Inside Enrique Tarrio's Miami Return: Politics, the Proud Boys, and the Road Ahead

On a Tuesday morning in West Miami, people trickle in and out of Latin American Bakery & Cafe with bags of Cuban pastries and Styrofoam cups of coffee. The February air is thick and humid. Cars roar down SW 57th Avenue outside the bustling restaurant, which features a sprawling, shaded outdoor patio and burnt-orange interior walls adorned with colorful framed images of Havana.

Enrique Tarrio strolls onto the café's terrace, around the corner from his home, around 11:15. The 42-year-old looks at ease, wearing a blue plaid button-down shirt, a matching denim "Team Tarrio" cap, and a large black ring bearing the Proud Boys' rooster symbol. He's sporting his signature black Ray-Bans, which he quickly swaps for round-rimmed eyeglasses upon sitting down.

Shortly after he settles in, a waitress comes to take our order. Tarrio, speaking in Spanish, orders a Coke, a colada, Cuban bread, and four ham croquetas.

"Por ahora," he tells her. "Gracias."

Once the food arrives at the table, he squeezes a small wedge of lime onto the croquetas and pours his Coke into a cup of ice. He then proceeds to check his Apple Watch.

"I was released" — Tarrio pauses, looking at the time on the watch's small screen — "18 minutes ago."

Exactly two weeks prior (almost to the minute), the onetime leader of the far-right Proud Boys was released from federal prison. Tarrio had served less than two years of his 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to his role in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot when President Donald Trump pardoned him, along with other members and leaders of far-right groups, with the stroke of a pen.

In a sit-down interview with New Times, Tarrio discussed his return to Miami, his time in prison, and what he sees as the Proud Boys' place in America moving forward. He also talked about plans to possibly run for U.S. Congress, and the political aspirations of other Proud Boys.

"A Really Good Panic Attack"

Tarrio recalls the moment he realized he would likely be seeing freedom. He was lying on the floor of his Louisiana prison cell on November 5, with his ear pressed to the crack of the door, listening carefully to the results of the presidential election being broadcast outside.

"Once he won, I had a really good panic attack," Tarrio says. "I was just waiting for the doors to open."

Hit with the longest sentence imposed on any January 6 defendant, Tarrio was not at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors nonetheless cast him as the mastermind of the attack, presenting evidence showing he created a special wing of the Proud Boys called the "Ministry of Self Defense," which coordinated attacks during the insurrection and celebrated them afterward.

"Make no mistake...we did this," Tarrio told senior Proud Boy leadership after the attack, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Tarrio, however, has long maintained that the insurrection was neither organized nor planned in advance. At a recent press conference held in Doral days after his return home, Tarrio said he was in Maryland on January 6 watching the news as it unfolded. "There’s absolutely nothing I will apologize for, because I did nothing wrong," he told reporters during the press conference. "The Proud Boys did nothing wrong, and American patriots did nothing wrong."

On this early February morning, he strikes a slightly less brash tone.

While seated outside the Cuban restaurant, located just down the street from Miami International Airport, he describes how he filled more than 15 composition books with plans for his future post release. Most of the plans, he says, involved "conventional" means or normal jobs. He considered returning to Miami to work in the security industry again or possibly developing some properties he owns in North Florida.

But once he returned home on January 22, he abandoned all those plans. He says his passion now lies elsewhere: with the Proud Boys. "Most of those ideas that I wrote down were ideas outside of the realm of politics. But now looking at things, I love what I do, so I think I'm gonna continue to do that in some capacity," Tarrio says. "Is it activism? Is it trying to get elected? I don't know what it means yet."

Proud Boys at a Crossroads

In September 2016, Vice Media cofounder-turned-far-right-provocateur Gavin McInnes founded the Proud Boys as an ostensible "men's drinking club."

While the group’s members have marketed themselves as "Western chauvinists" and "anti-white guilt," the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil-rights advocacy organization, has long designated the Proud Boys as a "hate group" for the club's repeated brawls with leftist protesters at political rallies and ties to white-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups while Tarrio was chairman.

