MILITIAS, PATRIOTS, AND BORDER VIGILANTES IN THE AGE OF TRUMP.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

ON APRIL 16, 2019, an armed band of vigilantes calling themselves the United Constitutional Patriots "detained" at least 200 men, women, and children in New Mexico, then called in the Border Patrol to collect the captives. I put detained in quotation marks because most of the kneeling migrants being held at gunpoint were probably planning to present themselves to the authorities at the first opportunity anyway. They were here to seek asylum, after all. But in footage posted online, the gunslingers speak like they've seized an invading army. "We just got a note that a couple of kids are picking up rocks," a woman holding a camera declares as the feds lead some migrants away. "So be careful."

If you remember the days when George W. Bush was president, that story may have given you a gust of deja vu. Several civilian border patrols cropped up back then too, most famously the Minute-men. These weren't the first paramilitary groups to go hunting for unauthorized border crossers--that had been happening for decades--but the Bush years were a boom time for the practice.

That, in turn, was part of a larger pattern. When Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office, the social space that would later be filled by the immigrant-fearing Minute-man movement was filled instead by the government-fearing militia movement. When Barack Obama became president, the Minutemen fell into factionalism and '90s-style militias began to grow again. Donald Trump's reign has seen a new surge of border patrols by nativist vigilantes. What do these shifts mean?

THE EASY REPLY is that this is just a matter of which party occupies the White House: Camo-clad right-wing populists are more likely to be afraid of a Democratic president than a Republican one, so they turn their guns outward rather than upward when the GOP is in power.

There is truth to that, but it doesn't explain everything. The Minutemen weren't exactly fans of George W. Bush. (Some of them disliked his immigration policies so much that they called for his impeachment.) And while the border paramilitaries have been re-emerging during the Trump years, the conventional militias--and the broader "patriot" movement of which they're a part--haven't dropped out of view. So what else has been going on?

For one thing, there's 9/11. The Bush-era border groups emerged for many reasons, but it's no coincidence that they took off after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Sometimes you can draw that line directly.

Consider Chris...