Patriots or vigilantes? Florida's Minutemen on lookout for..

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Patriots or vigilantes? Florida's Minutemen on lookout for illegals
About 300 have joined militias dedicated to patrolling the U.S. border.
Jim Stratton

Sentinel Staff Writer

November 25, 2007

ENGLEWOOD

For Truman Fields, the war against foreign invaders begins at home -- Home Depot.

Several times a month during Florida's latest building boom, the retired IBM executive climbed into his Dodge pickup and cruised home-improvement stores or construction sites in southwest Florida.

Armed with a camera and a missionary's zeal, he'd look for groups of Hispanic men and start snapping pictures. Fields, 66, assumed anyone who ran off was here illegally. Then he'd call local authorities.

"Sometimes they'll mob my truck, thinking I'm looking for workers," said Fields, a former Marine with a buzz cut and bone-crushing handshake. "They're all around if people will just open their eyes."

Fields is one of about 300 Floridians who have joined the controversial Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the national group that seeks to end illegal immigration. Recently, he and three other Florida members spent from a few days to a full month in the Arizona desert, looking for Mexicans and other foreign nationals crossing illegally into the U.S.

There are Minuteman chapters in Central Florida, South Florida and North Florida. Members tend to be middle-aged, politically conservative, strongly pro-military -- and predominantly non-Hispanic white.

"There's a lot of interest," said Bill Landes of Haines City, the group's director for North and Central Florida. "These are people who love their country."

And people who think that country is under siege.

The Minutemen and a host of similar groups see illegal immigrants as an invading army that steals jobs and shreds the American safety net.

They fear a porous border attracts terrorists and criminals and say an unchecked flow of outsiders threatens their very way of life. Animated by talk radio and incessant Internet chatter, they warn that Mexicans are planning a reconquista, a retaking of the American Southwest, and that government officials want to merge Mexico, the U.S. and Canada into a single country.

"We are not only at war with Iraq," says the mission statement of Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, a group that has worked with the Minutemen, "but we ARE at WAR with MEXICO."

Volunteers cast themselves as patriots "doing the job the federal government refuses to do." They bristle at critics who claim they are racist, insisting the issue has nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity.

"Here's our response to people who say we're racist," said Gina Moore, an organizer with Lee County's Florida Minutemen Patriots. She raises a sign that reads:

"Real Americans Committed to Integrity, Sovereignty and Truth."

"That's what 'racist' means to us."


'Where do the rest of us end up?'

The Minuteman movement emerged three years ago during the national slugfest over illegal immigration. Founded by Jim Gilchrist, an accountant from California, and Chris Simcox, the publisher of a weekly paper in Tombstone, Ariz., the group grabbed headlines with its militaristic style and high-profile bivouacs on the border.

Describing itself as the nation's largest neighborhood-watch program, the group posted volunteers -- most of them armed -- along the Mexican border, instructing them to look for illegal immigrants crossing the desert.

Images of gun-toting civilians patrolling the scrub flashed across the globe, and the Minutemen became the best-known border-security group in the country.

But internal squabbling quickly split the organization, and its leaders each formed new groups under the Minuteman banner. Today, while the Minutemen remain the most talked-about group, more than 100 similar organizations have formed.

Florida has about a dozen, including Americans Standing Tall of Cape Coral; Citizens Against Illegal Aliens in Fort Myers; and Reportillegals.com, a Pompano Beach-based Web site that, for $10, relays information about suspected illegal immigrants to authorities.

The presence of those groups reflects Florida's popularity with Hispanic immigrants. The state is home to more than 850,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Border-security groups say it's impossible to escape the weight of those numbers, and Landes, 52, thinks he has felt it firsthand. A former truck driver and handyman, he blames illegal immigrants for a tight job market that cost him work. And he suspects that an illegal immigrant caused a traffic wreck that killed a relative in 2003.

But Landes, who is on full disability, can't prove that.

He joined the Minutemen, he said, because "everyone else" ignores the problem. And he's worried that without major reforms, illegal immigrants will bankrupt the country.

So far, Landes has focused on recruiting members and attending rallies. Last spring, he traveled to Washington to meet with Simcox and U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Bartow. He spent a week in Arizona last month, patrolling the border at his own expense. He would not say how much the trip cost.

"My money is tight, so I can only do whatever I can to get a little gas money, either picking up aluminum cans or such things," he said after the trip. "I would have stayed longer if there was any way I could have."

During the October operation, the Minutemen say they spotted 511 illegal immigrants coming through the desert. U.S. Border Patrol agents ultimately captured 152 of them.


