This SPLC article is so slanted it makes me laugh. Doesn't matter
though. If they put so much pressure on the border that it begins to
affect drug trafficker bussiness, people will start dying. AK's vs
pistols and shot guns. HA HA HA HA HA!!! DIE MOTHER FUCKERS DIE!!!
***** you.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Arizona Showdown
High-powered firearms, militia maneuvers and racism at the Minuteman
Project
By David Holthouse
COCHISE COUNTY, Ariz. -- The predominantly Hispanic towns of Douglas
and Naco are connected by the aptly named Border Road, a 20-mile
stretch of rocky dirt that runs parallel to a ragged barbed wire fence
separating the United States from Mexico.
The night of April 3, armed vigilantes camped along Border Road in a
series of watch posts set-up for the Minuteman Project, a month-long
action in which revolving casts of 150 to 200 anti-immigration
militants wearing cheap plastic "Undocumented Border Patrol Agent"
badges mobilized in southeastern Arizona. Their stated goal was to "do
the job our government refuses to do" and "protect America" from the
"tens of millions of invading illegal aliens who are devouring and
plundering our nation."
At Station Two, Minuteman volunteers grilled bratwursts and fantasized
about murder.
"It should be legal to kill illegals," said Carl, a 69-year old retired
Special Forces veteran who fought in Vietnam and now lives out West.
"Just shoot 'em on sight. That's my immigration policy recommendation.
You break into my country, you die."
Carl was armed with a revolver chambered to fire shotgun shells. He
wore this hand cannon in a holster below a shirt that howled "American
bad asses" in red, white and blue. The other vigilantes assigned to
Station Two included a pair of self-professed members of the National
Alliance, a violent neo-Nazi organization. These men, who gave their
names only as Johnny and Michael, were outfitted in full-body
camouflage and strapped with semi-automatic pistols.
Earlier that day, Johnny and Michael had scouted sniper positions in
the rolling, cactus-studded foothills north of Border Road, taking
compass readings and drawing maps for future reference.
"I agree completely," Michael said. "You get up there with a rifle and
start shooting four or five of them a week, the other four or five
thousand behind them are going to think twice about crossing that
line."
With a grilled sausage in one hand and a cheap night vision scope in
the other, Johnny scanned the brush in Mexico, spitting distance away.
"The thing to do would be to drop the bodies just a few hundred feet
into the U.S. and just leave them there, with lights on them at night,"
he said. "That sends the message 'No Trespassing,' in any language."
The conversation stopped just short of decapitating Mexicans and
putting their heads on pikes, facing south.
"I don't really like violence, but if we did start doing what you're
talking about, it would show we mean business for a change," said the
group's only woman, and the only person who didn't carry a gun. "It
would say, 'This is the USA, don't ***** with us!"
The woman, who said she was with a Pennsylvania anti-immigration group,
had outraged Johnny and Michael that afternoon by reporting for duty
with a Star of David pendant dangling below the neckline of her "I
Survived the Minuteman Project" t-shirt. She also squabbled with them
over the morality of pit bull fighting, and expressed her belief in
animal rights and no-kill dog and cat shelters. They started calling
her "Jew *****" behind her back.
She got back on their good side by condoning blood lust.
"Damn, I thought you were one of them," Michael said.
"One of what?" the woman asked.
"You know, animal rights, pacifism, save the kittens, all that crap."
"Well, this may sound a little weird, but I just have more respect for
the lives of stray cats and dogs than I do illegal aliens."
"That's not weird at all," Michael said. "Not one damn bit."
Playing Army
Vigilante militias have been capturing, pistol-whipping and very
possibly shooting Latin American immigrants in Cochise County since the
late '90s, when shifts in U.S. border control policies transformed the
high desert region into the primary point of entry for Mexico's two
most valuable black market exports, drugs and people.
But the Minuteman Project raised the stakes with a highly publicized
national recruiting drive followed by a campaign of deceitful media
manipulation. These maneuvers generated massive and mostly positive
nationwide coverage of what in actuality was little more than a
relatively small and ineffectual gathering of bigots and weekend
warriors, led by a pair of dueling egos. While they played Army in the
desert for a few weeks, this slapdash band was transformed by the hype
into the elite vanguard of America's anti-immigration movement.
