Minuteman volunteers on lookout in South Texas

FALFURRIAS — This small town, a welcome highway stop in a no-man's-land of mesquite brush between San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, hummed along Saturday like it was any other weekend.

Families enjoyed chicken fried steaks and fries at the Star of Texas restaurant. The local radio station played rancheras and gave out the weather report.

Yet out of sight just 8 miles south on U.S. 281, activity whirled on a private ranch as volunteers from Texas and other states kicked off a monthlong project to combat illegal immigration.

The ranch belongs to Michael Vickers, a local veterinarian who teamed up with other landowners from Falfurrias to Hebbronville to host the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps on a combined 20,000 acres.

The organization is an offshoot of the original Minuteman Project, which brought dozens of volunteers from across the country to Arizona in April to halt illegal crossings in a stretch of that state's border with Mexico.

Though headquartered in Falfurrias, organizers of the group's Texas mission say volunteers are still signing up and, if the numbers allow it, the project's reach may be expanded.

Nearly 50 people are available in McAllen, and as many as 40 could be dispatched to the Laredo or Del Rio areas, said Al Garza, director of the group's Texas operations.

Other organizations with similar objectives but independent leadership also launched border watch missions Saturday near El Paso.

Garza said he had hoped to get 1,000 volunteers. More than 500 had signed up, and around 300 were on the ground, he said.

None of these numbers could be independently verified. News media access was limited to a morning training session and to a single observation point a half-mile from the highway, where three volunteers were posted.

The training session doubled as a pep talk for 22 volunteers gathered on folding chairs near an operations trailer, their backs to the sweat-inducing morning sun.

Mostly military retirees with diverse backgrounds, from computer programmers to accountants and teachers, they listened intently for 45 minutes as Garza and other designated field supervisors described the nuts and bolts of the task at hand.

"You are in a history-making moment," Garza told them, explaining that although the objective is to reduce as much as possible the influx of undocumented immigrants, volunteers were there solely as observers.

Contact is forbidden. Sightings are to be reported to "base camp," which would relay it to the Border Patrol in hopes that agents would track down the crossers.

The group has had several meetings with supervisors in the patrol's Falfurrias station, organizers said, and agents know exactly where the volunteers will be located.

Volunteers would be assigned a designated time and geographical location in a line intersecting known smuggling routes. Only people with valid Texas permits would be allowed to carry handguns, and the weapons were to remain holstered. Shotguns or rifles were not allowed.

If they planned to go into Falfurrias, volunteers were told to keep a low profile and not discuss Minuteman-related business in town.

Chris Simcox, one of the two co-founders of the original Minuteman Project and now in charge of its field border watch missions here and in other states, drew applause as he detailed the group's growth.

It all started with just him, a one-man show in Arizona, he said, and had expanded to more than 4,200 volunteers signed up for simultaneous border watch operations now taking place in 12 states along the southern and northern U.S. borders.

He said even mainstream politicians who once may have shunned the group have started to come around. Last week, he said, he was in Washington and that the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, gave him a pat on the back.

"He told me, 'We appreciate you guys waking us up and letting us know what the issues are about,'" Simcox said.

And despite what agency spokesmen may tell news organizations, rank-and-file Border Patrol agents also support the Minuteman cause, Simcox said.

The agency has maintained a steadfast official disapproval of the effort, saying catching illegal crossers should be left to trained agents.

By evening, a volunteer scanning the brush with binoculars from atop a truck told her supervisor about a possible sighting. A cow was spotted in the area, leaving it too undetermined to merit being passed along to the Border Patrol.

Organizers said the agency was tracking two groups of migrants, one of them as large as 50 people, spotted elsewhere on the ranch.

Despite their varied life and career backgrounds, volunteers at the morning meeting had the same explanation as to why they were there — to secure the borders to prevent potential terrorists from sneaking into the country.

"I love my country," said Greg, of Lake Jackson, south of Houston, asking that his last name be withheld. "There are some people who can get in that shouldn't get in."

Harry, a 74-year-old retired Marine from Port Aransas, said he'd rather be helping in Iraq, even if just to feed the troops. But he said the government wouldn't allow him to go, so the least he could do was become a Minuteman.

"They're constantly preaching about homeland security, yet we're allowing them to come in through the back door," Harry said.

Although more than 70 miles from the border, the Falfurrias area with its Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. 281 is a hot corridor for undocumented immigrants. They typically are dropped off on the highway south of the checkpoint, then trek by foot through immense private ranches, hoping to emerge at the highway farther north for pickup.

Vickers, the Falfurrias rancher, complained that more than 1,000 migrants traverse his land every day. The Minuteman effort is expected to curb that traffic. Organizers said several crossings had been thwarted already, during tests last month, and they noted that the Border Patrol responded to every reported sighting.

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(Delcia Lopez/Express-News)

Two volunteers with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps check assignments on a board at a private ranch near Falfurrias.

This is actually a pretty fair article about the Minute Men. I'm glad the Express was able to tell their side of the story without mucking it up with a bunch of bs.

"He [Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee] told me, 'We appreciate you guys waking us up and letting us know what the issues are about,'" Simcox said.

Waking us up? Where in L have these people in Washington been these last 20 years? Oh yeah, Washington. They ought to go outside the beltway and see what is happening to the rest of the country.

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