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In this week’s issue, the century-old roots of armed patrols, a trip to a piñatería in Reynosa, and how ICE is dealing with a crunch for space in processing migrants.

How much latitude do paramilitary groups get?

By Simon Romero in Sunland Park, N.M.

From their encampment in a barren stretch of New Mexico desert, a right-wing militia called the United Constitutional Patriots emerged from obscurity this month after its members filmed themselves detaining migrant families on the border with Mexico.

Where did this group originate? It turns out the F.B.I. had known about them at least since 2017 when it investigated tips that a group of heavily armed men at a trailer park in northwest New Mexico were “training” to assassinate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

Still, the origins of such groups stretch back a lot further, going far beyond the current policies aimed at curbing immigration from Latin America and fitting into a long tradition of border vigilantism and efforts to crack down on immigrants who were not white.

As far back as the 1850s, armed patrols from Texas crossed illegally into northern Mexico in efforts to capture African-Americans who escaped from slavery. The Border Patrol itself boasts that it originated from “mounted inspectors” who pursued Chinese immigrants trying to avoid the Chinese exclusion laws passed to severely limit immigration from China.

More recently, in 1977, the Ku Klux Klan created its own border patrol in California and Texas. David Duke, the prominent white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the organization, said at the time that the project was created to do something about the “illegal alien problem.”

Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, documents the K.K.K.’s actions and those of other armed groups on the border in her book “Bring the War Home,” about the white power movement and the paramilitary groups it spawned.

By 1986, as Ms. Belew explains, an armed paramilitary group calling itself Civilian Materiel Assistance, or C.M.A., gained notoriety for detaining men, women and children in the Arizona desert much in the same way that the United Constitutional Patriots has done this year.

Then, as now, the United States was debating a surge of asylum-seeking migrant families from Central America.

Calling itself “anti-Communist,” C.M.A. included American mercenaries who were active in the 1980s in Central America. Wielding military-style rifles, clad in military fatigues and operating out of southern Arizona, the group held 16 immigrants for about 90 minutes before handing them over to Border Patrol agents.

Despite widespread criticism of these tactics at the time, local authorities in the United States opted against prosecuting the C.M.A. mercenaries, at least for violating kidnapping laws.

The Cochise County attorney in Arizona elected not to prosecute, and the migrants who could have testified about being held by the C.M.A. were deported, preventing them from serving as witnesses in any case.

“At many points legal authorities have been tacitly accepting of paramilitary actions on the border or direct participants in them,” Ms. Belew said.

Eventually, the federal government stepped in, and the C.M.A.’s leader, J.R. Hagan, was arrested in 1986 on a felony firearms charge, similar to what occurred this week with the U.C.P.’s leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins, another felon.

Mr. Hagan was found guilty and received a two-year sentence. The sentence was suspended and he was put on probation.

But that wasn’t the end of border militias in Arizona. Nearly a decade later, in 2005, hundreds of “Minuteman” volunteers, some of them armed, drew national attention when they launched patrols along a 23-mile stretch of border in Cochise County. They flagged 335 illegal border crossers for the Border Patrol, but their leaders instructed the volunteers not to detain anyone.

In the present case, the United Constitutional Patriots posted videos of their members circling and holding migrants until Border Patrol agents arrived. The legal case involving Mr. Hopkins will shed light on how much latitude paramilitary groups will be given along the border in this new era.

Do you have questions about life on the border? Or feedback about this newsletter? Email us at: [email protected].

Papier-mâché piñatas, with a side of political commentary

By Elda Cantú in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico

There was a time more than 20 years ago when Dionicia Ramírez fulfilled an order for 1,000 Easter Bunnies.

Her business, Piñatería Ramírez in Reynosa, used to export hundreds of piñatas a month in the late 1990s. She had clients as far as Fort Worth and Dallas, and people would line up outside her shop. These days, though, “people now come with fear,” she said recently in her piñatería, surrounded by Paw Patrol dogs made of cardboard ($12 each) and superheroes of papier-maché ($35 a piece). “Everything in Reynosa came tumbling down for us.”