Tarrio, a Miami-born Afro-Cuban who took the reins as the Proud Boys' charismatic leader in 2018, steered the group in a decidedly political direction, providing security for right-wing political figures and attending rallies and protests on hot-button issues, including COVID-19 mask mandates and the 2020 presidential election.

Although his days as Proud Boys leader seemed to have ended in 2021, when he was initially jailed on criminal charges for burning a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic Black church in Washington, D.C., Tarrio has repeatedly emphasized in media interviews since his release from prison that it’s a mistake to label him as the "former" chairman of the Proud Boys.

"Moving forward, we're never going to state the structure, how it works, or any of that," Tarrio adds, then volunteers without elaborating that most of the Proud Boys support him, an unsubstantiated claim.

In Miami, where there are two Proud Boys chapters — Villain City and Vice City — that's a notable assertion. Tarrio founded the Vice City chapter in 2018. But in 2021, after Reuters uncovered that he had worked as a "prolific" informant for federal law enforcement following his 2012 indictment for his role in a scheme to rebrand and resell stolen diabetic test strips, the chapter disavowed its former leader — and labeled him a "rat." The infighting, which Tarrio recently described as "high school drama," led him to form a new chapter, Villain City.

Back in 2021, as Tarrio sat in jail, a former Proud Boy told New Times that while the organization was supposed to be a "men's drinking club" (a common refrain from Tarrio and McInnes), the Vice City chapter had become a "violent, maverick group that inserts itself into the political fray at every opportunity."

"These guys are fucking thugs and villains," he said.

Tarrio says that while he’s been working on uniting the two groups and plans to meet with both factions soon, he suspects a "grand majority" of Vice City’s membership consists of people who joined post-January 6. "After seeing everything that we went through in the investigations and the arrests, and you think it's a good idea to join the Proud Boys after January 6, I don't want you," Tarrio says. "There's something fucking wrong with you. You know, it's stupid, it's retarded, and you get the wrong sets of people."

Further, he says Vice City members have espoused what he calls "quirky, fringe views on things."

Quirky and fringe, as in, possibly anti-Semitic?

"Yeah, potentially," he says. "I know that we have some bad apples in the organization, and that's common, you know" he adds. "We weed them out as they come in and as we see the issues."

Despite the internal strife and increased scrutiny on the group since the insurrection, the Proud Boys have remained active across the nation. They've joined protests against the Cuban government in Miami, worked as security for a far-right evangelical pastor outside a Planned Parenthood center in Salem, Oregon, and shown up to school board meetings around the country to protest mask mandates. In the summer of 2022, members of the group stormed a children's drag queen story hour in California; event attendees said the "extremely aggressive" group "totally freaked out the kids" by shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs. Police reportedly investigated the attack as a possible hate crime.

"The Proud Boys are not terrorist masterminds. These are not the brightest neofascists out there," Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, recently told Wired. "But they are committed to the cause. They are single-minded in this mission now: for revenge, for retribution. And as we've seen before, they are willing to go across state lines and use violence in furtherance of their goals."

Following Trump's pardons, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism analyzed the Proud Boys' social media channels and found a spike in online activity, including discussions of ramping up real-world activism to support the Trump administration's agenda.

Tarrio says the group’s ideals haven’t changed since he left for prison, and that the group likely will continue to show up to protest events like drag queen story hour — and perhaps even attend school board meetings. But he also notes that the group will likely pivot to other forms of demonstrations. Take, for instance, the California Proud Boys who recently hung signs on a freeway with the Proud Boys logos and statements that read "Support Your Local ICE Raids" and "Fuck All Your Foreign Flags."

Spotted in California 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/M1FOfrIsX7

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) February 4, 2025

"I think they should have removed the 'L' but I ain't gonna couch-quarterback this thing," Tarrio wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a photo of the signs. "PROUD OF YOUR BOY!"

That said, Tarrio says he feels the "rally thing" for the Proud Boys has died –– meaning, the group's members are no longer showing up to protests like they used to. "The club has gotten to a point where we don't need to go to fucking rallies," he asserts. "That's why I built the Ministry of Self Defense. I didn't want those huge crowds."

