I Lead a Texas Militia Patrolling the U.S. Border

The Patriots for America (PFA) militia came about in 2015, but it was all very informal back then. We were just helping people get to their cars at rallies.

It was a violent, intense political atmosphere when Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton. When we saw people getting attacked just for attending political rallies, we wanted to protect them.

Left or right, Republican or Democrat, I believe you should be able to attend your own political rallies without fear for your safety.

Later on, in 2019, we focused on combating child sex trafficking, which changed the game for PFA completely. We still attend rallies and offer crowd protection—free of charge, of course—but these days, our foundational mission is rescuing children from sex trafficking.

At that time, some very graphic audio footage was posted to the PFA page on Facebook. It appeared to be the sound of a man yelling at a girl who was being assaulted. It was the most awful thing I had heard in my life.

I was beyond furious. I went outside and started praying and pacing, feeling like I was having a panic attack. I had a rhema moment. I’m a Christian, so I believe I had a holy spirit revelation.

I asked God to help me, and a thought immediately came into my head. We had about 1,800 members in Texas and a Missouri chapter, too. With all these people, I knew we could do something to help.

So I called my vice president at the time and said, starting today, we’re going to help rescue children out of Hell. And we started doing undercover brothel work trying to find trafficked kids, or parents with missing children would contact us and ask for help, so we’d do investigative work.

Then the big border missions started in October 2021 when we received a phone call to say Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe needed help down there. I thought we were going to have a few days or maybe a week to get prepared, but it ended up as 24 hours’ notice.

All of us went to our wives—imagine having that conversation—to say we’re leaving at 4:30 in the morning to go into an entirely unknown situation and we don’t know when or if we’ll come back.

Two years later, we’ve been blessed to sustain that mission and grow it to four border counties. We’ve made good contacts and good friends with the sheriffs down there, including Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, who’s a Democrat. He supports us.

We’ve been able to forge a lot of alliances and build trust in the communities. Everybody knows we do everything the right legal, constitutional way, despite what our critics say.

They call us racist and white supremacist and all this stuff. None of that is true. We’re a diverse, Christian organization. We have white and Black members; we have members of all different cultures and races. My wife is Hispanic and so are my twin boys.

If we are for white supremacy, then we have failed miserably. The truth is we absolutely condemn white supremacy and we keep all that rhetoric out of our organization. We care for these migrants and we put our lives on the line for them.

We take a lot of criticism from both sides of the aisle. The left call us racists and white supremacists. That’s just what they do. And from the right, there are some people who call themselves conservatives and Christians who say we’re traitors for giving water and medical aid to migrant families in need.

I’m a Christian before I’m a Republican. If I see a child or a woman or a family that needs water because they just swam across and it’s 110 degrees outside and they’re going to die—I’m going to give them water.

If we come across a family, we’re going to be the hands and feet of Christ and offer whatever water, food or medical care we can until Border Patrol arrives.

We’re not going to let someone coming and across seeking asylum be in need or die; we’re there for a humanitarian mission as well as to catch the nefarious individuals involved in human and drug trafficking.

One particular man, Orlando, brought his family over. A guy who tried to catch his daughter got swept downriver. About an hour later, Orlando came across, and we were walking him up to Border Patrol when he collapsed.

We worked on him for about 30 minutes before they arrived. But he died in our arms right in front of his family. That was a very emotional day; the same day as the Uvalde school shooting vigil. We headed back to base camp get showered up, wipe our tears, and then go cry some more.

Another time, there was a lady was hanging on to barbed wire, crying for her life. We couldn’t get Border Patrol or DHS to give us a boat. We couldn’t get to her through the wire without seriously injuring her or ourselves. So we, the PFA, had to go into the deadly river and swim 200 yards to save her.

She was already on the Texas side of the border. She fell back into the river at one point, and we had to retrieve her again, against the current, and bring her up to a boat ramp. She had a very emotional reunion with her sons. I don’t know anybody that wasn’t tearing up a little bit.

I got emails after that from people who call themselves Christians saying I should have put my boot on her head and pushed her back into the river and let her drown. I just couldn’t believe it because that’s not what Jesus Christ would do; that’s not what a Christian should do.

Yes, this woman is illegally trespassing into our country. Does that warrant death? A lot of these migrants do lose their lives, and many that have come across successfully—especially women and unaccompanied minors—have been sexually abused and raped.

Migrants come across in large groups, in caravans, for protection against the cartels and other nefarious individuals who seek to exploit them.

We’ve seen and cared for girls that were literally raped right before they came across the river, and we’ve had coyotes taunting us at the same time from the Mexican side of the border because they know we can’t do anything about it. Seeing things like that will haunt us for years.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order for police to arrest migrants who unlawfully cross the border is a double-edged sword. It’s good that he’s enforcing the law. But now we believe migrants will splinter into various groups rather than travel in large caravans so they’re less likely to be caught.