The Minuteman Project was the brainchild of two fathers: Jim Gilchrist,
a retired accountant and Vietnam veteran from Orange County,
California, and Chris Simcox, a former kindergarten teacher at a
private school in Brentwood, Calif., who left his job and his family,
moved to Tombstone, Ariz., and refashioned himself into a brash
anti-immigration militant following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Before the Minuteman Project began, Gilchrist and Simcox repeatedly
claimed they had recruited more than 1,300 volunteers. But when their
plan lurched into action on April Fool's Day in Tombstone, fewer than
150 volunteers actually showed up, and they were clearly outnumbered on
the Wild West movie-set streets by a swarm of reporters, photographers,
camera crews, anti-Minuteman protesters, American Civil Liberties Union
legal observers, and costumed gunfight show actors.
On the whole, the Minuteman Project's enlistees were nearly all white.
This wasn't surprising, except that Gilchrist and Simcox also claimed
prior to April 1 that a full 40% of their volunteers would be
minorities, including, according to their Web site,
"American-Africans," "American-Mexicans," "American-Armenians," four
paraplegics and six amputees.
California and Arizona were the most heavily represented states among
the Minuteman enlistees, but the volunteers reported from all regions
of the country. Many, if not most, were over 50 years old, counting a
relatively high percentage of retired military men, police officers,
and prison guards. Women made up nearly a third of the volunteers,
including a bevy of white-haired ladies from Orange County, Calif.,
selling homemade Minuteman Project merchandise like "What Part of
'Illegal' Don't They Understand" T-shirts and the quickly ubiquitous
"Undocumented Border Patrol Agent" badges (which, oxymoronically, bore
color-copy counterfeits of the official Department of Homeland Security
seal).
The keynote speaker at the Minuteman Project's opening day rally was
Tom Tancredo, the Republican Congressman from Colorado who chairs the
Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.
Tancredo addressed a crowd of about 100 inside Schieffelin Hall, an
auditorium not far from the ok Corral. Outside the hall, a phalanx of
Arizona Rangers (a state police agency) stood between the hall's
entrance and about 40 anti-Minutemen protesters who banged on pots and
pans and drums while the vibrantly outfitted performers of a
traditional Aztec dance group leapt and whirled to the cacophonous
rhythm.
In late March, President Bush had condemned the Minuteman Project at a
joint press conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox. "I'm against
vigilantes in the United States of America," Bush said. "I'm for
enforcing the law in a rational way."
Tancredo said that Bush should be forced to write, "I'm sorry for
calling you vigilantes," on a blackboard one hundred times and then
erase the chalk with his tongue.
"You are not vigilantes," he roared. "You are heroes!"
Tancredo told the Minutemen that each of them stood for 100,000
likeminded Americans who couldn't afford to make the trip. He applauded
Gilchrist and Simcox as "two good men who understand we must never
surrender our right as citizens to do our patriotic duty and defend our
country ... and stop this invasion ourselves."
Enemy Territory
While Gilchrist is newly prominent on the anti-immigration front - he
recently joined the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, a hate
group whose leader routinely describes Mexicans as "savages" - Simcox
has been active since 2002, when he founded Civil Homeland Defense, a
Tombstone-based vigilante militia that he brags has captured more than
5,000 Mexicans and Central Americans who entered the country without
visas.
"These people don't come here to work. They come here to rob and deal
drugs," Simcox told the Intelligence Report in a 2003 interview. "We
need the National Guard to clean up our cities and round them up."
But that was the old Chris Simcox talking, not the new, spiffed-up,
buttoned-down, ready-for-primetime Chris Simcox.
The old Simcox described Citizens Homeland Defense as "a committee of
vigilantes," and "a border patrol militia." The new Simcox - the one
interviewed for dozens of national TV news programs and major newspaper
articles about the Minuteman Project - characterized his new and
larger outfit of citizen border patrollers as "more of a neighborhood
watch program."
The old Simcox said of Mexicans and Central American immigrants, "They
have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling
drugs to your kids or raping your daughter and they are evil people."
The new Simcox said he sympathizes with their plight, and sees them as
victims of their own government's failed policies.
Gilchrist gave his sound bites an even more extreme makeover by
frequently comparing himself and most of his volunteers to "white
Martin Luther Kings," and the Minuteman Project to the civil rights
movement. He and Simcox both also preposterously declared in interview
after interview that they had designed the Minuteman Project to
"protect America from drug dealers and terrorists" as much as to catch
undocumented immigrants and turn them over to the U.S. Border Patrol.