He adds that because the main groups that the Proud Boys opposed, such as Black Lives Matter and "that 'Antifa' situation" — complete with air quotes around the word Antifa — aren't "a thing anymore," it's no longer necessary for members of the group to attend demonstrations. "I just don't see a need for us to go out there and be out there," he says. "I'll still go over there and piss them off [about the] the immigration thing. You'll probably still see us at the school board."

Does that mean that Proud Boys will pivot to other ways of influencing the culture and political scene? Perhaps by running for office? (Some members of the group have already won local elections.)

Tarrio allows that he's heard from "a lot" of local and national Proud Boys, as well as January 6 participants, who say they plan to run for office.

As for Tarrio himself?

"It's a maybe thing," he says. If he does run for office, he says, it probably won't be a repeat of his his 2020 bid for Florida’s 27th Congressional District, which he withdrew from before the Republican primary. Instead, he says he's considering, Matt Gaetz’s former District 1 seat near Pensacola, which Gaetz has said he has no interest in reclaiming. "If I do run, I want to be in that building that they accused me of trying to storm," Tarrio says.

Political Prisoner?

Tarrio says he typically read two books at a time while he was behind — one nonfiction and one fiction. He read biographies by Walter Isaacson (including the one about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs), George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and a book about Attila the Hun, the ruthless Central European ruler who set his sights on the Roman Empire during the Fifth Century.

Tarrio says he was fascinated by the people who went up against the Romans during that period. "These little groups went against this gigantic empire and were able to nip at its heels until it tore itself down — with the help of what they considered barbarians," Tarrio says. "And they weren't really barbarians. Sometimes they look better than some of the emperors."

Upon his own return to Miami, Tarrio says, he went to a local event celebrating the 172nd anniversary of the birth of José Martí, who led the fight for Cuba's independence from Spain in the 19th Century.

During the celebration, someone asked all of the "political prisoners" present to assemble for a photo. "Automatically, I grab my camera to take a picture, and they're like, 'No, no, no, you come.' I'm like, 'No, no, no, I can't do that,'" Tarrio recounts. "So they kind of forced me into a picture, because you could never tell no to a Cuban."

Unlike other January 6 arrestees (and the president who ultimately pardoned them), Tarrio says he doesn’t see himself as a political prisoner in the conventional sense. "Do I consider myself a political prisoner in the United States at a level of the United States? I say yes," Tarrio explains. "But at a level of what you actually consider a political prisoner, it's kind of like, no."

He adds that human history is filled with examples of people who were called "extremists" for opposing those in power. He doesn’t want to compare himself to a civil rights leader — "I’m not worthy of a sandal on their foot," he says — but notes that they too were sometimes called extremists.

Does he see himself as an extremist today?

He pauses.

"In a way," he says. "Not as intense as some people."

Before his incarceration, Tarrio says, he remembers how people would recognize him in public and casually remark that "he's a Proud Boys guy" before going on their way. But since his return, some members of the Cuban-American community have treated him like a celebrity.

At a recent birthday celebration for his grandfather, for example, it was hard to say who was the guest of honor. "My mom doesn’t help," he says. "I'm like, 'Wait a second, where are we going to dinner?' She says, 'Versailles,'" Tarrio recounts. "I'm like, What the fuck? You’re crazy!"

By now it's half past 12, and Tarrio has finished his croquetas and moved on to his colada. He pulls a cigarette from a box of Marlboros and lights it, then warns that he has to leave soon: He received a last-minute invite to a birthday celebration at Mar-a-Lago for Tony Delgado, the CEO of Latino Wall Street, whom President Trump reportedly once referred to as "The King of Puerto Rico." (Tarrio emphasizes that Trump will not be present at the event.)

As he takes one last drag on the Marlboro, two older women spot him as they enter the café and stop in their tracks. "Oh my God, what an honor!" one of the women gushes. "I hope you're free now. I was praying for you all the time!"

"Yeah?” Tarrio asks, rising to hug them and shake their hands. "Well, it worked."