15-year-old girl from a local high school where he was a coach. Two months later, he fled with the girl to Mexico.

tucson.com/news/local/cri…

44) A few weeks after that, the girl turned herself in to the American consulate in Mazatlan. Hezlitt was caught a short time later and extradited. He eventually wound pleading guilty to the sexual conduct charges and was sentenced to six years in prison.

tucson.com/news/local/cri…

45) Another violent incident from a border watcher, Arizona in May 2012: Jason “J.T.” Ready — a longtime leader of the state’s neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, and organizer of independent NSM border watches — went on a shooting rampage at the home of his girlfriend.

46) Before committing suicide, Ready shot and killed his girlfriend, Lisa Lynn Mederos, 47; her daughter Amber, the daughter’s boyfriend, and Amber’s 15-month-old baby girl.

splcenter.org/blog/2012/08/2…

47) The final capstone on the saga of the Minutemen was Chris Simcox’s conviction in 2016 on two counts of child molestation, for which he was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison.


splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016…

48) Despite this history of criminality associated with border militias, they haven’t entirely gone away. Barely a year after the Forde trials, a veteran of dubious background named Tim Foley began operating a border watch in the Altar Valley.

49) In Texas in the summer of 2014, a panic whipped up by right-wing media about Central American refugees inspired a group of “Patriots” to head to the Rio Grande and set up a militia operation called “Camp Lonestar.”

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014…

50) Like the recent New Mexico militia incident, these militiamen also filmed themselves detaining and harassing border crossers. It created a fraught situation with neighbors who disapproved of the heavily armed vigilantes.

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014…

51) Eventually, the operation folded shop. Like most far-right outfits, its end came amid arrests, internecine bickering, and accusations of fiduciary misdealings.

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015…

52) Now a fresh wave of militiamen are heading to a variety of locales along the border, inspired by Donald Trump’s “caravan” fearmongering.

washingtonpost.com/world/national…

53) As usual, they are not actually helping improve security on the border. If anything, they pose new challenges for authorities down there, including their propensity for stealing shit.

militarytimes.com/news/your-mili…

55) And as always, they are a bag chock full o’nuts, a volatile mix waiting to combust into violence. The New Mexico militia that’s been detaining hundreds is a classic case.


thedailybeast.com/qanon-loving-b…

56) The border militias are not just a weird local phenomenon. They have created a national legacy, one in which they have altered the shape of public discourse and heightened fear and hatred of immigrants.

57) The most obvious of these, of course, is The Wall: thanks to their fence project, the notion that erecting a simple barrier to solve the complex problem of immigration has become embedded right-wing conventional wisdom, touted most loudly by Donald Trump.

58) The Minutemen also gave us the legacy of linking the border and immigration to national security. It’s actually utter rubbish, but it’s become another right-wing cornerstone that “we must secure the border before passing immigration reform.”

americasvoice.org/blog/david-nei…

59) Meanwhile, in Arivaca, the memory of young Brisenia Flores lives on. The militias there are facing hell from the locals, who understand the deeper nature of the creature they’re dealing with.

60)“We have a strict no-militia policy at the bar because of the history of militia violence in this town.”

The rest of the nation would do well to follow Arivaca’s lead.

motherjones.com/politics/2019/…

@threadreaderapp unroll please

P.S. This is of course a Cliffs Notes version. For the full details -- which are every bit as strange and twisted -- read my book, which won the International Latino Book Award for Nonfiction in 2014.

amazon.com/Hell-Followed-…