In January, I encountered three masked, armed men while I was reporting on asylum seekers arriving at the border wall near Sasabe, Arizona. The men were filming and flying drones over an encampment where humanitarians had set up food, shelter, and water for asylum seekers, who often wait several hours, or even overnight in very rugged conditions, for Border Patrol agents to pick them up to be processed.
The men, who had covered their faces with neck gaiters, and had pistols strapped to their legs and tactical vests, looked intimidating to say the least. It turns out they were part of a right-wing private security outfit based in Arizona called Mayhem Solutions Group. Four days later they turned up at the camp again with Jaeson Jones, a former Texas DPS captain turned MAGA pundit, who is part of a nonprofit called Border 911, a group of former Trump cabinet members, Fox News pundits, and former law enforcement officers. Border 911 calls itself “a group of the most distinguished border security experts.”
Border 911 is part of the America Project, which was founded in 2021 by conspiracy theorists and election deniers Patrick Byrne, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, and his brother Patrick Flynn.
While at the camp, the masked men threatened to detain volunteers. Afterward, Jones claimed on the MAGA outlet Newsmax that aid volunteers were “aiding and abetting the cartels” and “smuggling aliens into the country.”
Groups like Border 911 are not just spreading lies about the border; they’re deploying a political strategy to propel Trump back into the White House. Border 911 members, who include former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott, former acting ICE commissioner Tom Homan, and former acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan, are holding events across the country, especially in swing states, to convince voters that the country is being invaded and that only Trump can save them.
These former officials may tout law and order, but Border 911’s activities are not entirely legal, according to a recent ABC News investigation. “Despite a federal prohibition on 501(c)(3) organizations favoring or opposing candidates for public office,” the outlet reported, “Border 911 appears to have used its clout as a tax-exempt charity to push for Trump’s reelection.”
And a recent Border 911 fundraiser in early April at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump, where seats sold for anywhere from $1,200 to a “presidential” for $100,000, raises further questions about whether the group is crossing that line. I spoke with Zachary Mueller, political director of the nonprofit America’s Voice, about Border 911 and the dangerous precedent it sets for our democracy and the safety of border communities.
I’m looking at ads that Border 911 did leading up to the April Mar-a-Lago fundraiser, and Jaeson Jones has Texas DPS helicopters behind him. He uses them a lot in his content creation, because he’s a former DPS employee, and he has that access. But can you use DPS helicopters and a public agency as a backdrop when you’re doing an ad for a political fundraiser?
That’s a good question. What really stuck out for me is Jones’s line that “the threat is already walking amongst us.”
Right, because they’re really promoting the whole invasion threat narrative, and then saying, by the way, “they’re already among us.”
There’s a long, dangerous history of actions and rhetoric around “rooting out the enemy within.” Obviously, they’re not interested in the nuances of immigration policy and how we’re going to manage migration, especially with global warming on the rise and folks fleeing for safety. This kind of “enemy within” threat is implying that these are not Americans and never will be. And we have to find them and root them out because they are a threat to our civilization. They’re a threat to, you know, the country itself. It’s definitely the rhetoric that Donald Trump is using too.
In Border 911, there are a lot of former DHS law enforcement, like Rodney Scott, who’s a former Border Patrol chief. He does media with the official Border Patrol flag and shield on the wall behind him, as if he were still in office and working for Border Patrol.
Especially concerning is how doing that creates the precedent for turning law enforcement and government agencies into partisan political apparatuses. They use law enforcement not as arbiters of the law but as “Trump’s people.” Since they are former police officers and administration officials, it adds to the level of concern about the line between the political actions of these folks and whether they will use the law to enforce a political agenda.
And basically they’re using scaremongering over the border to persuade voters to vote for Trump. There seems to be a very clear political, electoral aspect to Border 911 as these former Trump officials go from city to city.
Tom Homan has said repeatedly that he’s going to lead mass deportation efforts, the largest in history, if Trump is elected. As horrific as family separation was, his rhetoric is an indication of how much further they want to go. I think it’s hard for us to wrap our brains around what that actually means. Stephen Miller and Homan himself acknowledged that it is going to be a massive logistical effort, and a large-scale military mobilization, which ties in to their invasion rhetoric. The American people rejected family separation, and I believe they will be repulsed by the actual details of their plan for mass deportations.
There’s also a huge grift factor to all this, right? There’s a lot of merchandise being sold. There’s Bibles, there’s golden tennis shoes, there’s T-shirts. Everything is branded. For $30 you can buy a “The Border Is Our Theater of War” T-shirt from the Border 911 shop. Is this just a very American thing, where everything is commodified? Even xenophobia?
