Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

The post The Border Propagandist appeared first on Coda Story.

Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win  on November 5, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” 

The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan's Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump. 

Border911 remains linked to a 501(c)(4) group, called The America Project, a major funder of election conspiracy efforts. Unlike a 501(c)(3) charity, 501(c)(4)s can legally support political campaigns, and they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” organizations because they aren’t required under U.S. tax law to reveal their donors. However, they lack one important advantage of a 501(c)(3)–their donors’ contributions are not tax-deductible. (Homan also in 2023 created another 501(c)(4) he called Border911 Inc.) 

Border911 Foundation, and its members, identified on its website, are promoting extremist policies, such as declaring an invasion at the border, to elected leaders and law enforcement officials and falsely portraying the country as beset by voter fraud, according to a joint investigation by a multistate team of journalists from Lighthouse Reports, the Texas Observer, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and palabra based on dozens of interviews, attendance of various Border911 events, and reviews of public records, videos, speeches, and social media posts. 

Border911’s policy agenda foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. The nonprofit has already had an impact in Arizona, where several Border911-backed bills have been introduced and where Republican lawmakers are pushing a controversial November ballot initiative that would formally declare a border invasion and empower state and local officials to become immigration enforcers. 

Despite his background in law enforcement, IRS filings show that Homan’s foundation and his Border911 dark money organization may be skirting federal tax law, according to tax documents and interviews with experts, that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in “any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.” 

Border911 associates have testified in Congress as law enforcement experts, instead of as Trump-aligned activists, and spread disinformation in media interviews, calling the Biden Administration's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border "the biggest national security threat to the American people since 9/11." Meanwhile, these same players are securing lucrative border security contracts for themselves or for-profit companies that employ them, documents show. 

“BORDER911 is a team of operators with decades of experience,” Homan posted on X last November, announcing the group. “We helped create the most secure border in history. The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

Homan’s cavalry, who are publicly featured as team members, includes former state and federal law enforcement, some of whom have intelligence backgrounds, including Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol Chief; Derek Maltz, a former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent; Victor Avila, a former agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor; and Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned NewsMax correspondent, according to public records and the Border911 Foundation’s website. 

For the last several months, the group’s members have been targeting battleground states and cities “to educate them [about the] border crisis,” Homan said on a March podcast. At a July conference in El Paso, Homan claimed that “Millions of people heading to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census.” When seats are apportioned for Congress, he said, “That’s going to create more seats in Congress for Democrats. They sold this country out. It’s almost treasonous.” 

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August, the gruff-talking and pugnacious Homan has attacked her on Fox News, where he is a contributor. The former federal agent, who got his start as a police officer in West Carthage, New York, before becoming a Border Patrol agent then moving to ICE, characterized Trump’s Democratic opponent on Fox as “disgusting” and said that Border Patrol and ICE agents did not respect her. She “broke the border,” he said.

From Dark Money Group to Charity 

Homan claims he launched his nonprofit as a purely self-funded passion project. “I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

But before it became its own foundation, Border911 was part of The America Project, an organization founded by serial election deniers: former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security advisor. 

At a raucous White House meeting on December 18, 2020, Byrne and Flynn were part of a group of advisers that counseled Trump to use National Guard soldiers to seize voting machines to overturn the election. When martial law was not imposed, the two formed The America Project. And Byrne poured  $27 million of his own money into that project, according to a post on X, including funding a sham election audit in Arizona, and recruiting radicalized individuals as poll workers with an emphasis on those with military and law enforcement backgrounds. 

For part of 2023, Homan served as CEO of The America Project, then he launched Border911 Foundation Inc. in October of that year as a nonprofit. Homan is no longer the CEO of The America Project, but, as of June 2024, he was still listed as a board director. It’s unclear what salary and compensation, if any, he has received from The America Project.

Homan declined to be interviewed for this article, and he referred questions about Border911 to Steve Lentz, a corporate attorney in Virginia. Lentz said he didn’t know how much Homan was paid as CEO of The America Project or whether Byrne or The America Project supported Border911. “I don't know whether the foundation has received any money from them or not,” he said. Regarding the Border911 organizations, Lentz said that “Mr. Homan received no compensation in 2023, and will receive $1.00 in 2024.” 

