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Posted on 10/01/2005 4:23:16 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CAMPO – As the sun set, Roy Wood looked out of place patrolling a dirt road a few steps north of a rusty fence that separates the United States from Mexico. The clean-shaven English-as-a-second-language instructor wore a T-shirt tucked in clean blue jeans, a pistol strapped to a belt. Many of the hundreds who make up the self-appointed civilian patrols monitoring the border to deter smuggling of people and drugs are unemployed or underemployed ex-military men who have long resented Mexicans who come to the United States illegally and, in their view, compete for jobs, crowd hospitals and schools and threaten English as the nation's dominant language.
The civilian patrols of recent months have failed to stem the tide of illegal crossings, but they have ratcheted up pressure on Washington to better police U.S. borders and fueled tension in border towns about potential violence. And as the patrols continue, they are targeting a wider circle of volunteers.
There are urban dwellers, young women, even some Hispanics. Their gripes about illegal immigration are often the same as those of the gun-toting veterans, though their backgrounds are different.
"It shows that the problem reaches all of America, not just a specific group," said Gayle Nyberg, 57, a Murietta, Calif., woman who slept in the back of a 1976 Chevrolet Suburban painted in camouflage while on patrol.
More than 200 people signed up with the California Minutemen, who spent three weeks at the border this summer.
Civilian patrols are opposed by 56 percent of Californians but supported by a majority of Republicans and people at least 65 years old, according to a recent Field Poll. Support was weak in Los Angeles and San Francisco and among Hispanics and people under 40. The telephone survey of 426 registered voters Aug. 19-29 had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
Wood, who battled two hours of rush-hour traffic to get here, has taught immigrants English for two years. Most of his students have been Asian.
Returning home to Southern California in 2002 after spending 11 years teaching in Japan, he found his opposition to illegal immigration hardening. He concluded that Mexican immigrants have failed to assimilate in the United States, unlike the Vietnamese star students at his high school in Huntington Beach or the students he teaches English.
"Suddenly, they make American friends, they learn the language, they buy a car, they start to acclimatize themselves to the American way of life, just as I did in Japan," he said.
Heather Evans, a 25-year-old Los Angeles microbiologist, was initially uneasy about joining the patrols which she'd seen on a television news report. But when she drove three hours to the border one July weekend, her fears quickly evaporated.
"I told my family it was like an armed picnic on the border," said Evans, who is considering whether to buy a gun for future visits.
She traces her opposition to illegal immigration to the time, a few years back, when she noticed that men who whistled and hooted at her often looked Mexican to her.
Rogelio Cabrera said he felt harassed in a different way. A 30-year-old who loads port containers in Long Beach, he said illegal immigration began troubling him when day laborers who he said appeared Mexican began gathering outside a neighborhood Home Depot store.
"They see I'm Latino, coming out with bags of cement, and they huddle around me saying, 'What can I do for you?'" said Cabrera, who joined the patrols despite the fears of his Mexican-born wife.
Two dozen or so recruits gathered one August evening in Campo, 40 miles east of San Diego, where many had been camped for nearly three weeks. Small groups were assigned along a mountainous 16-mile stretch of the border blanketed with mesquite, cedar and manzanita trees.
Wood was dispatched to "base camp" – a metal-roofed canopy with an electrical generator that powered a 28-foot radio communications tower. Volunteers sat on the canopy's roof and scanned the landscape with night-vision binoculars.
Britt Craig had spent three weeks at base camp living on canned food out of the back of a yellow van. Craig, a former Marine paratrooper, wore a patch over his left eye from what he said was a shrapnel wound in Vietnam. "I'm kind of a solitaire," he said.
Craig, 56, has never been terribly troubled by illegal immigration but left his home in Florida when he learned about the citizen patrols, which he saw as a question of people exercising their right to bear arms.
"I grew up with guns, I believe in guns, I believe in an armed citizenry," he said. "These folks are answering to a national defense need."
Nothing prevented people from carrying licensed weapons in most of the areas where the Minutemen patrolled, authorities said. Still, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department extended the nighttime hours of its tiny Campo substation and paid overtime to reinforcements.
A small group of protesters, who camped in tents, closely followed and frequently taunted the patrollers.
"When we have two very diverse groups, very polarized and highly emotional, running around, many of them carrying guns, obviously we're going to have to be there," said San Diego Sheriff's Lt. Bill Hogue.
He added: "I don't know how you'd feel about a bunch of people running around your neighborhood with guns but it makes some people uneasy."
No one spotted illegal crossers this night, which is typical. The Border Patrol credits the California Minutemen for reporting crossings that resulted in three arrests during a three-week patrol. The agency has made about 1.1 million arrests over the last year – or an average of 20,000-plus a week
It was a quiet evening of friendly conversation and rock-music playing on the radio, except for a tense, 20-minute argument with four men who approached in a Nissan Maxima. They belonged to a small group of protesters camped about a mile away over a dirt road. The protesters followed the patrollers at every step, banging pans, shouting through bullhorns and shining flood lamps on them.
"What's happening here is unacceptable!" shouted the driver, a portly man who stepped outside the car. "We have to tear (the border fence) down. You want to build it up."