'Gangs were taking over'

Fields spent six weeks out West. Back here, his work has focused on job sites and labor pools in Southwest Florida. He says he was pushed into the movement by a dozen little irritants such as having to "dial 1 for English" and struggling to be understood at Miami restaurants. His breaking point came a few years ago, when he visited a daughter in Venice, Calif.

"I was lying in bed, and I heard all this automatic-weapons fire," he said. "The gangs were taking over."

Now Fields, a grandfather, pursues the issue with the fire of a religious warrior.

He spent more than $3,000 on his trip to patrol the border. At a recent rally in Sarasota for CNN commentator Lou Dobbs -- a hero to many in the movement ---- Fields went face-to-face with a counterprotester before police stepped in. He insists he cares only about an immigrant's status -- legal or illegal -- and not his ancestry, but in the next breath he warns that Hispanics might take over.

"If it keeps going like it is, they'll be the majority very quickly," he said. "And then where do the rest of us end up?"

That "us-vs.-them" mind-set has sparked sharp criticism.


'They're targeting individuals'

Minutemen have been called "vigilantes" by President Bush and bigots by immigration advocates. The Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform consider them extremists who employ the tactics and rhetoric of white-power groups.

Members describe foreigners using loaded words such as swarm and horde. They rattle off facts and figures gleaned from the Internet -- even when the facts are fiction.

They have claimed, for example, that illegal immigrants are responsible for 7,000 new cases of leprosy in three years. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, however, says the real number is fewer than 1,400 in 10 years.

"Some of this stuff is entirely false," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, "but it's accepted as reality."

Potok, however, doesn't think most border-security types are "unrobed Klansmen." Many, he said, are "well-meaning" and correct when they say the government's immigration policies "are completely broken."

But he is troubled by the movement's methods and the mean streak it seems to nurture. At any gathering of border-security proponents, you'll see T-shirts that, at best, can be described as unkind. One reads, "Because sneaking across the border is illegal, stupid ." Another depicts Uncle Sam saying, "I want you to speak English or get out!"

"They're not debating policy," Potok said. "They're targeting individuals."

Yes, but only those individuals who break the law, counters Fields.

Minutemen, he said, welcome immigrants who follow the rules. They point out that their national vice president is a naturalized citizen originally from Germany. Their national director is of Mexican descent.

"I have nothing against legal immigration," Fields said. "In fact, years ago we hosted a Swedish exchange student -- sponsored her. But she came here legally."

Fields and others also say they hold no personal grudge against those crossing the border illegally. There are Minuteman search-and-rescue teams, they point out, able to provide emergency medical care if someone they find is injured.

"You have to have compassion," Landes said.


'A different point of view'

Newcomers, however, rarely see it.

In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin blasted the Germans, complaining that they would never learn English. In the 19th century, it was the Irish in New York and after them, the Italians. In each case, so-called "nativists" warned that foreigners depressed wages and degraded the quality of life.

With Hispanics the largest minority group in America, it's now their turn.

Deborah Grider has watched the illegal-immigration drama from behind the register of the Sasabe Store, a one-stop market in a tiny border town 75 miles southwest of Tucson. It's the type of place where you can buy bread, 25 feet of electrical wiring and a $1,700 wood-burning stove. And since 1920, it's a place where Americans and Mexicans, dollars and pesos, have mixed.

Grider, who speaks Spanish fluently, knows there's an immigration problem and respects the Minutemen's position. But she's also seen the poverty that drives Mexicans into the desert -- and the coroner's van that sometimes follows. She said if Mexicans are willing to risk death -- about 180 die each year -- it's unlikely they'll be deterred by civilian patrols.

"I'm not sure they really know what it's like in Mexico," she said of the Minuteman groups. "If they did, they might have a different point of view."

On the King's Anvil Ranch 30 miles to the north, Brevard County resident James Johnston shakes his head.

He is in Arizona's Altar Valley with Landes, Fields and about 80 other volunteers for "Operation Secure America," a monthlong Minuteman production. The group uses the ranch as a base to conduct daily patrols in one of the busiest smuggling and illegal-immigration corridors in the country. Last year, agents in this Tucson sector arrested almost 380,000 people.

As Johnston, 39, prepares for an eight-hour night shift, he says he realizes things are bad in Mexico, and he sympathizes with people trying to make a better life. But immigration needs to be controlled, he says, and border enforcement is now a matter of national security.

"If we just open it up, we'll be flooded with poverty," says the electrical engineer and father of two. "Then it'll be all over."

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