Downplaying the dangers militias pose carries significant risk — risk that will be borne by vulnerable migrants in remote places in the desert.  By Ryan Devereaux The Intercept (4/23/19) LAST WEEK, American vigilantes captured hundreds of migrants — including women and small children — along a darkened stretch of the border in New Mexico. The group, calling itself the United Constitutional Patriots, or UCP, uploaded video of its score to Facebook. Illuminated by the fluorescent glow of flashlights, the shaky footage showed weary mothers, fathers, and toddlers kneeling in the dirt, heads bowed, as the armed men circled around them. The migrants’ captors summoned…

The United Constitutional Patriots are just one in a long line of anti-immigrant groups who try to terrorize the border areas. By Raul A. Reyes NBC News (4/22/19) It speaks volumes about today’s political climate that anti-immigrant domestic terrorists have begun calling themselves border militias, holding unarmed people at gunpoint and feeling so emboldened that they post videos of their activities on social media, including Facebook and YouTube. Luckily, the hubris of at least one group didn’t impress law enforcement: On Saturday, the New Mexico attorney general’s office announced that Larry Hopkins, the leader of the United Constitutional Patriots (which had been detaining migrants…

  Corporations profit from millions of people and their families subjected to unaffordable bail amounts. By Andrea Woods & Alex Rate ACLU (4/17/19) Around 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, April 23, 2017, Eugene Mitchell, Shayleen Meuchell, and their four-year-old daughter were in bed at their home in Lolo, Montana, when they heard a violent crash. “It sounded like a truck had driven straight into our house,” Mitchell later said. In a surreal flash, armed bounty hunters kicked in the front door, broke into the bedroom, pointed assault rifles and pistols at the family, and shouted at them not to move. The bounty…

  By Abby Zimet Common Dreams (4/13/19) Unimaginably, the lows keep going lower. In Texas, Laura Maradiaga-Alvarado, an 11-year-old girl who fled death threats in El Salvador with her terrified family, may now be deported alone thanks to an immigration court’s administrative error, an evil narcissist’s pointless government shutdown, and the prevailing cruelty of his inept regime. Laura, her 15-year-old sister Adamaris, and her mother Dora arrived at the U.S. southern border in October; gang members had begun kidnapping and killing their family members after one relative witnessed a murder and testified in court, and one member of MS-13 had threatened to…