T.S. McMullen, a former Marine toting an M-14 rifle, responded calmly that the protesters were "communists."
The driver compared the civilian patroller to Nazis. "I hope your children get harassed by bigots, like you are!" the driver shouted.
"We are not racists," McMullen said. "You're the only racists."
"Unfortunately, this is a war," the protester said as he returned to his car. "I despise everything you represent but I respect you as a soldier."
There was plenty of verbal jousting between patrollers and protesters but no arrests during the three weeks the Minutemen spent on the border. The patrollers have drawn criticism from Mexican President Vicente Fox, who accuses them of practicing vigilante justice.
Wood didn't see any illegal crossers during his three nights on the border, though he likes to think his presence may have scared them away.
The son of a California Highway Patrol officer and an elementary schoolteacher, Wood never followed illegal immigration when growing up. He said he rarely mingled with Mexicans in high school.
While teaching English at a high school in Yokkaichi, Japan, he said he noticed American staffers were given lighter workloads, special treatment he said he didn't deserve or want. When he returned home one summer and sought to bring his Brazilian girlfriend, he said he had to haggle with an official at a crowded U.S. consulate to get her a tourist visa.
"Seeing that situation, all these (visa applicants) waiting to get into the United States and then coming back and hearing how illegal aliens just jump over fences," he said, shaking his head at the dining-room table of his rented one-bedroom apartment in Oceanside. "It's like being at an amusement park and waiting for two hours in line, then someone just cuts right in front of you. That isn't fair."
When Wood brought his current girlfriend, who is Japanese, with him to the Minuteman patrol, he said she was terror-stricken during the night and feared being kidnapped or killed.
Wood acknowledged a lack of economic opportunity back home often drives illegal immigrants, but he was unsympathetic. "They're really poor, they have no skills, it's almost like Mexico just wants to unload its undesirables," he said.
Wood said he felt right at home with the Minutemen and plans to return when his schedule permits.
"I'll do it as long as it takes – until it's just as hard to get across the border as it is to get in through an airport," he said.
So that's the new angle, just a bunch of angry white men.
"The driver compared the civilian patroller to Nazis."
That's funny. One of the groups opposing the Minutemen call themselves "Brown Berets", seems that the name brownshirts was already taken.
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Fox has troops on his southern border and provides zero services to illegals in Mexico.
You beat me too it. What a piece of steaming crap, liberal hit piece this is! Most ex-military have litte or no trouble finding jobs as they are disciplined and responsible--two qualities that the MSM lacks. This is just a hit job on Patriots who care about protecting our country when (sadly) the Government won't.
You don't hear the MSM talking about the professional anti-war protestors this way.
As of late, methinks these "Field Polls" are pure, liberal driven B.S.
The first paragraph tells you everything you need to know about this article. 20 years ago this was called an editorial not a news story. P.S. AP fact check your stories before you release them!
No, you left some out. They're troubled ex-military, gun toting, rusty Chevy van sleeping, unemployed, vigilante, Nazi, bigot, angry white men.
Considering the poll probably referred to gun carrying racists, I am surprised that the percentage wasn't higher.
Not entirely new. FR's tiny resident contingent of quislings have been using this theme for quite some time.
Because you can't do anything if they are already here. You will be arrested for harassment, assault, or a hate crime depending on where you live. Or the local PD and Border Patrol will ignore you if you call it in. If you don't stop them at the border, then you can't stop them period!
This tells me they must be doing something right. If they don't like it in California its got to be good for the rest of us!
So that's the new angle, just a bunch of angry white men.
Not only that, but they're ex-military, carry guns, can't or won't get jobs and only resent illegal immigration when it's Mexicans. Citizens having to compete with illegals for jobs, illegals crowding the hospitals and schools must only exist in their imagination.
What a hit piece of an article.
BTW, I guess I could be considered unemployed or underemployed, but I prefer to call it retirement.
ping
Civilian monitors on both borders
By Jerry Seper - The Washington Times - October 1, 2005
"...Chris Simcox, who heads the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps... "When the government fails to fulfill its primary duty and protect this nation, it is up to self-governing people to step into the breach."
"...In Arizona, 850 volunteers stood watch near Naco to reduce the flow of illegal aliens in one of the nation's most-traveled immigration corridors. Their goal was to show that increased manpower on the border would effectively deter illegal immigration. During the 30-day vigil, apprehensions by Border Patrol agents in the targeted area dropped from more than 500 a day to fewer than 15."
"...Before the April vigil, Minuteman critics contended the group consisted of anti-immigration racists who would violently confront border crossers. That did not occur."
"The National Border Patrol Council, Local 2544, in Tucson, Ariz., also endorsed the Minuteman Project, saying its members -- about 2,000 field agents -- did not have "one single complaint from a rank-and-file agent in this sector about the Minutemen."
"Every report we've received indicates these people are very supportive of the rank-and-file agents. They're courteous. Many of them are retired firefighters, cops and other professionals, and they're not causing us any problems whatsoever," the council said."
"Residents in the area also thanked the Minutemen in a full-page newspaper ad "for doing what our government won't -- close the border to illegal aliens..."
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