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,”

In addition to Homan’s tax-exempt charity, IRS tax filings show that in October 2023 he created Border911, Inc, the 501(c)(4), and both organizations list their corporate headquarters as a UPS store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Both Border911 organizations also declare the same purpose in tax filings: to “educate Americans about a non-secure border.” In 2023, both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue. (The groups have not yet disclosed figures for 2024.) 

Two nonprofit compliance experts who examined Border911’s 2023 tax documents said it was unusual to see nearly identical expenditures for the two entities, while one of them—the dark money organization—reported no revenue. It appears, they said, that the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through the dark money organization, which would violate IRS tax law. “I don't have any explanation for how the (c)(4) can bring in zero money in its first year and be able to spend tens of thousands of dollars,” said Robert Maguire, vice president of research and data at the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

It would be particularly concerning, he said, if ex-law enforcement officials openly flouted federal law. “These are hard and fast rules, to make sure that people aren’t misusing nonprofits for purposes they weren’t meant for,” he said. “You would hope that someone who cares about the rule of law would care about making sure their donors have the confidence that they are not misusing the funds.” 

Lentz, the attorney who serves as a spokesman for Border911, said the 2023 tax filing for the dark money organization was incorrect. “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) that shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “It should be all zeros. We’re going to amend that 990 for Border911, Inc.” Lentz added that the 501(c)(4) was created in 2023 but not operational until March 2024. That month, ABC News reported that Border911’s tax-exempt charity appeared to be illegally backing Trump’s campaign, which Lentz told ABC was “inadvertent.” 

The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

After being informed of Lentz’s statement, Maguire said: “Still, even if the explanation is more innocent, the impact can be such that it obscures their activities and makes it more difficult to hold them accountable. I certainly hope that if these were honest mistakes, they will correct them and endeavor to do better in the future. After all, these documents are all signed under penalty of perjury.” 

Reporters for this story also requested comment from five people named on the Border911 website as team members, whom Lentz said are reimbursed for expenses by the foundation.

Two members replied to questions via email–former Border Patrol official Rodney Scott and former DEA special agent Derek Maltz–emphasizing that they joined Border911for philosophical reasons and were not paid employees. Maltz said he wanted “to educate America about border security and the growing fentanyl crisis.” Maltz deferred questions about his compensation to a Border911 Foundation representative but said that most work there is on a “volunteer basis.” 

Scott said that he was “a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team.” The organization “will normally reimburse me for limited/reasonable (coach) travel,” he said and that he has “been compensated for larger speaking events that required travel and extensive time.” Sara Carter, Jaeson Jones, and Victor Avila did not respond to requests for comment by publication date. 

Border Propaganda and Legislation 

Homan has made no secret of his close ties with Trump, who promoted him to acting director of ICE where he initiated and pushed for separating families at the border before retiring in 2018. “I’m a Trump guy and not ashamed of it,” he said in a video announcing The Border911 Foundation, which Trump promoted on his Truth Social media platform last year. 

It’s unclear when Homan first met Byrne, the Overstock.com millionaire, who has funded numerous election denial groups across the country through The America Project. (Byrne did not immediately respond to an interview request.) But, in April 2023, only a few months before Homan started Border911 as “his organization,” Byrne celebrated Homan’s hire as CEO of The America Project at a fundraising event in a gilded ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “What an honor it is to be turning the command of this vessel over to a real national security professional,” he said. 

Byrne then launched into a speech. “I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,” he said. Under President Biden’s America, we are “living through a Chavista Revolution. It’s a classic Maoist doctrine coming at you in all stages,” he told the audience. “I have literally poured 90 percent of my liquidity into this effort because there is no country, no future, if we don’t win this.” 

Homan nodded from the stage. “I’ve never met a man who loves his country more than Patrick Byrne,” he said. “I’m honored that you even asked me.” 

A year later, Homan would return to Mar-a-Lago heading his own fundraiser for the Border911 Foundation with Trump in attendance. Lentz, the attorney representing Homan and the Border911 organizations, said an individual donated the Mar-a-Lago venue to Homan’s group for the April 2024 fundraiser, but he said he didn’t know who it was. The attorney also said that he had no idea how much the group had raised at the event, but that the amount would be reported in their 2024 tax filing next year. 

Prior to becoming CEO, Homan had already participated in America Project events: In January 2023, he appeared alongside Arizona state Representative Steve Montenegro, who had been serving as the America Project’s national political director, at a Phoenix press conference to promote a slate of Border911-endorsed bills, followed by a speaking event two days later with MAGA-aligned Arizona legislators, which included free entry and meals for active-duty military. 

