Shannon Stapleton for The New York Times
David Weik has already been
patrolling.
Posted on 04/01/2005 3:10:18 AM PST by Pharmboy
Shannon Stapleton for The New York Times
David Weik has already been
patrolling.
TOMBSTONE, Ariz., March 31 - Walter McCarty, an 82-year-old retired Marine sergeant, says he is looking for adventure on the most porous part of the American border with Mexico. So, on Thursday, he signed up for the Minuteman Project, a volunteer patrol in search of furtive immigrants making the desert crossing into the United States.
"I hope to go out on patrols at night, find some illegals," said Mr. McCarty, who had his .38-caliber pistol strapped to his leg as he stood outside the citizen patrol's makeshift headquarters here in Tombstone, the town where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday engaged in a shootout with the Clanton gang in 1881. "I need some excitement. And this is better than sitting at home all day watching rattlesnakes crawl out of the den."
Led by Chris Simcox, a 44-year-old former kindergarten teacher from Los Angeles who accuses the federal government of turning a blind eye to the flow of illegal immigrants, the Minuteman Project is an effort to post 1,000 volunteers across 23 miles of border. It has angered Hispanics and many business and government leaders in this border county, aroused the Mexican government and prompted a warning from President Bush against vigilante action.
Still, for days, an assortment of volunteers, most of them retirees, has been trickling into the headquarters, on Toughnut Street, to get assignments that will begin Saturday and last a month. Reporters from as far away as Europe and Mexico have also descended.
Mr. Simcox said he would refuse to allow extremist groups to join his campaign and promised a peaceful protest that he compared to a neighborhood watch program. But the project has attracted support on Web sites of groups like Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group that says the patrol "is a call for action on the part of all Aryan soldiers."
Many of the volunteers are armed, which Mr. Simcox is not discouraging.
The pressure from the group, may be having an effect. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security said it would add 534 Border Patrol agents, an increase of more than 20 percent, and double the air surveillance along the Arizona border.
Although the federal authorities said the citizen volunteers had nothing to do with the new show of force, they said the border had become increasingly dangerous and chaotic, and a threat to national security. About 1,600 people a day try to cross the Mexican border into Arizona.
"We have increased our boots on the ground, and we will gain operational control of the weakest part of our border with Mexico," Robert C. Bonner, the United States customs and border protection commissioner, said at a Tucson press conference.
More than half of the 1.1 million people who were caught trying to cross the Mexican border last year were apprehended in southern Arizona, a rugged, sun-seared stretch of mountain and open desert that has become a gantlet for human and drug smugglers, and a focal point of complaints about broken boundaries. The citizen volunteers say they will track and report smugglers to the Border Patrol. They say they are not vigilantes and will try to enforce a strict "no contact" rule in approaching Mexicans.
"People are going to set up their lawn chairs, put on some sunscreen and start looking for suspicious activity," Mr. Simcox said in an interview. "We're doing the job President Bush refuses to do."
The project has increased tensions in an area along the border where Hispanics and Anglos live side by side, and where immigration is both a fighting cause and a business issue.
"It makes for a very bad situation in a community that does not want them here," said Ray Borane, the mayor of nearby Douglas, an Arizona border town of 15,000 people. "We are a proud, mostly Hispanic community. I'm afraid these people who are showing up for the Minuteman Project have a lynch mob attitude."
Border Patrol leaders, while expressing appreciation to the citizen group for turning the spotlight on a dangerous stretch of desert, said they worried that people with no background in law enforcement would get into trouble.
Shannon Stapleton for The New York Times
Chris Simcox is the founder of the Minuteman Project, which will patrol along the Mexican border.
"Everyone who comes across that border is not some docile peasant," said T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Control Council, which represents agents. "This isn't a game of tag out there."
In the last year, the Border Patrol has added hundred of agents, along with air support, to little avail in southern Arizona. Top Homeland Security officials who came to Arizona this week seemed particularly frustrated at the failure to stem the tide of illegal immigration here, while it has slowed in other border states.
Mr. Simcox said his group was born out of anger over the government's inability to curb the flood of people.
"You move out here to your 40 acres of Shangri-La," he said, "look out the window, and what to do you see? Hordes of illegals running from the bushes."
He has called for deployment of National Guard troops along the 1,950-mile border.
Conservatives, like Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, and Bay Buchanan, the sister of the former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, are offering support and will address weekend rallies here, Mr. Simcox said.