That makes these families more vulnerable to the cartels and other dangerous individuals, who aren’t just going to give up the millions of dollars they make from trafficking over the border. They’ll find ways to do it, just as they always have. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

The hardest thing is seeing the children, or comforting a shaking woman who was raped. These are evils that I can’t put my head around. It’s demonic. How a human being can do certain things like this to a child. It blows my mind and gives me a righteous anger towards these people that do it.

We’re there to help protect children from things like that. We’re there to help identify children that are being trafficked and then alert the authorities to legally detain the abductor.

A lot of these children are taught to say things and to act certain ways, but our team is trained to recognize body language and to ask the right questions.

For example, there was a guy we suspected of trafficking this young girl, and they were separated. Border Patrol asked the man: “What is your daughter’s birthday?”

He was looking nervous; his body language was telling. They asked the young girl for her birthday and it didn’t line up with his answer. So you know this is probably a trafficking case.

We work with enforcement in an unofficial capacity. Back in October 2021, state DPS officials in Texas told Sheriff Coe to kick PFA out of Kinney County or resources would be removed. But Coe basically told them to pound sand.

Thus ensued the next seven, eight months of being harassed pulled over multiple times a day, and followed by drones all the time. DPS didn’t like us for a long time.

I still don’t think DPS is a big fan, but we met with Captain Joel Betancourt and his lieutenants at their headquarters. We had a good come-to-Jesus meeting just so we could get to know each other better, and for them to understand that we’re a Christian group who does things the right way.

On a typical patrol, if we come across illegal migrants then we will immediately contact the sheriff’s office unless Border Patrol is somewhere close and we can just simply ask them to follow us. Every intervention we do is in the form of a question.

We also wear body cams not only for our safety, but also if—God forbid—something terrible happens and we are forced into a situation where we must defend our lives. The only thing that’s going to save us in court is that body cam footage.

We’ll only use force―up to and including lethal―in a situation like that if our lives are in danger. We can protect ourselves like any citizen can under the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Texas. We hope that never happens. And it hasn’t—yet.

But it’s a risk every rotation. The cartels had a free pass these past few years. Now Texas is actually pushing back against the cartels, and it hits their pocketbooks, they’re going to get a lot more aggressive.

We try to operate in wisdom and discernment. We’re a militia, so we have plate carriers. We carry AR-15s and side arms, and other protective equipment. And there are a lot of us. We’re not law enforcement, so we don’t pat people down or search them. We just ask if they have any weapons.

Our hope is they see how we look and the amount of firepower we have, and they’ll make a good decision not to pull a weapon if they have one. It’d be a terrible decision otherwise.

We’ve been in some very precarious, intense situations. Multiple members have been injured, including myself. I had to have surgery for a broken leg I got at Eagle Pass. I needed 13 weeks to recover.

I was tracking a potential coyote smuggling what looked like two children. He had made his way across to the Texas side and I had them on my night vision, and so I was transversing a cliff to get down there and to see if I could reach them to determine if it was a trafficker or a father.

Either way, we were going to contact Border Patrol and have them process the individuals. But I fell all the way down this little cliff and snapped my leg. I radioed it in, but we didn’t end up catching him in the end.

Dr. Matthew Cerniglia in Saginaw, Texas and his wonderful wife Savannah contacted me through social media. I didn’t have any insurance at the time. But they followed our various news stories and donated the surgery I needed. I ugly cried. It was a God-given miracle that these Christian patriots helped me.

America has a broken immigration system and it needs fixing. It’s taking a lot of people 12, 13 years just to get their papers or green card. Most of these immigrants are very, very poor. My heart goes out to them.

I won the geographical lottery by being born in the United States. I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and not feel empathy for these families that are putting themselves in such a dangerous situation by traveling all the way from Venezuela, Columbia, Cuba, you name it.

My empathy is for the families. I’ve had many conversations with these people. They’re in such a terrible situation in their own countries.

I feel like the parents are left with no choice. They can’t afford the thousands of dollars over years and years that it takes to do it the legal way, and so they come over illegally and find a way to become legal later. They’re in survival mode; most probably don’t want to do it the illegal way.

Our immigration system is absolutely terrible, and everybody knows it, all the way up to the top. I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be. I’d just be a bull in a China shop.

But if we could help fix that somehow with legislation end then I think we’d be on the right path to solving this issue. Until then, we’re always going to have this problem. And at the moment, it’s literally a flood of people.

Most are peaceful. But some are very dangerous. The authorities have already caught people on the terrorist watch list coming through. Who knows how many sleeper cells now that we have in these United States? Who knows where they’re at and what they’re doing and what they’re planning?

I don’t think it’s an if, I think it’s a when we’re going to see another attack on U.S. soil, especially as things heat up with Iran. I don’t know how, but I think it’s coming. I think it’s inevitable, in fact.

Samuel Hall is the founder and president of the Patriots for America militia.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

As told to Shane Croucher.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at [email protected].