A Texas County Welcomed a Border Militia Last Fall. Now Some Officials Have Grown Weary of It.

All day, members of the Patriots for America waited patiently for Samuel Hall’s instructions. The group had gathered at a rented house in Kinney County, which is on the border with Mexico and about 150 miles west of San Antonio. Finally, around 7 p.m., Hall, a former Protestant missionary who is the militia’s leader, emerged from his bedroom to deliver a prayer and a brief speech. The operation that January night, Hall warned his followers, might be dangerous.

At his command, the militia members and a few associates, who sometimes travel with the group, began to prepare. Kristina Binegar, a general contractor from Allen, a half hour north of Dallas, flaunted her favorite machete from her collection of blades. Nick Williams, an IT worker from Dallas, carefully set down a $4,000 assault rifle to sip an energy drink. Six others, who ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-plus, donned ballistic vests and holstered sidearms. Most in the group have full-time jobs and take days off to patrol the border. They piled into three trucks and headed for Eagle Pass, about an hour south, in Maverick County.

In Shelby Park, which overlooks the Rio Grande, Hall and his team met with Abraham Rubio, a Maverick County sheriff’s deputy. A National Guardsman asked those in the armed group to identify themselves, then described them to a colleague as “the sheriff’s team.” (The Maverick County Sheriff’s Department denies any official association with the PFA.) Rubio and the Guard, sent to the border as part of Operation Lone Star, Governor Greg Abbott’s immigration crackdown, then briefed the PFA members, many of whom have no training in law enforcement, on where migrants might be hiding. They pointed the group to a path littered with discarded bags, clothes, shoes, and toilet paper. The militia members walked down the trail to the river and began to sweep the area.

They soon found one migrant, a Nicaraguan man with an injured leg, resting in a field. The group escorted the man to a National Guard truck to await federal border agents to take him to a detention facility.

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