The mainstream American media largely failed to challenge these
flagrant reinventions, even though Gilchrist's militant rhetoric about
immigrants "devouring and plundering our nation" was still up on the
Minuteman Project's Web site; even though Simcox's statements are
public record (many were published in his own newspaper, the Tombstone
Tumbleweed), and even though the Minuteman Project's leaders already
had a record of lying to the media.
Early this year, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Web sites began openly
recruiting for the Minuteman Project. In response, Gilchrist and Simcox
proclaimed that neo-Nazi Skinheads and race warriors from organizations
such as the National Alliance and Aryan Nations were specifically
banned from participating. Pressured by journalists to explain exactly
how they planned to keep these undesirables out, the two organizers
said they were working with the FBI to carefully check the backgrounds
of all potential Minuteman volunteers, only to have the FBI completely
deny this was the case.
Gilchrist and Simcox then claimed they were personally checking out
each and every potential volunteer using on-line databases. Even if
this were true, one of Gilchrist's computers crashed the morning of
April 1, wiping out the records of at least 75 pre-registered
volunteers. As a result, the registration protocol in Tombstone rapidly
degenerated into a free-for-all, and virtually anyone who showed up and
gave a name was issued a Minuteman Project badge and told where to go
the next day to be assigned to a watch post.
Gilchrist and Simcox further claimed to the media prior to April 1 that
the only volunteers who would be allowed to carry firearms would be
those who had a concealed-carry handgun permit from their home states,
an indication that they had passed at least a cursory background
investigation. In fact, virtually no one was checked for permits.
While most of the Minuteman volunteers were not organized racists, at
least one member of Aryan Nations infiltrated the effort, and Johnny
and Michael said they were two of six members of the Phoenix chapter of
the National Alliance who signed up as Minuteman Volunteers. They said
the other four had arrived separately in two-man teams in order to
cover more ground and be less conspicuous. They said the Alliance
members came out to support the Minuteman Project, but also to recruit
new members, and to learn the remote hot zones for border crossers in
Cochise County. They said they intended to return and conduct small,
roaming, National Alliance-only vigilante patrols in the fall, "when we
can have a little more privacy," as Johnny put it.
The day after the registration meltdown, the Minuteman Project
sponsored a protest across the street from the Border Patrol's
headquarters in Naco. It drew about 75 demonstrators, including Johnny
and Michael, who sat quietly in camp chairs, wearing sunglasses and
holding placards.
Michael's sign was decorated with a war-room graphic of arrows that
represented armies marching north from Mexico and spreading throughout
the United States.
"Invasion?" it asked. "What Invasion?"
The graphic on Michael's sign was almost identical to the imagery on a
billboard the Alliance paid to put up earlier this year in a
predominantly Latino neighborhood of Las Vegas and on Alliance fliers
that were tossed onto driveways and lawns in Douglas and Tombstone in
late March during a dead-of-night distribution drive.
"Immigration or invasion?" those fliers read. "Non-whites are turning
America into a Third World slum. They come for welfare or to take our
jobs. They bring crime. Let's send them home now!"
Johnny and Michael offered their last names to no one, and never spoke
of their jobs, though Michael said he had fought in the first Gulf War
with the 82nd Airborne Division. At the protest, he wore a desert
camouflage vest over a black shirt emblazoned with a white fist and
combat boots. There were other small clues to the pair's ideology.
Driving to the protest, they blasted the white-power rock band
Youngblood. Johnny made several references to the "14 Words," a white
supremacist adage ("We must secure the existence of our race and a
future for White children"). Johnny also had a National Alliance symbol
tattooed to the back of his neck and "Born in the c.s.a." (referring to
the Confederate States of America) inked below his left jawbone.
"We both grew up in El Paso, and we've been racially aware since we
were kids," Michael said. "In the sixth grade, El Paso put in a forced
busing program, and I got sent to a middle school that was 95% Mexican.
I got my ***** kicked about every day. Johnny and I started backing each
other up and we've been fighting Mexicans ever since."
Though both have lived in Arizona since the late '90s, the Minuteman
Project marked the first time either has dared come near the border.
