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PHOENIX — The arrest of a border vigilante accused of pointing a gun at a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy during a confrontation in a desert smuggling zone shows that the "minuteman"-militia-style movement is still active in Arizona and a growing threat to public safety, law enforcement officials say.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has recently issued safety briefings for its employees about heavily armed groups in the Vekol Valley area, where the weekend confrontation occurred. The groups have been cited for infractions, including driving off-road, driving over protected plants and driving at night without lights.
The agency has also warned agents about dangers that the militias pose to the members of the public, who have encountered some of the men standing along public roads, heavily armed and dressed in camouflage, giving the impression that the roads are closed, said Pamela Mathis, a spokeswoman for the BLM.
"Basically, the overall point is they're a major safety issue for federal rangers, for the public and for themselves," she said.
On Saturday night, authorities say, Glendale resident Richard Malley pointed a semiautomatic rifle at a sheriff's deputy in the Vekol Valley, provoking a standoff that lasted until the deputy could convince Malley that he was a legitimate law-enforcement officer.
Malley, 49, was arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault involving a law-enforcement officer and released Sunday after posting a $10,000 bail.
Robert Deatherage, 48, and Robert Crooks, 63, who along with Malley were patrolling the drug-smuggling corridor running through the desert south of Interstate 8 and Gila Bend, were not arrested or cited.
Deputy Pat Arend, who reported staring down the barrel of Malley's AR-15, said it is a small miracle that neither he nor Malley was shot in the brief encounter.
Arend said he initially assumed that Malley, dressed in tactical gear, was another law-enforcement officer working in the area when they encountered each other after 9:30p.m. outside Gila Bend.
"The reason there wasn't a shooting is because, to me, he was passing himself (off as) law enforcement, so the last thing I'm going to do is shoot a cop," Arend said.
"If I would have pulled my gun, and he's thinking I'm a drug smuggler, he's going to shoot. I asked the guy later, 'What would you have done if I had my gun out?' And there was dead silence."
When the so-called minuteman movement first appeared in 2005, members spent much of their time on hillsides looking for smugglers carrying drug loads on their backs or leading human cargo through the desert, and they would try to help law enforcement locate suspects, according to law-enforcement officials.
The groups, which took their name from the militias that helped America win the Revolutionary War, were met with resistance from immigration advocates who predicted dire results from border-control supporters patrolling the desert with weapons.
"When I first was running into the guys on patrol, they were just observing and reporting," Arend said. "They'd take our personal phone numbers, and if they saw something, they'd call and say, 'Hey I think we got backpackers going up to a milepost,' and we'd go find them."
The original intent of the group was to provide an extra set of eyes for law enforcement along the border, said Howie Morgan, national political director of the Minuteman Project. But he said the focus changed as the federal government began to put more resources on the border with Mexico.
The national group's focus is now on strengthening immigration-enforcement efforts through more traditional political means than camping out in the desert, Morgan said.
"Anybody can yell and scream outside city hall. To get things done, you have to be inside the room where they make decisions," Morgan said. "That (the patrols) was all to show that the Border Patrol was not getting the support they needed in (Washington) D.C."
Morgan also cited an increase in violence along the U.S.-Mexican border among the reasons minutemen stopped patrolling in the area.
"It got dangerous," he said. "Obviously, that would scare away members."
There were likely other factors contributing to the group's waning popularity, said Heidi Beirich, intelligence-project coordinator with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups across the country.
The first came in May 2009, when Shawna Forde, a Washington resident and a founder of the Minutemen American Defense organization, recruited two men to rob and kill Raul "Junior" Flores.
Forde wanted to kill Flores because she thought he was a drug dealer and wanted to help fund her organization, according to prosecutors.
Flores' 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, was also killed in the robbery. Forde is now on death row.
That case shook the movement to its core because of the alleged ties between Forde and founders of more prominent national groups, Beirich said.
In 2012, prominent neo-Nazi and minuteman J.T. Ready murdered four members of his girlfriend's family and then killed himself.
This year, Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, was arrested on charges of child molestation. Both incidents further eroded mainstream support in the group, Beirich said.
"The last time we tried to take a count of these type of groups, we found almost none of them left," when there had been about 320 such groups at the movement's peak, Beirich said. "There is no Minuteman Project anymore, nor anything I know of that exists like a minuteman movement."
Instead, there appear to be small groups that are trying to play a different role than previous organizations, which publicly distanced themselves from vigilantism.
The groups that camped in the desert with some fanfare eight years ago would frequently check in with law-enforcement dispatchers to share their locations and learn of any police operations going on in the area. Now, they want to be the police, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.
"Private citizens want to do something about the illegal immigration and drug trafficking, but they should not be taking the law into their own hands," Arpaio said.
"I'm very concerned about them pulling a semiautomatic weapon against my deputy. I can understand the frustration, but this is not the way to do it. It's not worth the risk."
The three men whom sheriff's deputies encountered on Saturday night outside Gila Bend were intent on acting like police, according to court documents.
Malley told detectives that he had "reasonable suspicion" to point his rifle at Arend because Malley believed he was witnessing a crime when the deputy stopped his truck and flashed his lights in the hopes that smugglers would mistake the unmarked pickup for a drug-transport vehicle and approach the deputies.
Malley later said he had never witnessed such a drug operation take place and does not know what one would look like if he saw it, according to court documents.
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