Gov. Ron DeSantis deployed members of the Florida State and National Guards to Texas on Thursday to aid that state in its ongoing dispute with the federal government over undocumented immigrants entering the country.
“I believe that a state has a right to fortify its own borders,” DeSantis said during an appearance at Cecil Airport in Jacksonville.
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“... And, so, if Texas is helping to erect barriers, putting up razor wire, doing other things to keep illegal aliens out, I want to be helpful with them doing it. I don’t want to be part of the federal government trying to tear down these barriers and let more people in illegally.”
Just two days prior, 50 to 100 people had gathered at a Buc-Ee’s in Robertsdale, Alabama, to express their frustration with President Joe Biden’s management of the border crisis. The gathering was just one stop for the Take Back Our Border Convoy, which was en route from Virginia Beach to Texas, arriving at its destination the same day DeSantis announced his decision.
Angela Myers, a substitute high school teacher from Fort Walton Beach was one of a number of area residents who greeted the convoy on arrival.
“You should be able to let your child walk home from school and know that while she's at home by herself, she's not going to be raped by somebody that isn't here legally,” Myers said. “You shouldn't have that fear. We need that freedom and that feeling of being a free America again. And I want to give that to my kids and my grandbabies.”
Myers, like many here, said she was not anti-immigration — just pro-law and order.
“We're not saying, 'Oh, we don't want any immigrants or foreigners,'” she said. “We are made up of that. It's wonderful. They bring things to us, but we want it done the right way. Bring it to us the right way.”
Still, there were darker currents in the crowd, as well. Many of those who organized, sponsored, and promoted the convoy have been associated with the election denial, QAnon, and anti-vaccine movements. Tuesday’s crowd expressed support for many of these ideas, as well, including variations of the Great Replacement Theory, an unproven theory that claims migrants are being purposefully brought to the U.S. to replace white Americans and form a new electoral majority.
Among them was Linda Johnson, who traveled from Tullahoma, Tennessee to join the convoy.
“They're trying to change our way of life here,” she said.
Johnson ran unsuccessfully for her local city council in 2021 and said she’d been motivated to seek political office after visiting Key West on her honeymoon in 2019.
“Going to Key West during Pride Week ... and just seeing the moral debauchery there — It was like drag queens on corners luring young people,” she said. “... I was like I don't want our city to turn into this ... I don't think I'm better than anybody else, but to me that's sin and you don't celebrate sin.”
Johnson compared what she perceived as moral decay to a “virus.”
“It's like a disease and it just grows and it spreads and becomes detrimental,” she said. “So you've got to catch it before it gets to that point.”
“I've been told ... you can't legislate morality,” she added. “Well, morality has been legislated for centuries, hasn't it?”
While some in the crowd echoed national political talking points, others brought more personal motivations. Marty Crouse, from South Florida, had scrawled a message in black ink on the side of his van. It read, “It's personal. Granddaughter. March 10th, ‘22. Found dead by her four-year-old son. She was cold and blue. Cause of death: fentanyl.”
Crouse’s granddaughter, Brianna Bury, was just 29 when she died. Crouse keeps her obituary taped to the driver’s window of his van. He blames the federal government for not doing more to stem the flow of fentanyl.
“Without all this fentanyl coming across the border, she would have had more of a chance of surviving her drug addiction,” he said. “... If there was no fentanyl coming across it, I can’t say it would surely have saved her. But I can say her chances would have been a lot better. And it's not just me, it's a whole lot of families.”
While Crouse hoped the convoy would achieve concrete policy changes, many in the crowd had more esoteric objectives, reflecting an increasingly metaphysical conservative movement that is preoccupied not just with legislating morality, but with waging spiritual warfare. A woman named Del, who declined to give her last name, put it succinctly.
“This is spiritual,” she said. “It's not right versus left, not red versus blue. It's spiritual. It's God versus Satan.”
Del said she’d been drawn into politics, first, by the election of Donald Trump and, then, by the emergence of “Q,” the enigmatic leader of the burgeoning QAnonn movement, which claims the Democratic party is controlled by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles.
Del said her preoccupation with politics and conspiracy theories had alienated her from friends and family, including her daughter and her neighbors.
“You try to tell people around you,” she said, “but they don't want to hear it. They want to watch the football game or whatever, you know? And now it's a joke with my neighbor. I used to always go over and do the Super Bowl with them, and, the last few years, it's just like, ‘Oh, so who's doing the satanic ritual on this game?’”
Several organizers spoke at the event, including Y.G. Nyghtstorm, a one-time congressional candidate and board member for the far-right Catholic media site Church Militant, and Josh Macias, of Veterans for America First.
Macias was convicted on firearms charges in 2022, after having been arrested in November 2020 outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where votes were being counted. Prosecutors had charged him and another man with election interference charges, as well, but a judge later tossed those out.
Macias also participated in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. A video of him meeting the prior day in an underground parking garage with a small group of leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys was played during Congressional hearings about the insurrection.
On Tuesday, Macias suggested the convoy was about more than border security.
“Yes, we are taking our border back,” he said. “We also want to take our country back ... This is our soil. This is our country.”
“We're going to do it again if we have to,” he added, seemingly referring to the events of Jan. 6. “We will carry America. Our brother ain't heavy. If we have to do it, we will stand up again … to protect our country against both foreign and domestic enemies.”
“Amen,” the crowd chanted in unison. “Amen.”