At the press conference, the men repeatedly tied fentanyl deaths to the border “invasion,” insinuating migrants were bringing in the drugs, even though most fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens through ports of entry, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “This border is out of control. It's a crisis,” Homan told reporters. “Anybody who argues differently is ignoring the data, and they're lying to you.” 

“I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

Two days later at a nearby theater, Montenegro publicly touted a “Border911” legislative agenda for the 2023 session that included declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations, repurposing the Arizona National Guard as a border force, allowing unauthorized immigrants to agree to orders of deportation to avoid prosecution, and prohibiting migrants from pleading down charges if they caused the death of an American citizen, mirroring some initiatives that Texas had already adopted under Republican Governor Greg Abbott. (Trump has suggested cartels be designated as foreign terrorist organizations as part of the justification for his proposal, if reelected president, to use his emergency powers to deploy even more active duty military to police the border and protests elsewhere.) 

“We’re going to focus on educating representatives and senators on what their authority is … so that we can start passing the right legislation,” Montenegro told the audience. Then, he added, “We’re going to replicate what we’re doing here” in other states “so that the entire country understands that every state is a border state.”

Montenegro introduced bills in 2023 and in 2024 that would’ve furthered Border911’s goals. Much of this legislative work coincided with Montenegro’s tenure as the America Project’s national political director, which he followed up with paid consulting work, according to state disclosure forms. Yet he never filed a personal financial interest statement with legislative officials before introducing or voting on Border911-aligned bills, a House clerk confirmed. 

It's unclear how much The America Project has paid Montenegro, since Arizona doesn’t require legislators to disclose compensation amounts. Whether Montenegro remains on the group’s payroll is also unknown, since his most recent state filings don’t cover 2024. The lawmaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Receiving money from an outside group while advancing its legislative agenda raises ethical questions, according to Paul Eckstein, a longtime Arizona attorney and expert in legislative conflicts of interest. “If he's receiving … $10,000 or more, if I were giving the advice, I would say he's got a substantial enough financial interest that he should not be involved in any way, in any (related legislative) action,” Eckstein said. 

Some Border911-backed bills have made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate only to be vetoed by Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. But Montenegro and other Republicans successfully referred the “Secure the Border Act” to the November ballot, which, if approved by Arizona voters, would authorize state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officers—even though Arizona border sheriffs have said they lack the manpower and funding to carry it out. One ex-border sheriff, a Republican, called it an “ill-conceived political stunt.” (Similar bills have previously been approved, and largely struck down by the courts, in Arizona and other states.) 

Separate Organizations with the Same Goal 

By May 2024, Homan was running the Border911 Foundation as a separate nonprofit, but he was still collaborating with Montenegro and The America Project. In his capacity as a state elected official, Montenegro approached city leaders in Tombstone, Arizona, in May and requested and received a special permit on behalf of The America Project for a Border911 “Borders and Elections” town hall meeting. Alongside Montenegro at the city council meeting was Shawn Wilson, CEO of a private security firm called Mayhem Solutions Group. “We partner with [Mayhem] them for data and intel coming across the border, not to mention with our law enforcement,” Montenegro said of The America Project’s relationship with Mayhem. (Wilson, who describes himself as an Army veteran, previously volunteered with Arizona Border Recon, a paramilitary group that claims on its website to provide intel and security services to federal agents.) 

The purpose of the event, where Border911 member Victor Avila, the former HSI agent from Texas, was identified as a speaker, would be to “sound the alarm” about the “current administration failing to do its job” when it came to securing the border, Montenegro said, according to the city council meeting minutes. “We’re trying to sound the alarm … not just in the state of Arizona, but we're trying to reach out to every state in the union.”

“I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,”

In addition to a press conference and a Border911 panel with elected officials, they would meet privately with “law enforcement intel officers and other folks that collect data intelligence,” he said. The America Project would also deliver food to local Border Patrol and law enforcement, Montenegro said, and give the local sheriff an award. 

Border911 members have held and filmed similar events in Texas, New York, and elsewhere. Team members often produce and distribute strategically edited video from the border that bolsters MAGA conspiracy theories about invasion and immigrants as criminals. Like Homan, Sara Carter, another Border911 team member, is also a Fox News contributor who often talks about “criminals flooding the border.” 