"The only way I'd be down here is with a bunch of other white guys with
guns," Michael said. "Whites are the minority in these border towns,
man. They've already been taken over. This is enemy territory."
Lock and Load
The Minuteman Project's "command and communications center" was located
on the campus of Miracle Valley Bible College, a former cult compound
just outside Naco. Stained mattresses and dusty junk cluttered the
halls of the compound's dormitory buildings, where 100 Minuteman
volunteers slept two to a room.
Another 30 to 40 vigilantes pitched tents on a weedy ball field with a
rusted backstop, where tumbleweeds soared and bounced on shrieking
desert winds.
The social atmosphere on the desolate compound was saturated with
paranoia, military fetishism and machismo. A neatly printed sign posted
to the communal shower room announcing "Women's Shower Hours 7-9 and
3-5" was defaced with a scrawled "NO! MEN ONLY!"
By day two of the Minuteman Project, volunteers had taken to calling
the college's cafeteria the "mess hall," the dormitories "barracks,"
and the boundaries of the campus "the perimeter." Security was tight.
Armed guards patrolled the perimeter and stopped cars at the front gate
to check occupants for Minuteman badges. Minuteman security teams
randomly placed trip flares in the desert outside the compound's
structures to alert them at night to the presence of intruders.
Rumors of imminent danger flew through the dorms regularly, along with
shouts to "lock and load," because the notorious Central American
street gang MS-13 was about to storm the campus.
MS-13 is a favorite bogeyman of the anti-immigration movement, and in
late March unsubstantiated Internet rumors began swirling that MS-13
leaders had issued orders for hundreds of MS-13 members in Los Angeles
and Phoenix to converge in Cochise County and "teach the Minutemen a
lesson." The Washington Times reported these rumors as fact on March 28
in a front-page article headlined "Gang will target Minuteman vigil on
Mexico border."
The night of April 4, a cry of alarm went up throughout the Miracle
Valley compound that "a credible threat" had been received that armed
MS-13 gang members were about to lead a charge of hundreds of Mexicans
"over the wire" and against the Minuteman posts along Border Road.
Furiously donning body armor and loading weapons, Minuteman Project
security officers and citizen volunteers piled into vehicles and raced
to the rescue, only to find that, like all the supposedly impending
assaults on the Bible college, the MS-13-led attack never materialized.
The Minuteman Project's culture of fear sprang from the top and then
trickled down through the ranks. A towering bodyguard dressed all in
black shadowed Gilchrist, and Simcox often donned a bulletproof vest
(Simcox is prohibited from carrying a firearm due to his 2004
conviction for illegally packing a pistol in a national park while
hunting immigrants).
When Johnny and Michael first arrived at their assigned post on Border
Road, they warily eyed a rock formation atop a hill about 250 yards
away, in Mexico.
"That's a perfect MS-13 sniper's nest," Michael said. "Keep an eye out
for any glints of metal up there."
Johnny pulled out a pair of vinyl rifle cases from a hiding place in
the heap of camping and military surplus gear that filled the back of
his Toyota 4Runner. Inside the cases were assault rifles, a violation
of the Minuteman's weapons policy, which required volunteers to arm
themselves with handguns only. "They're loaded, and there are extra
clips in there, just in case anything goes down," he said.
Carl found a depression in the earth behind his pick-up truck and
called his squad together.
"This is our fallback position," he said. "If we start taking incoming
rounds, everyone dive here and get your head down."
But there were no incoming rounds, and no invading, dark-skinned
hordes. Day after day, hour after hour, the Minuteman Project
volunteers spaced in seven posts along a mile-long stretch of Border
Road sat in lawn chairs and milled around, staring at dirt, cacti, and
the occasional jackrabbit.
There was so little action on the Mexican side of the fence that a lone
cattle rancher riding his horse just south of the border was enough to
spark a flurry of radio traffic: "Station Two, this is Station One, we
have a mounted possible hostile coming your way, over."
The rancher smiled, waved, and shouted, "Hola!"
"He's probably scouting our troop strength and positions," said
Michael. "I don't trust that guy."
Machine Guns and Minefields
Richard Hodges, lifetime Cochise County resident, lives with his wife
on a homestead just off the Naco side of Border Road in the same house
his great-grandfather built in 1897. Curious about the Minuteman
Project, he cruised up and down Border Road, along with several other
local residents, snapping photos and chatting up the vigilantes.
