“The Marauders is a blistering book, a hard-ass stare into the voracious mouth of the US-Mexico border. Patrick Strickland has done a fine piece of reporting from places we don’t dare to tread.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway This real-life Western tells the story of how citizens in a small Arizona border town stood up to anti-immigrant militias and vigilantes. The Marauders uncovers the riveting nonfiction saga of far-right militias terrorizing the border towns of southern Arizona. In one of the towns profiled, Arivaca, rogue militia members killed a man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009. In response, the residents organized and spent two years trying to push the new militias out through boycotts and by urging local businesses to ban them. The militias and vigilante groups again raised the stakes, spreading Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories alleging that town residents were complicit in child sex trafficking, prompting fears of vigilante violence. The Marauders flips the standard formula most often applied to stories about immigration and the far right. Too often those stories are told from the perspective of the ones committing the violence. While Strickland doesn't shy away from exploring those dark themes, the far right are not the protagonists of the book. Rather, the people targeted by hate groups, and the individuals who rose up to stop them in their tracks, are the heroes of this dramatic story.

In 2004 vigilante groups patrolled the U.S.-Mexican border, hunting for migrants in the vast Arizona desert. A law student who hails from the small border town of Douglas, AZ takes off two years from his studies at Stanford Law School to return to Douglas to fight against the growing vigilante movement and the human rights abuses on the U.S.-Mexican border. This book provides a first-hand chronicle of the immigration debate that currently engulfs our nation. Ray Ybarra Maldonado writes about the border from his personal experience as a child and from the perspective of a dedicated activist who has travelled into the interior of Mexico to find victims of vigilante abuse. He also shares stories from his work at a migrant shelter in the Mexican border town where his mother was born, and from the middle of the Arizona desert where gun toting members of the Minutemen Project confront migrants crossing the militarized border. Born on the Border does more than chronicle the growing anti-immigrant movement that has emanated from Arizona, Ybarra Maldonado makes a compelling argument that the current immigration laws are immoral and that civil disobedience is needed so that human mobility can be recognized as a human right. While others are arguing over what comprehensive immigration reform looks like, the author's personal conflict between doing what is morally right and breaking the law challenges readers to take a drastically different look at one of the most pressing issues facing nation-states in the 21st century: immigration and the human right to cross borders.

While many actors and conditions contribute to the problems at the border, one set of actors has been unexplainably missing from the literature and policy analysis: border vigilantes. These vigilantes have painted the border as a dangerous locus of criminal and terrorist activity, necessitating concerned citizen sentinels. They have blitzed the public with portrayals about the number of migrants crossing the border illegally and the need for law enforcement to increase border protection. Their message is powerful because they back their rhetoric with action: these individuals camp out near popular desert border-crossing points, document the rate of undocumented migration, and even turn away and/or turn in migrants to the U.S. Border Patrol and local law enforcement. Border vigilantes claim to do the work that the government is unwilling, or at least unable, to do effectively: protect America from the security threats of a permeable border and preserve the rule of law.In this paper, border vigilantism is put under the microscope. Part I explores the history and current state of the border and the role of vigilantes in promoting border reform and preventing undocumented migrants from entering the United States. Part II looks at the legal rights that vigilantes have when conducting their military-like operations at the border - in particular, the rights they have to detain migrants under state citizen's arrest laws. These laws are particularly important in light of current comprehensive immigration reform proposals; i.e., an inadvertent byproduct of criminalizing border-crossing and illegal presence, as Part II details, is that such criminalization would open the floodgates for vigilantes to arrest any border crossers under any circumstances. Part III proposes reforms - including both legislative approaches and private initiatives - to balance the border vigilantes' expressive rights with the American value to treat others with dignity.

Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.

These essays, written by leading historian of violence and Presidential Commission consultant Richard Maxwell Brown, consider the challenges posed to American society by the criminal, turbulent, and depressed elements of American life and the violent response of the established order. Covering violent incidents from colonial American to the present, Brown presents illuminating discussions of violence and the American Revolution, black-white conflict from slave revolts to the black ghetto riots of the 1960s, the vigilante tradition, and two of America's most violent regions--Central Texas, whic.