Jaeson Jones, the former captain in Texas DPS’s intelligence division, who identified himself at one point as Border911’s vice president, creates “invasion” content as a correspondent for the far-right NewsMax, and has been featured on Fox News. Those two media companies separately settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits with voting machine companies after falsely alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trying to overturn that election was The America Project’s initial focus, and election denial remains a major theme of Trump’s reelection campaign. 

Jones and Mayhem Solutions Group use the same video production company, Cine 48, co-founded by the media director of the far-right group Turning Point USA. (Turning Point USA is yet another 501(c)(3) charitable organization with an eponymous dark money group for political purposes.) Jones and Border911 have also regularly produced content about the border for a Turning Point USA series called “Frontlines,” as well as a mini-series co-starring Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, whom Jones has called a “close friend.” 

Lamb is closely aligned with the far-right constitutional sheriffs movement, and he is a promoter of election conspiracies, including about non-citizen voting. 

In one presentation to a Central Texas GOP chapter, Jones showed videos that he said revealed armed cartel members driving around Arizona. He attributed the footage to his firm Omni Intelligence and to Mayhem Solutions Group, and bragged of embedding with Pinal County deputies in Arizona. 

The Border is Open for Business 

The tactic of portraying the border as under invasion has proved useful for efforts to undermine confidence in the election—and has proved profitable for Border911’s members. 

Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified in Washington, D.C., before the House Homeland Security Committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert. 

Maltz did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts. Maltz is the executive director of government relations for PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA, and Texas DPS, among other agencies. Maltz said his job with PenLink includes interacting with the firm’s U.S. government and foreign customers, but he’s not registered as a lobbyist because his position does not involve lobbying. He said he became a member of Border911 because of his concern about Mexican cartels, Chinese organized crime, and escalating fentanyl deaths: “My work with the Border911 Foundation is completely independent of my role with Penlink. … I am a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team, but I am not a board member or employee.” 

Maltz isn't the only Border911 team member linked to a firm that’s cashing in on border security-related government contracts. Rodney Scott, the ex-Border Patrol chief, founded a consulting firm in July 2021—about a month before retiring from the federal government. At the time, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group in California filed a complaint alleging that founding the firm, Honor Consulting, while serving as Border Patrol chief violated federal law and ethics rules. (The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the complaint. The FBI and Homeland Security inspector general’s office said they could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.) In an email response to questions for this story, Scott said that prior to founding the firm, he consulted with U.S. Customs and Border Protection legal counsel, who, according to him, said there were no legal issues or concerns. When asked about the complaint, a CBP spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel matters. 

“He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

In 2023, Scott incorporated a new company with a similar name: Honor Consulting Plus. Some of the firm’s customers include Republican Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil’s re-election campaign, and the Texas Office of the Attorney General, records show. 

In May, the Texas Attorney General’s office granted Scott’s firm, Honor Consulting Plus, a $50,000 contract to advise on the state's lawsuit defending Governor Abbott’s contentious floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande, part of the governor’s multibillion-dollar militarized immigration enforcement initiative called Operation Lone Star. Scott is tasked with providing expert testimony in the case and is approved to invoice $600 an hour, with no monthly billing limit, according to the contract. Scott referred questions about the contract to the AG’s office. 

Since 2018, Homan has also had his own for-profit firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting. His Virginia-based firm registered to lobby in Texas in 2021, though state filings show no activity. Public records reveal only a handful of clients, including $32,000 to provide “strategy consulting” for failed U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, one of the 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed he had been authorized to cast the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Homan also has been personally paid $1,300 in travel reimbursement funds from Trump’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission data. 

Border911 team member Avila has focused less on government contracts and more on aspirations for public office, making unsuccessful bids for city council, Texas Land Commissioner, and Congress. A year ago, Avila launched Border Patriot PAC, which to date has endorsed a single candidate, John Fabbricatore, a former ICE agent running as a Republican for a congressional seat in Colorado. Fabbricatore, who resides in the Denver suburb of Aurora, contributed to nationwide misinformation about a Venezuelan prison gang taking over an apartment complex in his city—a false story the Trump campaign repeated. 

Otherwise, Border Patriot PAC hasn’t done much. According to its July 2024 filing, the PAC only had $19,000—of which $15,000 came from Wilson’s Mayhem Solutions Group. 

