The leader of an armed group that spent the past two months detaining migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, drawing condemnation from civil liberties advocates, has been hospitalized after he was attacked in jail, his attorney said.
Larry Hopkins, 69, was in a hospital with broken ribs after being attacked on Tuesday at the Dona Ana County Detention Center in Las Cruces in southern New Mexico, attorney Kelly O'Connell said.
A spokeswoman for the Dona Ana County center did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The attack occurred the same day Hopkins' United Constitutional Patriots (UCP) group abandoned its border camp near Sunland Park, New Mexico, where they had spent two months detaining thousands of illegal migrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last week accused Hopkins' group of being a fascist, white nationalist militia illegally detaining and kidnapping Central American families seeking asylum.
O'Connell said he had spoken with Hopkins by phone.
"This guy is very high-profile. So, if he gets put into jail and is immediately attacked after his first hearing just a few days after being put in there, can Dona Ana County correctional protect high-profile defendants?" O'Connell asked.
O'Connell said he did not know why Hopkins had been targeted. But a spokesman for his UCP paramilitary group said he believed it was because of his activity at the border.
"They put him in a pod cell with a group of people and they had just got done watching the article about the ACLU writing about him being racist, and as a result of that he was attacked," UCP spokesman Jim Benvie said in a video posted online.
New Mexico's Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday said the UCP's activities had to stop, and the FBI arrested Hopkins the next day on gun charges based on a 2017 search of his home.
Benvie said the UCP was moving to another campsite in a couple of days and would continue to support the U.S. Border Patrol as it faced an "invasion" of migrants, most of whom it said are fraudulently seeking asylum.
"We do have a private property location on the border that we have secured," said Benvie. "We will not be going anywhere, we will be on an area where we can continue to do what we’ve done.”
The Border Patrol has said it does not support private citizens acting as law enforcement.