"Some of them seem all right, and I do give them credit for putting
their money where their mouth is and for bringing a lot of attention to
the problem of illegal immigration. But a lot of them are a little too
extreme, a little too racist for my taste," Hodges said. "They were
talking to me like they're white supremacists or something, and they
were assuming I must be too just because I live here and have to deal
with all the illegals. But I don't care too much for those kinds of
attitudes. That's just not the correct mentality people need to bring
down here. That sort of thinking should have died with Hitler."
Back when he was a kid, Hodges said, the average Mexican didn't have
any reason to sneak into the U.S.
"They had it pretty okay in Mexico, so when my daddy found a Mexican on
our property, he'd put a shotgun on him, you bet, but it wasn't because
he didn't like Mexicans, it was because he knew that Mexican was
probably on the run, because their criminals would run to America just
the same as our criminals would run to Mexico. My father would order
them to take off their pants, them give them a choice: either walk back
to Mexico with no pants on, or wait for the sheriff."
Things are different now.
"I see illegals on my property all the time, and I don't point a gun at
them. You can tell just from looking at them they're no threat. They
don't scare me. They're not out to get me. They just want to go on
their way. Sometimes I'll call Border Patrol if it's a really big
group. Other times I just say, 'Oh, what the hell,' and let them be. I
do worry that some of them are coming into the country for a welfare
free ride, and I'm sure a few of them are criminals, but I talk to
these people a lot, and I'll tell you, most of them are coming here to
work. Pure and simple."
The immigration problem can't be solved in America, Hodges said. It can
only be solved in Mexico.
"I was in the Air Force, and I saw how the Soviets did it. Sure, we
could build a wall, and put machine-gun towers on top, and create a no
man's land with a minefield, and we start machine-gunning people and
blowing them to bits, and it might curtail them a bit, but it won't
stop them from coming so long as we allow the Mexican government to
keep treating its people so poorly. You can put the Marines on the
border, you can build all the walls and bring in all the Minuteman
Projects you want. They're not going to stop. There are millions and
millions and millions of poor, desperate people in Mexico, and hunger
is a powerful motivating force."
But no matter how desperate, it was hard to imagine any but the most
foolhardy of undocumented immigrants would dare attempting to cross
into the U.S. along the mile of Border Road staked out by the Minuteman
Project, not when it was so easy for them to just hike an extra mile in
either direction and circumvent the vigilante enforcement zone, which
was a hive of activity easily spotted a distance.
The vigilante blockade was augmented by a constant procession of U.S.
Border Patrol agents, Cochise County sheriff's deputies, curious local
residents like Hodges, and the omnipresent media. Also, while they
posed for the cameras, staring dramatically at absolutely nothing but
empty desert through their spotting scopes and binoculars, the
Minuteman Project volunteers were themselves under constant watch by
roving clusters of American Civil Liberties Union legal observers, who
the Minuteman volunteers referred to over their radios as "traitors,"
"Jane Fondas," and "acl-Jews."
The Minuteman volunteers were stone-faced toward most of the reporters
and camera crews that cruised up and down Border Road, trolling for
interviews and footage. But the vigilantes cheered the arrival of Fox
News Channel crews ("They're our people," said Michael) and that of
anti-immigration CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, whose coverage of the Minuteman
Project was particularly supple.
Gilchrist and Simcox had difficulty sharing the spotlight. Cochise
County, it turned out, wasn't big enough for both their egos.
Once when Simcox saw Gilchrist surrounded by reporters, he said to
himself, but loudly, "There goes Gilchrist, holding down his own fort
again."
And to one group of volunteers, Simcox said, "Listen up, I need
everybody to understand that while the California people did a good job
of getting you here, now that you're here, this is my show, because
this is Civil Homeland Defense territory, so just understand that,
okay? Thanks."
Of the two, Gilchrist revealed himself to be the more hackneyed media
ham.
The afternoon of April 2, a documentary film director posed Gilchrist
in front of Johnny, Michael, and Carl standing shoulder-to-shoulder
before the border fence, with their backs to the "sniper's nest" they'd
been so fearful of scant hours before.
"We are not racists," Gilchrist said on camera. "We don't endorse
racism, and we're not a hate group. We've told white supremacists
they're not welcome here, and we've kept them out. The only hate group
members here are from the aclu."
