When you've lost Ammon Bundy -The anti-government militia leader can't make sense of his allies' support of ICE [View all]

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Ammon Bundy Is All Alone
The anti-government militia leader can’t make sense of his allies’ support for ICE violence

Not so long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.

In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.

I spoke with Bundy a few hours after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. “It’s sickening to me,” he told me over the phone, “just to see the parallels of history repeating itself.” (In his November essay, he had compared the administration’s treatment of immigrants to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.) He added, “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/ammon-bundy-trump-ice/685849/