NewsVine_Mariyam
Platinum Member
Trevor Aaronson
July 7 2019, 4:00 a.m.
In the video, self-appointed border guards have rounded up hundreds of migrants and forced them to sit near an active train track in New Mexico. Armed with rifles, the militia members point bright flashlights into the immigrants’ faces as the exhausted and disheveled adults and children turn their eyes downward to avoid the glare.
“Lots and lots of coughing, folks,” a woman recording the video says, alluding to a right-wing conspiracy theory that people from Mexico and Central America are carrying infectious diseases. “This is what’s coming across our border. How bad does it get before we actually build the wall?”
“We’re just allowing people from all over the world to rush our borders,” a militiaman behind her says. “Bottom line, you got to support Donald Trump. He’s the only guy telling the truth.”
In response to the video — which was recorded on April 16, posted on social media and YouTube the next day, and then broadcast by major news networks — the American Civil Liberties Union urged U.S. and New Mexico authorities not to allow “racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum.”
Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, admonished the militia members, who call themselves the United Constitutional Patriots. “These individuals should not attempt to exercise authority reserved for law enforcement,” he wrote in a statement.
Three days after the video appeared online, the U.S. government seemed to take action. Larry Hopkins, the Patriots’ leader, was arrested and charged in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico with being a felon in possession of firearms. News reports suggested a cause-and-effect relationship between the immigrant roundup and the arrest. “This militia group detained migrants at the border,” a CNN headline read. “Then their leader got arrested.”
But while outrage generated by the video may have driven the government to arrest Hopkins, the charge against him has nothing to do with kidnapping terrified people and their children at gunpoint. In fact, the charge against Hopkins relates to an incident that occurred more than 18 months earlier, when FBI agents found the militia leader with a cache of weapons and suspected him of plotting to kill Democratic Party leaders and funders. At the time, federal officials chose not to charge Hopkins. The FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment about the investigation or the timing of Hopkins’s prosecution.
Hopkins’s case is emblematic of how the FBI and federal prosecutors often treat right-wing extremists, ignoring offenses or bringing lesser charges for crimes that would almost certainly result in aggressive federal prosecutions if they were committed by other types of extremists.
Take the case of Christopher Daniels, an African-American gun rights advocate, who came to the FBI’s attention around the same time Hopkins did. The FBI raided both men’s homes within months of each other and, in both cases, found weapons they had reason to believe should not have been there. But in Hopkins’s case, the FBI decided merely to confiscate the guns and wait 18 months before doing anything else, whereas in Daniels’s, the FBI quickly arrested him.
While Hopkins remained free to terrorize immigrants, Daniels was jailed for five months, losing his home and his job.
The primary difference between them wasn’t just race, but ideology. Federal agents appeared to make a clear decision to view Hopkins, a right-wing militia leader, as less dangerous than Daniels, a supposed “black identity extremist.” The term was coined by the FBI Counterterrorism Division to describe a supposed ideology based on the theory that police brutality against African-Americans justifies retaliatory violence. Critics have questioned whether “black identity extremism” exists at all, describing it as “fiction” and “fantasy.”
This double standard is common in federal prosecutions. An Intercept analysis earlier this year found that right-wing extremists are rarely prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws, even when their crimes meet the federal definition of terrorism. Since the 9/11 attacks, just 34 right-wing extremists have been charged under anti-terrorism laws, compared to more than 500 alleged international terrorists, according to The Intercept’s analysis.
In fact, if not for the video of the United Constitutional Patriots and the anger it sparked, Hopkins might never have been charged at all.
Continued reading here:
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/07/fbi-border-vigilante-black-identity-extremist/