Johnny and Michael put on their poker faces.
"The ACLU are no different from white supremacists," Gilchrist said.
"They're a clear and present danger. They have the same mentality that
murdered Martin Luther King, and they want to kill us. Literally the
aclu wants to kill us by invoking violence. We've been vilified and
castigated as ghoulish monsters, as gun-toting, baby-killing war
machines.
"We are not in favor of violence, and we don't hate immigrants. We
don't have any problem with Mexicans. If they come into the country
legally, we want them here. We want America to be a melting pot of all
different kinds of people, where every race, color and creed is
blending together."
The two neo-Nazis bristled. Melting pot? Was he serious?
"We are a peaceful demonstration. We're doing this peacefully, the way
our founding fathers wanted us to. We don't need baseball bats and tire
irons and guns and flamethrowers and bulldozers to wipe people out and
level villages. We can do this peacefully, same way Martin Luther King
sought justice for American blacks. We're followers of Gandhi and
Martin Luther King..."
"End of interview," Johnny said.
He and Michael abruptly walked away.
Once they were out of earshot, Johnny called King "an Alabama
silverback" and made gorilla noises. Michael said, "I hope he
[Gilchrist] doesn't believe that crap. I realize he's gotta be all PC
for the media, but come on - Gandhi didn't wear a gun. We're in a
race war, not a peace march."
'Avoid Them!'
Midway through April, the Minuteman Project declared total victory.
"Citizens in lawn chairs, armed only with cell phones and binoculars,
shut down a 25-mile stretch of the border," Simcox boasted at a press
conference held at the Miracle Valley Bible College compound. "We
showed our government it can be done."
In reality, the citizens were armed with considerably more than cell
phones and binoculars, and they were active along two miles of the
border at most, and those two miles were not even continuous.
As proof of their success, Gilchrist and Simcox touted a potent
statistic: the number of Border Patrol apprehensions of suspected
illegal immigrants in the Minuteman Project enforcement zone dropped
almost 90% during the month of April, compared to previous years.
But government officials on both sides of the border say that's because
the Mexican government made a huge effort to warn immigrants looking to
cross about the Minuteman Project, and thousands of immigrants either
walked around the vigilantes or simply hunkered down in the Mexican
border city of Agua Prieta and waited for the vigilantes to go home at
the end of April.
The governor of the Mexican border state of Sonora, Eduardo Bours
Castelo, ordered 44 members of the Sonora State Preventative Police
Force to patrol a huge cattle ranch opposite the Minuteman sector of
Border Road, in order to intercept unwary migrants before they reached
the vigilante posts.
The Mexican federal border patrol agency Grupo Beta, which is assigned
to protect immigrants from bandits and to search for those who have
succumbed to the scorching sun, also bolstered their forces.
"We're trying to scare them. We tell them they may be shot by the
Minutemen," said Enrique Palafox, the Grupo Beta commander in Agua
Prieta. Both the state and federal patrols informed the immigrants of
the Minuteman Project watch post locations and offered to give them
rides back to Agua Prieta so they could either wait out the vigilantes
or at least re-supply with food and water before setting out again on
an alternate route.
The streets of Agua Prieta were posted throughout April with bright red
fliers that warned in Spanish: "Danger! Publications in the United
States and Mexico are reporting that during the month of April,
hundreds of vigilantes from the United States will form patrols along
the border from Agua Prieta to Naco. It's possible these individuals
will have guns. They are not part of the Border Patrol or the
government of the United States. Avoid them! They're dangerous!"
One night during the second week of the Minuteman Project, at Centro de
Atenci=F3n al Migrante Exodus, or care, a temporary shelter for
immigrants housed in a Catholic church a couple miles from the border
in Agua Prieta, a group of nine men in their late teens and early 20s
from Vera Cruz sat around a long table, hungrily downing soup and
tortillas. They said they were determined to get into America so they
could make 50 dollars a day as laborers, instead of the 50 pesos (about
$5) they earned for ten hours of cutting sugar cane at home.
"I'm not coming into America to rob anyone," said the group's apparent
leader, a 20-year-old farm kid named Lu=EDs. "If I wanted to rob for a
living, I could do that in Mexico. Please, tell the Minutemen I don't
want to fight."