For a decade, the city has been caught in the crossfire of the drug war. International clients are scarcer now. Most of her revenue comes from local shoppers.

Her store is a mile away from the International Bridge that connects Hidalgo, Texas, and Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and across the street from the Mercado Guadalupano where vendors hawk fruits, cowboy boots and herbal remedies, but also tactical gear. According to data from the Mexican government, more than 94% of the residents of the city reported they felt unsafe there last year. It’s been over a year since the State Department issued a “do not travel” advisory, to the dismay of business owners and officials on both sides of the river.

Mrs. Ramírez was 19 in the early ‘80s when she ran away with el Mago Dalton, a magician she met when the circus came to her town in Hidalgo. The couple eloped and headed north. Settling in Reynosa, Mrs. Ramírez got bored, started selling piñatas, and eventually learned to make them. “I came here with fear, but it was because I didn’t know anyone, the fear of coming alone,” she said. “The city was not as dangerous as today.”

Business prospered quickly, and their family did, too. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Dalton Dávila and Dionicia Ramírez raised five children. Piñatería Ramírez bought a truck, opened a workshop, hired 20 people, started processing export permits — and learned that it’s illegal to send Disney piñatas across the border. El mago Dalton quit the prestidigitation business.

The couple sent their children to college, and several of them turned to the family business for employment when they struggled to find a job. Dalton Jr., a chemical engineer by training, thought of ways of broadening the age of their customers beyond young children and their parents. At 15, he had sculpted a pole dancer.

Instead of popular cartoons, he started fashioning piñatas out of internet memes and viral sensations: local politicians, drug lords, Hollywood stars. “I started playing with piñata art as a means of expression,” he said.

His parents were not thrilled. Not because some clients complained that their merchandise had gotten too racy — which did happen — but because Dalton Jr.’s paper sculptures took longer to make. “I had to fight my father who thought, ‘You will never survive with your piñatas, you make one a day,’” he said. But through social media he found something besides inspiration: more clients.

“It opened up our market a bit,” said his sister, Denisse Dávalos, 30, an industrial engineer who deals with customers. “People come from the Valley to meet us, they visit to see a piñata that has gone viral, they take a picture. It’s very nice,” she said.

The Valley is the Rio Grande Valley. But their piñatas have gone farther. When they made a piñata of the pop-singer Thalía, a fan club had it shipped to New York. One of Donald J. Trump drew so much attention that in 2016 it got featured in a short film and the siblings were invited to a screening in Dallas. Dalton Jr. remembers that immigration officers were amused by pictures of the piñata when they applied for entry into the United States.

But while their Trump piñata regularly draws media attention, people planning parties usually stick to more fun themes. Last December a customer called with a special request. Minnie Lopez, 44, ordered two piñatas for the 21st birthday of her oldest daughter, a serious “Game of Thrones” fan. Ms. Lopez is Mexican but has lived in McAllen, Tex., for over 40 years. Yet she struggled to remember the last time she visited Reynosa, less than half an hour away. “Maybe three years ago,” she guessed. The shop arranged for someone to deliver Cersei Lannister with a throne to Texas.

“We have many customers from the Valley, and for security reasons they don’t want to come to this side to pick the piñatas up. Sometimes we take them to the international bridge,” said Denisse.

Meanwhile, Dionicia Ramírez says she likes to cross the border on weekends with her husband. “We go often,” she says, and gestures toward her grandson, who is cooing and tumbling around piñatas: “Él nació allá.” He was born there. There: in Texas. Their visits are routine: “We go shopping. Sometimes we need paint, brushes, masking tape. We get those at Walmart.”

Elda is the deputy editor of NYT en Español, and one of a team of New York Times journalists reporting on the border. Each week they share a slice of their reporting about the border and the people who spend time on both sides of it.

Number of the week: 50,223

That’s how many migrants were in ICE detention, as of Monday. It’s one of the highest numbers on record, and about 500 more than a congressionally mandated limit of just over 45,000.

Read more about the crunch in space for processing them here.

Read earlier installments of Crossing the Border here. Sign up here to have the next issue delivered to your inbox.

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