Meet the New Proud Boys

“We’ve kind of gotten what we want, right? There’s no reason to fucking protest,” Enrique Tarrio, a longtime leader of the Proud Boys, told me earlier this week over the phone while he was taking a minute to charge his Tesla. We were speaking about why his group had receded from the streets. His answer: He no longer felt compelled to show up with other Proud Boys to fight left-wing protesters, because the federal government was doing the job itself.

A year ago, it seemed that the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists were poised for a renaissance. These groups had been in a lull because much of their leadership, including Tarrio, was imprisoned for involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But at the beginning of his second term, President Trump issued pardons and commutations to some 1,500 of the rioters. Having once told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Trump has now effectively opened the way for extremist militias—with their signature assault rifles and tactical gear—to antagonize local populations, especially immigrants, as they had in Portland and elsewhere.

And indeed, groups of armed men have been roaming the streets intimidating immigrants, violently confronting protesters, and claiming an authority beyond the purview of state or local law enforcement. This time, though, the men belong to the Department of Homeland Security’s mass-deportation teams. Their tactics bear striking similarities to those of the Proud Boys and other militias that showed up in U.S. cities during Trump’s first term. Clad in the same tactical vests, cargo pants, sunglasses, and neck buffs pulled over their faces, some 3,000 federal agents deployed to the streets of Minneapolis with catastrophic results.

Homeland Security’s mandate, of course, is to protect the border, find people who are in the country illegally, and facilitate the deportation of undocumented immigrants, in theory targeting the “worst of the worst.” The Proud Boys showed up at events ostensibly to stand up for immigration enforcement, among other things. But often the result was fistfights with left-wing protesters and anti-fascists. The federal agents and militia members have displayed the common goal of relentless intimidation—of immigrants and the left—and have used militaristic tactics in their confrontations. (Both, too, are currently unpopular and out of step with the majority of the American public.)

These similarities aren’t a coincidence. They are a demonstration of how DHS and its agencies have melded the views and tactics of the extremist fringe with the apparatus and authority of the federal government. The White House, instead of giving the Proud Boys and others tacit permission to intimidate the left as it did in the first Trump administration, has effectively created its own in-house militia to replace the Proud Boys and harass their common opponents. Extremists have stepped out of the way to let ICE and Border Patrol do the work. When I asked DHS about this dynamic, Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s spokesperson, called the observation “irresponsible” and “shameful during a serious moment for our country.” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson similarly replied over email that “The Atlantic should be ashamed of themselves.”

“Immigration was a central and polarizing issue in 2016. It continues to be a central focus of the guys,” Tarrio told me. He described his group’s prior role as doing the things law enforcement wasn’t allowed to do in the first Trump administration. “There were times when the feds weren’t allowed to do their job,” Tarrio said. “Here, ICE is doing its job no matter what.”

[Read: Where have the Proud Boys gone?]

ICE and the Border Patrol can pursue these aims with the resources that independent right-wing groups could only dream of. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer, gave ICE $75 billion in extra funding. Both Vice President J. D. Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller in recent months have said agents have legal immunity. The Department of Justice has done little to investigate agents’ actions, including the killing of two civilians, instead focusing on what officials claim the victims did wrong.

Legal experts doubt the immunity claim, and the administration this week somewhat softened its rhetoric and approach in Minneapolis. (Vance has since claimed that he never said “officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity.”) The agents who shot Alex Pretti are currently on administrative leave, and the administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, said yesterday that he plans to “draw down” ICE and Border Patrol’s presence in the city. Regardless, the administration’s comments suggest that agents will at least receive significant support for any legal challenges they may face over their actions.

The similarities among ICE, the Border Patrol, and the Proud Boys and similar groups have prompted the question of whether any Proud Boys have joined the agencies. Last month, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a report citing the account of an American citizen who had been detained by ICE, who claimed to have “noticed several of the agents had tattoos that expressed support for the Proud Boys.”

Tarrio was noncommittal when I asked him directly about Proud Boys in ICE. “I’m sure some of the guys have applied,” he told me, but added that “if they did join ICE, we’d probably be quiet about it, because they’d probably get fired if they were publicly a Proud Boy.”

Now that ICE and Border Patrol have left them with less to do, the Proud Boys have adjusted their tactics. Tarrio told me that he was considering going to Minneapolis in disguise, with a few other Proud Boys, for the purpose of “gathering a little bit of intelligence” on the people protesting ICE. When I last spoke with Tarrio, in September, he was in the midst of another plot that also did not involve having a visible presence: He and a small group of Proud Boys were organizing digital campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for making insensitive statements about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. (Tarrio’s ability to muster a large Proud Boys presence is in jeopardy given his past as a federal-government informant, and many no longer regard him as the group’s leader.)

[Read: Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio: MAGA has figured out how to “play dirty”]

But the extreme far-right ethos the Proud Boys espouse has seeped into the federal government. Nativist ideologies are driving immigration policy; the government is calling out and antagonizing specific communities of color, such as Haitians in Ohio and Somalis in Minnesota. DHS is disseminating white-supremacist propaganda on its official media channels.

That blurring of the lines is sowing the conditions for an uptick in political violence, which is already at its highest level in decades.

Sean Westwood, a professor and director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, explained to me that state violence typically occurs in ways that can be processed and absorbed by the public, like a police officer clearly acting in self-defense or a prison executing a convict on death row. But these justifications don’t apply to the killings of Renee Good, who had turned the wheel of her car away from her assailant, and Pretti, who never drew a weapon and was disarmed before he was shot. The extra risk of such wanton actions by the state is the sparking of retaliatory violence, Westwood said, much as the National Guard killing of four Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University in 1970 triggered national unrest.

Tarrio told me he thinks ICE is doing a great job, and said retaliation from the left is the one thing that could potentially bring him and his fellow Proud Boys back out. Which raises the possibility, of course, that at some point in the future the government’s agents and Tarrio’s militia members could join forces on the streets of an American city.