By the end of the Minuteman Project, its organizers claimed to have
assisted in the capture of 336 undocumented immigrants from Mexico and
Central America. In addition to the posts along Border Road, the
Minuteman Project set up a chain of camps 40 miles east of Border Road
and 35 miles north of the border. There, volunteers staked out a series
of dry washes and culverts around a highway that serve as "lay-up
spots" where exhausted immigrants stop to sleep and wait for rides
after hiking two or three days over mountains and through open desert.
Judging by Minuteman Project radio traffic, the vigilantes patrolling
the lay-up spots busted far more immigrants than those on the higher
profile Border Road, but their final tally of 336 is impossible to
verify because the U.S. Border Patrol does not record the identity or
affiliation of citizen informants.
Border Patrol officials did say the Minuteman volunteers were more
hindrance than help because they so frequently called in false alarms
and set off ground sensors.
"The Border Patrol didn't want them, my community didn't want them
here, and I didn't want them here," said Douglas Mayor Roy Borane. "All
they succeeded in doing was creating hard feelings and spreading a
racist message. The amount of media attention they received has been
totally out of proportion to their actual impact. The Mexicans have a
saying that I think applies quite well to the Minuteman Project: 'It
was all song and no opera.'"
Brown and White
Chris Simcox bounded onto the stage in Washington D.C.'s Lafayette
Square. With the White House in the background, he grinned ear-to-ear
and gave the cheering crowd a double thumbs up.
It was the morning of Monday, April 25. The Minuteman Project had less
than a week to go, and Simcox had left his troops in the field - by
then their numbers had dwindled to fewer than 50 - in order to be
received as a champion in the nation's capital by the "immigration
reform army" gathered there for "Hold Their Feet to the Fire," a week
of rallies and lobbying sponsored by the Federation for American
Immigration Reform, or FAIR.
FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein had personally invited Simcox. "For
many Americans, the Minuteman Project looks more like Lexington and
Concord," Stein stated. "It represents the escalation of action
required to face down the arrogance and contempt of selfish greed. In
my view, those who see it differently mistake the matter entirely."
Standing above an adoring audience, Simcox said the Minuteman Project
in Arizona was just the beginning. "This has been a dream come true for
citizens," he said. "We were bold enough to stand up and tell the
federal government that it's not securing our borders. But our efforts
will continue in the future with a multi-state campaign. There will be
no compromise!"
Simcox left the stage to a chant of "Thank you, Chris! Thank you,
Chris!'
The Minuteman volunteers and the FAIR enthusiasts draw their
inspiration from the same cauldron of seething resentment. They're fed
up with being asked their language preference by automated operators,
with hearing Spanish on their radio, seeing it on billboards, and with
struggling to be understood by busboys and hotel maids who "speak
Mexican."
The news that Los Angeles had just elected its first Latino mayor in
100 years was just another foul omen that America really is being
conquered, one fake green card and one minimum wage job at a time. They
don't care to discuss the complexities of global economics. They don't
want to hear about international trade policies or economic migration.
They see the world in brown and white.
"Thanks to the gross malfeasance of our government, Americans are going
to be fighting for their nation on the streets of their own cities,"
wrote Glenn Spencer, a prominent anti-immigration activist, Minuteman
Project volunteer and repeat "Lou Dobbs Tonight" guest, in a May 2
essay publicized on his America Border Patrol Web site. "Many are not
going to survive this conflict alive. Thousands will die."
Already, imitation groups waving the Minuteman banner have formed in
California and Texas. The same week that Simcox appeared in D.C.,
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the Minuteman Project in
a radio show, saying he'd welcome border vigilantes in his state.
"I think they've done a terrific job," he said. "It just shows that it
works when you go and make an effort and when you work hard. It's a
doable thing. It's a shame that the private citizen has to go in there
and start patrolling our borders."
Gilchrist and Simcox have both announced they're forming separate
splinter vigilante groups. In May, Simcox claimed that "over 15,000"
people had already joined his new organization, the Minuteman Civil
Defense Corps.
"We are now undertaking the task of recruiting, training and deploying
thousands of U.S. citizens to the four southern border states with
Mexico," he said.
"We have a mandate from the citizens of the United States who are no
longer just demanding better border security, they are now willing to
participate in securing the borders themselves," Simcox said. "Our
intentions are to follow the will of the people."
.
|
