Meet the MAGA Media Militia
Former Texas DPS captain, Jaeson Jones, is a savvy MAGA propagandist and border chaos entrepreneur.
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When it comes to the “border chaos” economy, Jaeson Jones has all the profit angles covered. Not only is he a correspondent for Newsmax, but he also runs his own private company, Omni Intelligence, and is a professional speaker on the border crisis circuit for the America Project, founded by election deniers Patrick Byrne and retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn. You can buy his look on Amazon. He’s founded a brand called American Vanguard, which exhorts you to “join the movement,” and buy the shirts, hats, and mugs he sells online. Changing the spelling of his name from Jason to Jaeson means he’ll rank higher in online search results.
Jones, a former captain in the Texas Department of Public Safety, is the epitome of the new MAGA media militia man. He’s a “journalist” for the ever-expanding network of MAGA content creators, and he’s a chief propagandist for Texas governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. He lands exclusive interviews with DPS personnel and goes on helicopter ride-alongs, which he uses to promote Operation Lone Star to a national audience.
But Jones also reports beyond Texas. On January 9, the Newsmax correspondent and a group of armed men, their faces masked, rolled into a makeshift aid camp near the border wall an hour east of Sasabe, Arizona, to question and film migrants and intimidate humanitarian aid volunteers.
When aid volunteers asked who he and his companions were, he said, “I’m with Newsmax. You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” Most migrants at the camp were women and children from Mexico and Central America, according to a volunteer who spoke with Jones. The volunteer asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. “They were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency, and harassing people and making people feel intimidated,” she said. “And Jaeson Jones had a camera with him, and while these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country’ on camera.”
The volunteer said she and others told the families that the men were not law enforcement and that they didn’t need to speak with them, but the masked men threatened to detain the volunteers if they spoke to the migrants in the camp, she said. “They told us to step back or else we would be detained,” the volunteer said. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing.”
The men told the aid volunteers that they were intel officers from a taskforce. “They said they’d been contracted to collect information,” she said. “And that they would bring the US forces in if we didn't step aside, that we are not allowing people to leave that we're essentially holding people there, which we aren’t.”
Only one of the masked men could speak Spanish, it appears, according to aid volunteers who took video of the exchange. Jones, judging from this interview, doesn’t speak Spanish either, a definite limitation to collecting “intelligence” at the border.
Before Jones appeared, I was at the same camp on January 5, but armed only with an audio recorder and notebook. Three masked men with pistols strapped to their legs arrived in two pickup trucks. I identified myself as a reporter with The Border Chronicle and asked if I could speak with them. At first, one of them yelled to the other two, “Don’t speak to her. Don’t say anything to her,” but gradually they opened up about their work as I continued to ask questions. I noticed that all three men were wearing hats marked with the logo of the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counterterrorism division. One of their tactical vests read “investigator,” and another read “trafficking taskforce.”
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I asked if they did indeed work for Texas DPS, and, if so, what they were doing in Arizona. One man told me they didn’t work for DPS but that they provided intelligence for House committees, including the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, led by Kentucky Republican representative James Comer. In February, Comer will launch border hearings, and Republicans have already begun hearings to impeach DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The three men told me they had a drone and were filming cartels south of the border wall who take money from migrants and transport them to the wall. And they were documenting the “environmental damage” created by the migrants at the camp.
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In the last several months, battles among factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have emptied Mexican border towns and shifted migration routes to more remote areas of the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the small town of Jacumba Hot Springs, California, or the remote areas east of Sasabe, where I was speaking with the masked men. For many years, cartel factions have controlled the Mexican side of the border and charged migrants and asylum seekers to cross through their territory. Many migrants I’ve interviewed also say they’ve been detained multiple times by Mexican immigration and police and been forced to pay bribes to be released.
These migrants and asylum seekers arrive at gaps in the wall, or smugglers saw through the wall, creating an entryway, while others come over the wall with ropes and harnesses into the United States.
Why do they do this? People, with very few exceptions, are barred from presenting themselves at ports of entry for asylum unless they have a CBPOne appointment, but there are many difficulties in accessing the app, and not enough appointments to meet the need. U.S. law states that asylum seekers can present themselves anywhere at the border, not just ports of entry, and this remains the case, unless Congress chooses to change it.
Most people crossing wait on the U.S. side of the wall for Border Patrol agents to arrive so that they can request asylum. They want to turn themselves in. Over the years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of asylum seekers. Most have endured abuse and worse by armed cartel men in Mexico, and many have fled gang members and violence in their own countries.
At the camp near Sasabe, the sight of three masked, armed men stalking through the camp only worsened the anxiety and fear of families waiting for U.S. border officials to pick them up. One young Ecuadoran woman, who was traveling with her aunt, was sobbing inconsolably, because something traumatic had happened to her on her journey north.
With the polarization in Congress and now a hyperpartisan presidential election year, border communities are trapped in the middle of the political dysfunction.
