I saw roving 'hunt clubs' kill street kids in Colombia. I'm sick that it's happening here

Donald Trump’s presidency now has a human body count.

“We really feel like we’re being hunted, we’re being hunted like animals,” an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian.

I’ve seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time in Colombia on behalf of the German-based international relief organization I’ve worked with for more than half my life. I shared the story in my book about those experiences, The Prophet’s Way, detailing one of the “hunt clubs” I ran across in Bogotá.

These were mostly middle-class European-ancestry (white) men, many of them off-duty cops, who go out at night in camo with high-powered rifles and night-vision gear to hunt dark-skinned “los gamines,” the million or so street children who commit much of the petty (and often serious) crime in the city.

Afterwards, they go drinking and partying, celebrating their kills. Some of the clubs even have names, like “the deer hunters” (cazadores de ciervos).

“Hunt clubs” is my term (and that of my host in Bogotá); during that era, what these men were doing was called “social cleansing” or “limpieza social” and in addition to killing kids, they also targeted for beatings or death homeless people, sex workers, LGBTQ people, drug users, and others they labeled “undesirable.”

As Amnesty International noted in a 1993 press release:

“There is concern for the safety of thousands of street children in Bogota following the appearance on 11 August 1993 of posters in the city centre inviting them to attend their own funerals.

“These posters, which announce the extermination of ‘delinquent street children’ are signed in the name of industrialists, shopkeepers and civic groups. There have been an increasing number of reports of killings of so-called ‘social undesirables’ (desechables sociales) in what are routinely called ‘social clean-up operations,’ generally attributed to shadowy ‘death-squads.’”

But the hunt clubs of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s were pikers, compared to what Trump, Miller, Homan, Noem, et al are running today in America.

So far since Trump took over their operations, they’ve killed at least 40 people, both in their so-called “detention facilities” and on the streets of our cities, and imprisoned more than 70,000 men, women, and children in over 230 concentration camps. And Trump just cut off funding for medical services for those in the camps, so expect the death numbers to grow quickly.

Unlike the “volunteers” in Bogotá, Trump’s thugs are well-paid, making up to $200K when you include signing bonuses, bounties, and other benefits.

And they get to go hunting!

• Supervisory Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, for example, reportedly bragged to his fellow ICE hunt club members that when he shot Miramar Martinez in Chicago suburb Brighton Park there were “5 shots, 7 holes.” The following day, he shared with his ICE buddies a text message saying, “Cool. I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out.’”
• After shooting Renee Good five times for daring to tell him to “have a nice day,” ICE hunt club member Jonathan Ross called her a “fucking bitch.”
• And when two ICE thugs murdered Alex Pretti, they rolled his body over to count the bullet holes as nearby agents laughed and applauded.

Like the hunt club members in Bogotá, today’s ICE hunt club members — under color of law and with the approval of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the applause of Trump’s senior officials — pick out people based on how dark their skin is and routinely kick in brown-skinned people’s doors or drag them out of their cars before assaulting and even killing them.

And, while the hunt club members in Bogotá only occasionally wear masks or balaclavas to conceal their identity, ICE hunt club members can do it all the time.

America has — at least for the past few generations — always considered itself better than this.

These ICE hunt clubs don’t operate in secret. They wear (concealed) badges. They draw salaries from your and my tax dollars. They joke about murder and violence in their text messages. They pose for photos with their victims.

And they know — absolutely know — that powerful people will protect them. After all, the vice president of the United States claimed they have “absolute immunity” from prosecution.

But that protection only works if the rest of us stay quiet.

Colombia’s hunt clubs didn’t (largely) vanish because they had a moral awakening. They ended when the public finally said no and forced accountability. And the country today shudders every time that story is told. History tells us, unambiguously, how this sort of disgrace ends.

Every modern society that normalizes “hunts” of the poor, the dark-skinned, the undocumented, or the politically inconvenient eventually discovers that the culturally-acceptable definition of “undesirable” keeps expanding.

Today it’s brown-skinned migrants. Tomorrow it’s white protesters (they’ve already started that, building a database of “domestic terrorists” who film them and even revoking their access to TSA PreCheck). Then journalists (they just raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson). Then judges (they arrested Judge Hannah Dugan).

Then anyone who won’t clap loudly enough.

Colombia learned this lesson the hard way. As did Germany, Chile, and Argentina. So did the American South after Reconstruction, when “posses” and “night riders” were praised as patriots until, in the 1950s and 1960s, we finally admitted to ourselves what they really were and did something about it.

But here we are again.

The people running today’s ICE hunt clubs may feel untouchable now. After all, people like them always do. But history keeps receipts and is utterly merciless with those who choose to hunt human beings.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.