For years, Tim Foley and his militia stalked the deserts of southern Arizona hunting migrants, drug couriers and cartel scouts crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States. Armed with AR-15 rifles, camouflage gear and military-style surveillance tactics, the group called itself Arizona Border Recon and portrayed its mission as a patriotic defense of the nation. But now, after Donald Trump’s return to the White House and an unprecedented militarization of the southern border, the crossings have largely disappeared.
Yet Foley and his men still gather in the desert.
A detailed report published in Die Zeit follows the militia during one of its “Obs” operations in spring 2026, offering a rare portrait of a movement confronting an uncomfortable reality: what happens when political extremists achieve the world they demanded?
The answer, at least in the Arizona wilderness, appears to be far more complicated than victory.
Foley, 66, leads his patrol through dry riverbeds and rocky hills near the tiny border town of Arivaca, Arizona. Around him march men from across the United States carrying semi-automatic rifles and backpacks filled with water and supplies. Their destination is a gap in the towering border fence erected and expanded under Trump’s administrations. But unlike previous years, the desert is quiet.
The silence is new.
Trump’s second presidency brought sweeping changes to the border region. Thousands of soldiers were deployed to the frontier, surveillance intensified and immigration enforcement agencies expanded dramatically. According to figures cited in the report, illegal crossings dropped from roughly 1.5 million during Joe Biden’s final fiscal year to around 238,000 under Trump, the lowest number recorded since 1970.
The crackdown transformed the border into one of the most heavily monitored regions in North America. Fighter jets, helicopters and drones now patrol the skies. Border Patrol staffing has surged. Even migrants who evade the fence face aggressive interior enforcement and deportation operations.
For Foley, this should have been vindication. He spent years arguing that only overwhelming force could stop migration. He voted for Trump precisely because he believed the government had failed to secure the border.
And yet his militia keeps returning to the desert.
The Die Zeit report suggests the answer lies not only in politics but in identity, loneliness and the search for meaning in modern America.
At the center of the story stands Foley himself, a man whose life mirrors many of the upheavals that have reshaped the United States over the past two decades. Raised in San Francisco, he struggled with addiction as a young man before rebuilding his life in Arizona as a construction foreman. The financial crisis of 2008 destroyed much of that stability. He lost his job, his home and eventually his marriage.
After drifting across America doing temporary work, Foley settled near the border and became obsessed with tracking migrant routes and cartel activity. There, among abandoned desert towns and dried riverbeds, he found a new mission.
Arizona Border Recon emerged from that period, attracting veterans, law enforcement officers and men disillusioned with civilian life. Many arrived carrying personal trauma. One of Foley’s earliest recruits, a former Iraq and Afghanistan squad leader named Randon, suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder after combat deployments. Foley gave him a place to stay, and together they spent years exploring cartel smuggling routes through the desert.
The militia eventually gained national attention through documentaries and media coverage. Foley even became entangled in one of Germany’s largest journalism scandals after appearing in a fabricated Spiegel report by disgraced reporter Claas Relotius. Later, Foley traveled to Washington during the January 6 Capitol riot, though he says he never entered the building itself.
Now, however, the movement seems suspended between triumph and emptiness.
Around the campfire at night, the men speak less about migrants than about personal disappointments, addiction, war and cultural decline. One member, Jason, says he joined the patrols because his stepson became addicted to fentanyl. Another, Heath, admits he misses the intensity of earlier years, when cartel gunfire echoed through the hills and scouts monitored every ridge.
“It used to feel like a war zone,” he says in the Die Zeit account. “Now it’s peaceful.” The word sounds almost like a complaint.
The conversations drift easily into conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Foley rails against Muslim politicians and warns of demographic replacement. Videos circulating online are treated as evidence of hidden threats to American identity, even when another member points out they are fake.
But the report also captures moments of fragility that complicate the image of hardened extremists. Foley grieves deeply for Rocko, his dead pitbull companion, pausing during patrols to remember the dog’s favorite swimming spots. He proudly shows photographs of his grandson, whom he is no longer allowed to see because his daughter believes he belongs to a cult. He speaks tenderly about “Mary,” his partner, with whom he is building a ranch and planning a feed store business.
The militia camp itself increasingly resembles less a combat outpost than a gathering of aging men reluctant to abandon a shared purpose.
On one patrol, they discover only footprints in the sand. On another, they install surveillance cameras overlooking a deserted smuggling route and celebrate when the equipment finally works. No migrants appear. No cartel scouts emerge from the hills. Even the drones Foley believes are spying on the group never return.
At one point, a frustrated member asks openly: “What is this supposed to be? A damn camping trip?”
The question hangs over the entire story.
The report suggests that for many in the militia, the border was never solely about border security. It became a stage on which broader anxieties about masculinity, national decline, aging and social irrelevance could be acted out. The patrols provided camaraderie, structure and the sense of participating in a larger historical struggle.
Trump’s success in drastically reducing crossings may therefore have created an existential problem for the very movement that helped fuel his rise. If the enemy disappears, what remains?
By the end of the patrol, several members leave early to return to jobs, businesses and families scattered across the country. Foley stays behind despite chronic pain and exhaustion. Days later, he texts the reporter claiming a migrant group finally crossed near one of their cameras after the journalists departed. Border Patrol agents responded immediately with helicopters and mounted officers.
Then the desert fell quiet again.
Today Foley spends much of his time building fences on his ranch, caring for livestock and searching for work. He is also constructing a memorial for Rocko on a hilltop he calls “Rocko’s Ridge.” The monument will be made from mesquite wood and barbed wire.
It is an oddly intimate project for a man who once imagined himself defending civilization at the edge of the nation.
And perhaps that is the deeper story Die Zeit captures in the Arizona desert: not simply the persistence of armed militias after the border crisis faded, but the difficulty of letting go of a battle that gave damaged lives their sense of meaning.