In the weeks before the election, members of Border911 have joined a final America Project-backed blitz called “Operation Restore Freedom,” giving speeches about the border along with other pervasive election conspiracy theorists in Texas and in crucial swing states like Nevada and Arizona that Trump needs to win. 

If Trump does prevail, Homan and other Border911 members may get the chance to fundamentally reshape national security and immigration policy. 

If Trump loses, Homan and his former military and law enforcement allies at Border911 and the America Project will likely be on the frontlines sowing doubts about the election for months to come. 

At speaking events, Homan sounds confident in Trump’s victory. At an America Project fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Homan said he’d pledged to Trump, as they dined together in Las Vegas, that the former president would win the November election and he’d serve under him again. “I can’t wait to be back,” Homan said. “He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

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In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web. Tangles’ premier add-on feature, WebLoc, is controversial among digital privacy advocates. Any client who purchases access to WebLoc can track different mobile devices’ movements in a specific, virtual area selected by the user, through a capability called “geofencing.” Users of software like Tangles can do this without a search warrant or subpoena. (In a high-profile ruling, the Fifth Circuit recently held that police cannot compel companies like Google to hand over data obtained through geofencing.) Device-tracking services rely on location pings and other personal data pulled from smartphones, usually via in-app advertisers. Surveillance tech companies then buy this information from data brokers and sell access to it as part of their products.

WebLoc can even be used to access a device’s mobile ad ID, a string of numbers and letters that acts as a unique identifier for mobile devices in the ad marketing ecosystem, according to a US Office of Naval Intelligence procurement notice.

Wolfie Christl, a public interest researcher and digital rights activist based in Vienna, Austria, argues that data collected for a specific purpose, such as navigation or dating apps, should not be used by different parties for unrelated reasons. “It’s a disaster,” Christl told the Observer. “It’s the largest possible imaginable decontextualization of data. … This cannot be how our future digital society looks like.”

While a device’s mobile ad ID is technically an anonymous piece of information, it is easy to cross reference other data points to determine the owner, according to Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If there is another data point—like the address of the person who lives at the place where your phone seems to be all of the time—it can be very easy to quickly identify and build a profile of people using this supposedly anonymous information,” Lipton said. 

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police must have a warrant to obtain cell phone location data from service providers like AT&T and Verizon. But Nate Wessler, the attorney who argued the Carpenter case and the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the Observer that companies have justified selling phone location information through data brokers by arguing that mobile ad IDs are anonymous. 

“These companies absolutely trot that out as one of their defenses, and it is pure poppycock. … It’s transparently a ridiculous defense, because the entire thing that they’re selling is the ability to track phones and to be able to figure out where particular phones are going,” Wessler said.

The privacy implications of police using services—like Tangles—that provide location data are “identical” to the issues raised in the Carpenter case, Wessler said. That’s because location data harvested from apps, as opposed to that obtained from service providers, can be even more invasive, he said. “You can tell just as much about somebody’s GPS history from their apps as you can from their cell phone location data from their phone provider. And in some cases, you can tell more,” Wessler said.

Tangles is a product offered by the cybersecurity company Cobwebs Technologies, which was founded in Israel in 2014 by three former members of Israeli military special units. The company has said their products, which are marketed as open source intelligence (OSINT) tools, have been used to combat terrorism, drug smuggling, and money laundering, but Meta has accused the company of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit. In 2023, Cobwebs Technologies was acquired by the Nebraska-based tech firm PenLink Ltd.

Christl, the Austria-based digital rights researcher, said that companies selling software that incorporates data harvested from mobile phone apps have greatly expanded the definition of OSINT tools. If a company has to buy personal data from third-party brokers to incorporate into a software that they sell to police, he said, then that isn’t really an open source tool.

Lipton, the investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that’s troubling for the public. “People don’t realize that some of this stuff comes with a high cost,” she said. “Both price-wise and privacy-wise.”

In a written statement, a PenLink spokesperson told the Observer their “open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions are used to protect our communities from crime, threats, and cyber-attacks by providing seamless access to data that is publicly available. From a technology perspective, we want to note that we operate only according to the law, adhering to strict standards and regulations.” The spokesperson did not answer other specific questions.

Cobwebs Technologies, now part of PenLink, has scored contracts through its Delaware-based subsidiary Cobwebs America Inc. with various federal agencies, including ICE, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ICE holds Cobwebs America’s highest-dollar federal contract so far, according to usaspending.gov.

