I met Wid Lyman earlier this year, when we were both covering the murder trial of an Arizona rancher accused of shooting a migrant. (The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and the prosecution declined to retry the rancher.) We quickly figured out that we were on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but trials are long and dull and can make for unexpected temporary friendships. During the day, we’d chat about which witnesses seemed evasive and find ourselves generally in agreement; in the evenings, from my hotel room, I would watch him on Infowars, opining about the wide-open border. A few months after the trial, he agreed to let me tag along with him for a day as he drove around Texas and New Mexico, making videos for Border Hawk.
After our uneventful trip up the mountain, Lyman drove across the state line into New Mexico, a transition marked by a sudden proliferation of marijuana dispensaries. We passed by a casino-hotel complex where Lyman had slept on his first visit here, a few years ago. The hotel was nice, but it was within walking distance of the wall, so he doesn’t stay there anymore. “I would drive to the border wall two minutes away, and then I’d drive back to the hotel. I was, like, ‘Man, that’s too close,’ ” he said.
As Lyman tells it, for most of his life he was more interested in sports than politics. He and his older brother, Dan, grew up in Amherst, where their father was a professor at the University of Massachusetts and their mother, Izzy, who also has a Ph.D., was an evangelist for homeschooling. Wid speculated that the liberal environment of New England pushed his mother’s politics rightward. Whatever the reason, the Lymans have made fearmongering about immigrants into a family business. Izzy is the editor of “Victims of Illegal Immigration,” an essay collection with a lurid blood-splattered cover, published by Social Contract Press, another U.S., Inc. project. Dan is the president and editor-in-chief of Border Hawk, as well as an occasional contributor to Infowars. In an interview with Peter Brimelow, the VDARE founder, posted on X earlier this year, Dan Lyman called ending birthright citizenship “a no-brainer” and warned of “the destruction of white America” by immigration.
Wid, who told me that he’s “more moderate” than other members of his family, got involved with border politics more recently. His work as a physical therapist dried up during the pandemic; then, in September of 2021, Izzy offered a suggestion. Thousands of Haitian migrants were camped out in squalid conditions under a bridge at the border in Del Rio, Texas. What if Lyman went down there, checked out what was going on, maybe made some videos?
It wasn’t immediately clear that Wid would make it as a citizen journalist. He had no reporting or filming experience, and his Spanish is limited. “I was totally overwhelmed; I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. On that first trip, he spent a day in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, where he was surprised to see the industries that catered to, and sometimes exploited, migrants: reselling their discarded clothing; providing protection that could resemble extortion. His posts, which he shared on his personal account, were a modest success. Soon, his brother enlisted him to work for Border Hawk, and he began travelling from his home, in Michigan, to Texas, Arizona, and California.
It was a fortuitous time to be making content about immigration. A year after Lyman’s first trip to Del Rio, Elon Musk—who has posted about immigrants relentlessly, and often misleadingly—bought Twitter (now X). Right-wing creators who had once been banned were now promoted; the site is Border Hawk’s “bread and butter,” Lyman told me. (Dan Lyman declined to be interviewed about its operations.) People all over the country were eager for information about what, exactly, was going on at the southern border, and they were increasingly turning to alternative sources to get it.