I don’t know if it’s just an American thing, but definitely on the American Right, there’s always been a consistent theme with, where does the grift start and end? And where do the politics start and end? Oftentimes, there’s a lot of overlap between the two. Donald Trump has consistently embodied this throughout. There’s the Trump hotels, the Bible he’s selling, the shirts. It’s a commodification that encourages violent, antidemocratic radicalism amongst their supporters.
For a nonprofit like Border 911 to engage in this way, that immigrants are an existential threat, and from a political angle to spread disinformation, to spread rhetoric that has spurred political violence, including, several domestic terrorist attacks, and they’re raising $50,000 per table to amplify that rhetoric. And the grift is helping advance these really radical ideas at the same time.
This antidemocratic, xenophobic stance on the border is presented as a lifestyle, right? Buy the merchandise, attend the rallies, and support our candidates.
Right. Once individuals start investing their hard-earned dollars into these radical ideas or going to the border or purchasing these shirts, that investment can then become more. Even if it’s a fraction of a percent of the people they’re speaking to, who take their rhetoric literally, that there is a military-style invasion at the border. Well, the logical conclusion of that is violence. We’ve already seen the kind of harassment and threats that Catholic Charities and other aid providers who assist folks who have been vetted and paroled into the country, are receiving. The rhetoric is saying that they should target those communities, target those individuals who are doing good work there for violence, and they’re raising a lot of money off of doing it.
What role do Texas and Governor Greg Abbott play in normalizing and legitimizing this dangerous rhetoric?
I think what we’re seeing in Texas is a case study for both the radicalization of the Republican Party and a projection of where they want to go with the policy. And what I mean by this is, back in 2019, after the El Paso massacre, Greg Abbott apologized for using invasion rhetoric, and was resistant to engaging in invasion conspiracy rhetoric and policy, up until recently, when folks like Tom Homan, very privately and publicly, pressured Abbott, to adopt the white nationalist invasion conspiracy, as the means to stage a fight with the federal government over immigration enforcement.
The radicalization of both Abbott’s ideas, and his rhetoric, is indicative of where we have seen the rest of the party go, but also, on the policy front, the challenge here isn’t just “show me your papers” legislation that would allow law enforcement officers throughout the state to ask for people’s papers to prove that they are citizens. This is extremely detrimental, but what they are also arguing is that the federal government should no longer have federal authority over immigration.
What Abbott is really articulating is an argument that each state should be able to engage in international diplomacy and immigration enforcement, independent of what the federal government is doing, which would create a real concern for the United part of the United States. The implications of that are far reaching and deep, especially when it’s charged with a racialized rhetoric that dehumanizes people, advances violence, and antidemocratic ideas.
Both from the rhetorical shift of where Abbott and Texas are at, in addition to the policy, is a combination that we can look to, to say, if Republicans are in power, this is the trajectory that they’re headed down. And I don’t see them slowing down.
We also see Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton being tagged on Twitter by Tom Homan, and he’s filing lawsuits on behalf of America First Legal, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a white nationalist and former Trump staffer.
Ken Paxton is another example of this “law and order” stance belied by the fact that Ken Paxton is fighting with his own party over his corruption charges. There’s this attitude that the laws apply to others and not for themselves. It’s clearly the opposite of a law-and-order regime. It’s also indicative of the lack of accountability, the ability for corrupt leaders to continue to hold positions of power, that I think is telling about what we will see moving forward if they’re given more power.
I mean, this is what we see around the world with authoritarian regimes, right? Where leaders dictate what laws apply to them and don’t apply to them. And there’s this cult of personality around the authoritarian leader.
It is really important in this moment to recognize how Tom Homan, Donald Trump, and others in his orbit are promoting a cruelty-and-chaos agenda that is extremely nativist and xenophobic. The political rhetoric also has another function. They are using immigrants as the vehicle to socialize why we should not have a democracy. That this quote-unquote “invasion” is intentional and planned by Biden, DHS Secretary Mayorkas, and Democrats to allow immigrants to “pollute” the ballot box.
That’s the real point of this. It’s not just about hate towards immigrants or anti-immigrant policies. It’s also in service of these antidemocratic ideals, that we shouldn’t trust our democratic process. And when that’s the case, right, as we’ve seen around the world, it ushers in dictators where corruption is allowed to flourish, and there’s more violence and dictatorial policies, because there’s no participation from the public in the decision-making process. It poses a larger question for us as a country. Do we want to continue to be a nation that is embodied by the Statue of Liberty, that is welcoming of immigrants as part of who we are as a nation? And one that stands up for democratic ideals? Or are we adopting this different vision that is dark and dangerous? I think we need to look at what groups like Border 911 are doing very closely, and understand them for the threat that they really are to our democracy.
Read more: Read More