DPS’ Intelligence and Counterterrorism division has used Tangles since 2021, as first reported by The Intercept. The agency first purchased the software as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star border crackdown, doling out an initial $200,000 contract as an “emergency award” with no public solicitation. Each year since, DPS has expanded the contract: In 2022, it paid $300,000, and in 2023, more than $400,000, according to contracting records on DPS’ website. The agency’s new plan for a 5-year Tangles license, from 2024 through 2029, will cost about $1 million per year.

“You can tell just as much about somebody’s GPS history from their apps as you can from their cell phone location data from their phone provider. And in some cases, you can tell more.”

In its acquisition plan, DPS states that Intelligence and Counterterrorism division personnel need the tool to “identify and disrupt potential domestic terrorism and other mass casualty threats.” The plan references two Texas mass shootings. In August 2019, a racist white man from Allen killed 23 at a Walmart in El Paso. A few weeks later, a different perpetrator went on a deadly shooting in Midland and Odessa. The plan does not mention the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, when 91 DPS officers formed part of a massive botched law enforcement response. 

“Following the attacks in El Paso and Midland-Odessa Governor Abbott issued several executive orders designed to prevent similar events,” the acquisition plan obtained by the Observer states. “In response to these orders, DPS [Intelligence and Counterterrorism division] dedicated staff to identify potential mass attackers and terrorist threats.”

It is unclear how DPS has used Tangles or whether the software has helped stop any potential mass shootings. DPS did not respond to written questions or an interview request for this story.

Following initial publication of this story, Republican state Representative Brian Harrison said on social media that he would be requesting more information from DPS about its use of the surveillance software. Reached by phone, Harrison told the Observer: “I want to make sure that we don’t have Fourth Amendment violations going on here, whether it’s intentional or not. … Government should be protecting our civil liberties, not violating them.”

After DPS purchased the initial license for Cobwebs’ software in 2021, local Texas law enforcement agencies followed suit. Operation Lone Star spending records from the Goliad County Sheriff’s Office, obtained by the Observer, show that the Goliad sheriff obtained a “cooperative use of [Cobwebs] software” in fall 2023 along with the sheriffs of Refugio and Brooks counties to “identify, link, and track the movements of cartel operatives throughout the region.”

Other Texas clients that have purchased Cobwebs’ software include the Dallas and Houston police departments and the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, which shares access with the Matagorda County Sheriff’s Office, according to local government meeting minutes and DPS emails.

It is unclear how DPS has used Tangles or whether the software has helped stop any potential mass shootings.

Prior to its acquisition by PenLink, Cobwebs Technologies received backlash for how clients used its products. In 2021, Meta banned seven companies—including Cobwebs—that it had identified as participating in an online surveillance-for-hire ecosystem. As part of its sanctions, Meta removed 200 accounts operated by Cobwebs and its customers. In a company report, Meta investigators wrote that they identified Cobwebs customers in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, the United States, New Zealand, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and other countries. 

Cobwebs’ customers were not solely focused on public safety activities, Meta’s report said. “We also observed frequent targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico,” the report stated.

Agencies across the globe have used Tangles. From at least 2021 to 2022, Salvadoran police used it, according to the investigative outlet El Faro. Police in Mexico have also purchased the software, according to Excelsior, a Mexico City newspaper. 

In 2022, a Cobwebs Technologies sales rep asked a DPS employee if the state agency could serve as a customer referral for a police agency in Israel, according to an email obtained by the Observer. In the email, the sales rep stated that DPS had at least 20 Tangles users at the time. DPS’ new acquisition plan allows for 230 named users.

Wessler, the ACLU attorney, said the sale of mobile device data to third-party data brokers and surveillance tech firms remains a legal gray area. “There are some legal frameworks that get at the edges of this, but there’s a whole kind of core of issues that the law just hasn’t caught up to,” Wessler said.

But he said other government agencies already have moved away from purchasing products that use massive amounts of cell phone location data. The services can be expensive, the use of data is invasive, and there isn’t much evidence that these services have substantially helped investigations or solved a lot of cases, he added.

“It’s just like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” Wessler said. “We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money for this kind of haystack of data that they then are trying to pick needles out of, right?”

This story was originally published in The Texas Observer.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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