December was a particularly tough month for border aid organizations and residents. At least 250,000 people arrived to seek asylum, according to DHS figures. In November, NPR described a harrowing scene in remote sections of the California-Mexico border where migrants were stranded in open-air camps for several days without toilets, food, water, or shelter. Some were injured or sick and needed medical attention. “It looked like a scene from a refugee camp,” said NPR correspondent Jasmine Garsd Garcia about her visit near Jacumba Hot Springs, “but the difference is there was no infrastructure or official human aid. I mean, we’re talking about as many as 300 people at a time at each camp, and many are children, and there’s just no food provided. People have to go to the bathroom out in the open.”
With no government assistance, residents and aid organizations have tried to fill the vacuum. “In any other situation like this,” Garsd Garcia said, “you would expect to see the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, the National Guard, but here, it’s just locals from the town of Jacumba and volunteers going to hand out supplies and do basic first aid.”
Erika Pinheiro, executive director of the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, said in a Border Chronicle podcast, “DHS should be obliged to provide the basics that migrants need to survive while they’re waiting to be processed. Is this acceptable to the United States public that we leave men, women, and children in the desert to die with no food or water or medical care?”
The same dire conditions exist at the Arizona border. Longtime humanitarian groups like No More Deaths, and others including Humane Borders, Tucson Samaritans, and Green Valley–Sahuarita Samaritans, have mobilized to provide food, water, and temporary shelter while migrants wait for Border Patrol to pick them up. As winter temperatures plummet, more people have become critically ill and need to be medically evacuated from remote areas where there is no cell service. And Border Patrol often doesn’t respond to these medical emergencies, volunteers said.
“The astonishing thing is Border Patrol knows the number of people out here because they’ve got helicopters flying over all the time,” said Randy Mayer, a pastor and volunteer with the Green Valley–Sahuarita Samaritans. “Yet all they have is vans that don’t have four-wheel drive. The National Guard knows how to move people. FEMA and the Red Cross knows how but nobody is here.”
Alone and left with life-and-death choices, some humanitarians have driven critically ill or vulnerable families to the nearest Border Patrol station. A CBP spokesperson said that transporting people violates U.S. law and that humanitarians transporting asylum seekers could be prosecuted if a U.S. attorney accepted the case. During the Trump administration, several members of No More Deaths were charged for providing humanitarian aid—the highest-profile case being that of Scott Warren, a geographer and aid volunteer—who was charged with two counts of harboring undocumented immigrants and one count of conspiracy to harbor and transport, which could mean up to 10 years in prison. A jury found Warren not guilty, and the case garnered support from around the world for humanitarians along the border.
The CBP spokesperson said the agency did not know who the masked, armed men were with Jones but that their presence was not illegal if the men didn’t forcefully detain anyone. I also asked whether the men worked in any capacity with CBP or DHS. The agency said no but had no comment on the group wearing law enforcement attire. In Arizona, impersonating a law enforcement officer is a felony.
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The three men I encountered on January 5 were with Jones on January 9 at the camp. At Texas DPS, Jones worked for the Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Division, hence the hats these men were wearing. In Texas, Jones conducts himself as if he were still part of Texas DPS, as he reports for Newsmax, which has angled itself to the right of Fox News.
After Jones’s appearance at the makeshift aid camp, he put out his content on Newsmax and various social media platforms characterizing local volunteer orgs as “aiding and abetting the cartels” and “smuggling aliens into the country.” Another MAGA media correspondent, Ben Bergquam, who works for Real America’s Voice, which is a platform for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, referred to aid volunteers as “leftists aiding and abetting cartel members at their camp and inviting an invasion into this country.” Bergquam went on to tell his viewers that the aid camp was a “guerrilla camp and frontline of the invasion.” He called humanitarian volunteers “enemies within this country” and “pure evil.”
This type of disinformation deliberately incites violence and puts a target on the back of anyone who volunteers to provide food, water, or transport to a Border Patrol station for asylum seekers. The same day I was at the camp, other militiamen in two vehicles tried to drive through the middle of the camp while filming on their cell phones. I sought a comment from Jones via the phone number and email listed on his website, but no one responded. I also reached out to Texas DPS and the House Committee on Oversight for comment but have yet to receive a response.
Until the November presidential election, we can expect endless Republican-led hearings ramping up the “border chaos” narrative, stoking fear and xenophobia with the border as backdrop, in hopes of reelecting Donald Trump to the White House. The MAGA media militia, which includes law enforcement turned paid pundits like Jones, will provide the grist for the propaganda mill, while putting a target on the backs of border humanitarian aid groups.
Thank you so much, Melissa for walking right in to talk to these liars. Thanks for even posting links to their trash. Folks really need to see and hear what is out there as "real news that the libtards won't tell you !". This is a terrible time. We try hard to focus on the asylum seekers.
Thanks for this excellent reporting and being willing to confront these guys which they don't expect. I did the same by walking up to the armed white men at a Black Lives Matter demo in the fall of 2020 in Santa Fe. These macho men don't like being questioned. I'll post this on Witness at the Border on Facebook which I typically do with your posts.