The Trump administration’s aggressive push to step up the pace of deportations has created renewed scrutiny of the murky boundaries between law enforcement, private security firms and local militias, all of which have been deputized by the administration to help apprehend migrants at the border.
Jessica Pishko wrote about this recently for The New Yorker, and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Jessica, good morning.
JESSICA PISHKO: Hi, good to hear from you.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes, thank you for being here and thank you for your reporting on this. You start your piece by introducing us to somebody named Christie Hutcherson. Tell us about Christie.
PISHKO: So Christie Hutcherson is a woman from Texas. She has claimed to have a variety of experiences in Homeland Security. So one of the reasons I focused on her, I think, first of all, because many people think about this militia, Homeland Security space is largely male, and she's one of the few females in this category, but she also plays an interesting role in that she's both media and expert, right?
So she goes down to the border and films videos for her followers in which she uses a lot of very sophisticated equipment and then sort of claims to produce this material that reflects, I think what a lot of people on the right, but also in the center view as a kind of, you know, quote unquote “border crisis.”
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and this phenomenon of folks like Christie is reflective of a broader trend, right, where the idea of private security and militias has existed for a long time, but now there's this sort of influencer element to Border Patrol.
PISHKO: That's right. So the influencer element is certainly far and wide. If anyone goes on TikTok or Twitter, right, they will find thousands and thousands of videos from kind of amateur media groups who, you know, with the equipment that we all have on our cellphones can now go down to the U.S.-Mexico border and film, you know, some are like camps for by that nonprofit set up that give people like water and a place to shower that, you know, you can go and film like border patrol encounters with immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
So I think like the advent of all this easily available equipment also produces a lot of visuals that, you know, are also edited. So what happens is these influencers tend to edit the videos to make things look the most foreboding as they can.
DINGMAN: Right, right, because we should say, as I think I saw chyron on the news this morning, actual border crossings are extremely low right now, right, despite what some of these videos might make it seem like.
PISHKO: Yes, they're very low right now, and if anyone is looking online at these videos through the various streamers, what they will actually find is that all the videos right now on Twitter are old, so many of them were filmed, you know, in 2022, which was kind of the height of border crossings when Joe Biden was president. So what they do is take these videos and then recycle them to suggest that they are more recent.
DINGMAN: So, I also wanted to ask you about, you cite a sociologist in your piece named, I believe it's Harel Shapira, who did a study of militias and and groups like the ones that we're talking about to try to understand what fuels them, and talked about among other things, a quote, “sense of meaninglessness.” What was interesting to you about this work?
PISHKO: So one of the things that Professor Shapira did was he, you know, his book was more of a case study, so not necessarily data driven, but he went down to the border and spent time with these people. So just to be clear that this is the kind of work he was doing. But what he found was that when he talked to people, that their motivations for joining groups like the border militia were not necessarily all, I think, based in a sense of racism,
right, or a desire to like enact violence on people, but rather, these were folks looking for meaning, looking for a way to be patriotic in a sense, right?
This, and this sort of connects, I think, to a lot of images and things floating around about, you know, issues of men feeling alienated from society, kind of looking for a place to fit in. I was going to say we're, we aren't at war, we weren't at war. So, well, now that these sort of, you know, never ending wars have theoretically ended, there's a lot of people who I think are looking for both excitement, right, the kind of like thrill of being in a place that's perceived to be wild, the excitement of like videoing things that might be forbidden or that people, you know, maybe they're not supposed to see it.
And again, and like I said, just the sense that like they're doing something very good, even though he points out in his book, that these people he spent time with, they actually encountered very, very few actual immigrants. So even then, like, this has been a consistent trend is that they spent a lot of time looking and looking, but actually encountered very few people.
DINGMAN: But a difference it seems like now is that whereas groups like this have existed for a long time and perhaps have implicitly collaborated with federal agencies, now that connection is more explicit under the Trump administration, correct?
PISHKO: Yes. I mean, it's hard to say. So, you know, I want to be clear because there's also a lot of online rumors going around about some ICE agents may or may not be like jam sixers or they may or may not be militia members, right? So I want to be clear to say that like we don't have evidence at this time to suggest that Trump has actually deputized militias, like proud boys to go into immigration enforcement.
Well, one of the things that is true is that this is sort of an interlocking universe, right? Like, if you thought about the Venn diagram, like the kind of people who become ICE agents or border patrol, intersects with the kind of people who join militias, intersects with the kind of people who do this private security work.
And private security, of course, has a lower barrier to entry than joining the Department of Homeland Security. It's a lot less training, you know, the hoops to jump through, and so that tends to be a place where a lot of people who might not qualify to join law enforcement, right, will do private security, so it kind of becomes like what are those loopholes. I mean, it's not unlike, you know, it's not like Blackwater or like the kind of military contractors overseas, right? They absorb people who have separated from the military or are like not qualified to be in the military.
