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FBI Arrests Leader of Militia That Detained Migrants at Gunpoint

HeadlineApr 22, 2019

Back in the United States, the FBI has arrested the head of a vigilante militia group that has repeatedly filmed itself holding migrant border crossers at gunpoint in New Mexico. Sixty-nine-year-old Larry Mitchell Hopkins is the leader of the far-right, pro-Trump group calling itself United Constitutional Patriots, which the ACLU described as an “armed fascist militia organization.” His arrest Saturday on firearms charges comes 12 years after he was arrested in Oregon for unlawfully impersonating a police officer. Last week, videos posted on social media showed members of Hopkins’s militia pursuing migrants in New Mexico’s desert west of El Paso, Texas, holding them at gunpoint and coordinating their arrests with U.S. Border Patrol agents.

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