On Tombstone's main street, where cowboys re-enact the shootout that put this wind-raked desert town on the map, many residents said that they were upset with the Minuteman Project, and that crime from illegal immigrants was not a prime concern.
"I think Chris Simcox and his group have left something of a bad taste around here," said Roger Duewell, a retired anthropologist who works as a make-believe cowboy in staged shootings here. "I think he's lost a lot of support and has very few friends in town."
Others disagreed. David Weik, who works in Tombstone by day but spends many nights in camouflage gear tracking illegal immigrants, said Mr. Simcox was "telling it like it is."
Mr. Simcox has had an unusual political odyssey on his way to the Minuteman Project. He once volunteered for the presidential campaign of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, he said. He also said that as a teacher in a private school in Los Angeles he was head of the diversity committee.
A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Simcox was in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a desert wilderness on the Arizona-Mexico border, when he saw dozens of Mexicans streaming across, he said. He left Los Angeles, and spent weeks making observations in the desert.
He bought a weekly newspaper, The Tombstone Tumbleweed, and converted it into a forum for his crusade. "To get the media to pay attention, I decided I had to own a piece of the media," he said.
He has since picked up a criminal record and many critics. Two years ago, he was convicted of carrying a gun inside a National Park Service monument, a misdemeanor. Mr. Simcox said he was set up.
In recent weeks, the Minuteman Project has been criticized by both Mr. Bush and President Vicente Fox of Mexico. Mr. Fox has threatened to sue in international courts if private groups try to detain Mexicans in the border area.
Although Mr. Simcox said he expected more than 1,000 volunteers, he might not reach that number. He has told supporters they should stay at several area recreational vehicle parks and a Bible college's dormitory. But people who run those sites said that only about 150 people had indicated they were going to take part.
People like Mr. McCarty, the retired marine, say they are here for the distraction, and the thrill.
"I'm restless," Mr. McCarty said, leaning against an adobe fence in the midday sun. "I needed something to do before I drove my wife crazy."
RESULT:
borders????....we don't need no stinking borders.....
If My old Jeep would make it, I'd be there. I support Our President, but He is wrong on this one.
Bump/PING
He's wrong on this one...big time.....
Iv'e got a long way to drive...but would gladly show up with my 30-30 and 45......
Yep...I think most Freepers would agree. I imagine he and Rove figgered they could not swing the election w/o a certain percentage of the Hispanic votes that their position on immigration would bring.
I wonder about that. An assumption of the Hispanic population in the US with the right to vote is that they've come here legally. So if steps are made by the FedGov to stop illegals, do legal Hispanics consider that a bad thing?
I don't know if maybe this is a sympathy thing for other, not as fortunate Hispanics, or they take the position that I've gotten here legally so why doesn't everyone else make the same effort.
It seems that President Bush has either assumed that legal US Hispanics want the illegals issue to remain the way it is, or he has data that shows that to be true. Judging by the way he wants to leave the border open it looks like he has data. I don't think he would take his position otherwise. Not saying thats right (at ALL), just saying that the way he's playing it makes me believe that.
I'm among the group of people that are very supportive of President Bush, but on this issue and the LOST treaty, I don't support his positions at all.
Considering the compromises and the alternative, I never think that supporting President Bush is a bad thing, but I'd like to see him do a LOT more to fix this border mess.
Maybe a big concrete wall like the Israelis built. They did that to keep out terrorists and it's working pretty well for them.
They are not Vigilantes , they are undocumented border agents
I wish them good luck in their efforts! Its a hard job but SOMEONE had to do it!!
Leni
Snort.
Virtually everything in the "old grey whore" is an editorial pretending to be news. This is typical extreme bias in coverage. Everything in this "article" makes the minutemen either look like wackjobs or potential mass murderers. Not a thing about the president's unwillingsness (note the article used the lie "government's inability" to stop the flood of illegals.
The NYTimes is yet another reason why New York City Sucks
Good one!
Game, set, match to ballplayer (or should I say a big fly to right that cleared the fence?).
Pure misinformation.
One of Bush's goals had been immigration reform. Like many things, that was put aside to deal with 9-11 and other pressing concerns.
It has now been well over a year since Bush's speech on reform. Unfortunately, the Prez can't write legislation.
If you are looking for someone to blame, let me suggest the dipwad from Colorado who split the party.
I'm just trying to find a reason that this otherwise very reasonable POTUS should be so outside the box on this issue.
Let the illegals start importing handguns in massive quantities, or even just start the rumor that they are, and the libs may just change their minds on "open borders".
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