'We’re all in': Armed vigilantes say Trump team enlisting them for border enforcement

21 November 2024

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is reportedly having conversations with far-right militia groups in border states as it plans sweeping immigration raids and mass deportations.

According to a new report in Wired magazine, members of armed paramilitary groups are currently in contact with the incoming administration about assisting border agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a volunteer basis. Tim Foley, who leads the group Arizona Border Recon, told Wired he expected to be called upon by the administration once Trump has been inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.

"We’re in talks with a few different people,” Foley said. “We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”

Foley said his group has several dozen volunteers who routinely hike the rugged terrain around the Southern border, sometimes for as long as a week at a time. He wouldn't say exactly who his group has been in touch with, but that he was confident that his group would play a role in border enforcement, saying: “Everyone’s going to be tied up rounding people up and getting them out of here" and that there would be "a need for live, real-time intel.”

“This is my 14th year doing this,” Foley told Wired. “I’ve hiked over 2,000 miles of [migrant] trails. Most of my guys are certified trackers; we know how to read the ground, age tracks, and know if something’s old or new. We know how many people are traveling together and if they are carrying heavy packs on their backs.”

Trump has so far remained tight-lipped about how he would carry out his mass deportations, though he has said he would seek to use emergency powers to deploy the military as his own deportation force – something that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has already condemned. His new border czar, Tom Homan – who served as Trump's ICE chief during his first administration — has previously said that he would run "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."

Click here to read Wired's report in its entirety.

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