‘This is a war’: Meet the Texas ranchers forming their own border militia

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For Mike Vickers, not much has changed here since 1823, the year a group of frontier lawmen formed the Texas Rangers to protect settlers and their land.

“We’re still dealing with the bad guys from Mexico,” Vickers, 69, told The Post, referring to smugglers who traffic in drugs and desperate migrants. “This is a war.”

Dressed in a cowboy hat, tan cargo pants and weathered boots, Vickers, a veterinarian, runs the Las Palmas Animal Hospital, but he’s also chairman of the Texas Border Volunteers, a 300-strong militia helping the thinly-spread US Customs and Border Patrol agents cover more than a million acres of private land throughout the state’s border counties.

Thirty Volunteers armed to the teeth patrol the hundreds of thousands of acres of ranch land near this hardscrabble city of nearly 5,000. And they are expecting an influx of smugglers this Easter weekend.

“We always have big traffic at Easter,” he said. “It’s a big smuggling week for us.”

The land, cut by mesquite and cactus, lies nearly 90 miles from the Mexican border, but only 4.5 miles from a US Border Patrol checkpoint. Traffickers who have already crossed the border want to avoid this interior checkpoint — located on the only highway in this part of the state — at all costs. So vehicles crammed with drugs or migrants from Central America and even China drop off migrants and smugglers south of the checkpoint on the side of the highway.

Smugglers and their human cargo jump over fences onto the private ranches to traverse the vast expanses on foot. The mesquite canopy is ideal camouflage, allowing them to hide from drones and National Guard helicopters that regularly patrol the area.

“You never know what’s under that next tree,” said Vickers, whose 1,000-acre spread is one of the area’s smaller ranches.

The mission is dangerous for the Volunteers — and the journey is deadly for the migrants. There is an emergency call station in the middle of one ranch, where migrants can press a button and call the border patrol if they need help, Vickers told The Post. The call station has messages in Spanish and Mandarin as well as a tank with jugs of water.

“We always investigate a buzzard or a bad smell,” said Vickers, adding that his group — patrolling some ranches larger than 100,000 acres — have found more than 100 bodies of migrants who’ve perished crossing the rugged terrain since they began patrolling in 1988.

Vickers found his first corpse — a Pakistani asylum seeker — in 1991.

The modern-day posse, made up mostly of retired military, dress in camo fatigues and begin their patrols at dusk using night-vision goggles that are more sophisticated than those used by Border Patrol, Vickers said.

They conceal their weapons “out of respect for law enforcement,” Vickers said. Vickers carries in his SUV a rifle, and two .380-caliber handguns in the pockets of his shirt and pants. He also keeps a .45 Long Colt Taurus called “The Judge” under the driver’s seat of his Suburban. His wife, he said, carries a smaller model known as “The Public Defender.”

“The tough women stay,” he told The Post. “The weak and timid ones leave. I’m married to a tough one, and we’ve been together for 23 years.”

Despite their weapons, Vickers claims the Volunteers have never fired a shot and try not to confront the migrants. When they come upon a group, they radio nearby Border Patrol, he said.

Many ranchers left the area after traffickers burned down their homes or spray-painted death threats on their property. One rancher had two homes burned down, Vickers said.

In order to protect his own ranch, Vickers, who wholeheartedly supports President Trump’s proposed border wall, has installed his own barrier — a 220-volt electrified fence. Migrants have still tried to dig under it.
“I put it up years ago to protect my daughters when they got to high school and started to come home late after cheerleading or sports practice,” he said as he drove his Suburban over roadless terrain, slowing down to allow a handful of Hereford beef cattle he takes care of to cross the sandy track.

“Sometimes there would be strange people waiting by the gate asking my daughters for a ride,” Vickers said. “I wasn’t about to take any chances.”

He said he is always alerting ranchers in the area about bent sections of their wire fences, which is an indication that smugglers and migrants have tried to cross. He said depending on the size of the ranch, fences can cost up to $20,000 to repair, he said.

Even if Trump’s southern border wall gets built, Vickers said he will continue to do his part to defend private land, where Border Patrol is not allowed to cross, at least without the permission of the landowners.

Nearly 200 miles away in Brownsville, Rusty Monsees is also prepared to protect his own land despite the fact that the federal government installed a border barrier nearby a decade ago.

The 71-year-old former cop owns 21 acres in the Rio Grande Valley, where a 60-mile fence built during the Obama administration currently bisects part of his property. He carries a rifle in his truck, and says he has his own group of volunteer landowners who patrol neighboring ranches, and alert Border Patrol agents to suspicious activity.

“It’s not an influx we have; it’s an invasion,” he told The Post, adding that both migrants and smugglers regularly cross the river near his property as they make their way north.

He claims the current rust-colored fence, which was conceived during the final Bush administration, is an ineffective barrier. At 18 feet, it’s not high enough to keep anyone out, and the rough painted surface allows for easy climbing, he said. There are also 35 large gaps where automatic gates should be that allow migrants and smugglers easy access. The Department of Homeland Security said they are plugging the holes with automatic gates.

“You have to build a fence that actually stops people from coming in,” said Monsees, who sat in the driver’s seat of his burgundy pick-up truck as he surveyed his brush-covered property which features a modest wooden house.

One day last week Monsees told The Post that he and a neighbor watched federal Border Patrol Agents round up dozens of migrants. “We saw them fill 12 busloads in a three-hour period,” he said.

Vickers also came across a large group of migrants on a nearby ranch he was patrolling Wednesday night.

“We had quite the show,” he said, describing how his unit came across more than 30 migrants — many of them Asian, he said — and reported them to Border Patrol, who managed to detain 17 of them. “The rest got away,” he said.

The Volunteers received a warning from one of the smugglers, who regularly monitor their radio communications.

“He said in Spanish: ‘I’m going to hunt you down and chop you into a thousand pieces with my machete,’” said Vickers with a hearty laugh. “We’re staying and fighting. We’re never giving up.”





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Things will eventually come to this.

as I say name anyplace where the bad guys are the majority. The place is ruined. It’s that simple
 

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