A Taste of Things to Come?

Radical splinter groups self-financed with drugs and well armed. This may be a small foretaste of things to come in the next several decades.

The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols.

The three people arrested in the crime include the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a Washington State-based offshoot of the Minutemen movement, in which citizens roam the border looking for people crossing into the country illegally. Former members describe the group’s leader, Shawna Forde, 41, as having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing.

The authorities say that the three suspects were after money and drugs that they intended to use to finance vigilantism, and that they have been linked to at least one other home invasion, in California.

Will we one day see cross-border raids by American militia groups into Mexico? If drug violence increases or some event acts as a catalyst increasing militia groups and bringing more mainstream Americans into it, there may one day be. As the economy continues to decline and federal and state services are cut, at times drastically, we can expect to see not just radical groups like those mentioned in the article, but local communities organizing their own security. It will likely start with those on the edges of bad neighborhoods, or in places where neighborhoods have been gutted by the housing crisis and are going downhill fast.

Readers, what indicators should we watch when considering whether such groups will remain on the fringes or begin to grow? Unemployment rates among young white males? Law enforcement funding? A perceived lack of immigration reform? Some terrorist attack or major event wherein the perpetrators are found to have crossed in in from Mexico illegally?