www.dallasnews.com

Matt Labash: Visiting Minuteman headquarters

These Americans have been called everything from 'migrant hunters' to 'humanitarians'


05:55 AM CDT on Sunday, October 2, 2005




TOMBSTONE, Ariz. – The loosely organized, all-volunteer Minutemen have captured headlines and imaginations since their monthlong stand on the Arizona-Mexico border in April. Make that their monthlong sit, since much of their activity requires taking a load off in their best lawn chairs.

They plant themselves on the border in those old metal-tube jobs with vinyl webbing or the Wilderness Recliner with durable padded seat and insulated beverage holder, there to serve as reporting agents and visible deterrents against the gusher of illegal aliens our government seems unable, or unwilling, to stop. Some proponents cast these lawn-chair warriors, whose median age is near 60, as devout patriots conducting a high-stakes neighborhood watch, the "neighborhood" consisting of our lawless 1,900-mile southern border, large parts of which aren't even marked, let alone fenced. According to boosters, they are watchdogs and humanitarians, who have, over the last three years, rescued some 160 aliens who had nearly perished in the desert.

On the other hand, there are the Minutemen's legions of detractors. Mexican President Vicente Fox called them "migrant hunters," while President Bush denounced them as "vigilantes." The Minutemen do tote guns (though they encourage their ranks to secure concealed-weapon permits – the better, organizers say, to put the government to work weeding out potential wackos through criminal background checks). Yet the entire month of April, nothing remotely violent went down.

Whatever policing of their ranks they'd done, the Minutemen had been macheted in the media. Every sour-tempered hack and alternative-weekly assassin had turned up to call them extremists and xenophobes and depict them as backwoods mouth-breathers, just as happy to hunt Mexicans as to loll on the redwood decks of their double-wides.

Since the Minutemen's Arizona campaign dominated front pages in April, and a similar monthlong stint in every state along the Mexican border was announced for next month, eager volunteers have been hitting up Minutemen founder and Tombstone resident Chris Simcox to open chapters everywhere – in scores of inland states and every border state except Maine. Even Canadians, our lethargic neighbors to the north, want in on the action.

It seems the Minutemen are surfing a tidal wave of dissatisfaction. As a recent CNN poll confirmed, 96 percent of respondents felt illegal immigration should be a major issue in next year's election, perhaps because some 3 million illegal immigrants made it in last year, mostly through Mexico. Estimates of how many illegals our Border Patrol manages to intercept range from one in three to one in 20. So it's small wonder that even unlikely politicians – such as Hillary Clinton and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who this past summer declared a state of emergency in four border counties and who's requested a meeting with Mr. Simcox – are making border security fashionable.

When I visited the Minutemen headquarters recently, I found that staff members aren't exactly the nest of racist vipers I'd been reading about on the plane. I met Lucy Garza, Mr. Simcox's able assistant. If Lucy hears any aspiring Minutemen disparaging Hispanics (a naturalized citizen, she's 100 percent Mexican), they are shown the door – although Lucy herself, when it comes to illegal immigration, is a bit of a fire breather.

"They come over. They reap all the benefits. They rape our country, our system, and they send all the money back home," she says, tearing up as she describes how the deserts are ravaged by waste. "It makes me ashamed of my heritage."

In a back room, under a "Homeland Security" poster that depicts the bumbling Beverly Hillbillies, sit a pair of mild-mannered husband-and-wife retirees named Jack and Brenda. Jack wears an earring and sandals. Brenda snacks while logging phone calls from concerned citizens. "We're not a bunch of militiamen," says Jack, stating the obvious.

Like many Minutemen and Minutewomen, they are hard to place politically and seem pretty moderate across the board. In fact, they're not anti-government at all, in the sense of wanting there to be less of it. Rather, as Mr. Simcox says, "We must force our government to do their job by threatening to do it for them."

Jack is sick of all the shoulder-shrugging capitulation to illegal immigration. He's tired of his bank accepting matricula cards, issued by the Mexican consulate, so that undocumented immigrants can get home loans (no federal law prohibits it).

He's tired of illegals being "treated as super-citizens – free medical care, food stamps, housing assistance, paid schooling in their own language, everything immediately. Americans don't have universal health care. If you're not among the richest or poorest, you don't get it. The middle class is S.O.L." – [...expletive] out of luck.

Mr. Simcox is quick to point out that Mexicans and other illegal immigrants are forced by hardship to pursue this course and are as victimized by their corrupt governments as we are ignored by ours. "We don't blame the people coming across," he says, "I don't blame the victims. Man, I'd be doing the same thing. Actually, I'd be leading the revolution in Mexico."

So I ask Brenda how she can begrudge these people a better existence, even if they're gaming our system, when she won the lottery by being born in America.

Brenda, who is Cherokee Indian, makes a distinction I hear repeatedly from the Minutepeople: that unlike many other groups of their stripe, they are not anti-immigration, they are anti-illegal immigration. They even support increased legal immigration from Mexico and a beefed-up guest worker program, fully funded by employers who elect to exploit cheap labor at the expense of Americans.

Grandmotherly Brenda doesn't seem the type who'd be itching to dive into activism's mosh pit, but her breed is multiplying. Mostly, this is because whether one's concerns about illegal immigration are economic, cultural or related to national security, anyone who's bothered to examine the subject for a second knows that "border security" is an oxymoron on a par with "Senate intelligence" and "vegetarian meatball."

There are only 2,000 Border Patrol agents out along the vast Mexican border at any time, and they are not only undermanned but also often outgunned. Attacks on them are at record highs – around 200 in the Tucson Sector so far this year, according to Border Patrol.

They are increasingly shot at like tin clowns being plinked by high-school hooligans with carnival-booth air rifles – except that it's hot lead flying from smugglers who move aliens and drugs.

Not helpful is a negligent Mr. Bush, forever singing the song of homeland vigilance but providing only 210 additional Border Patrol agents when Congress called for 2,000. All manner of "OTMs" (other than Mexicans) are caught crossing the border – 119,000 so far this year. Many are released on our home turf with a "notice to appear" for their deportation hearings. (Since last October, 70,624 have been released, including 50 from "special interest" nations, according to Border Patrol.)

Many OTMs – 98 percent in one Texas district – can't be bothered to show up for their hearings, since by the time the special day rolls around they are putting up your siding or driving your cab. They may even be committing crimes. Of the nearly 400,000 absconders who've avoided deportation, roughly 80,000 are convicted criminals, reported Time magazine. And, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal immigrants make up at least 17 percent of the federal prison population.

Also problematic are business-appeasing politicians, more concerned about providing generous amnesty packages for illegal immigrants already here than they are about shutting down the border. Mr. Simcox's co-founder, Jim Gilchrist, a retired California accountant, has turned his side of the Minuteman franchise into a pressure group targeting employers who hire illegals. Mr. Simcox is hoping that Mr. Gilchrist is successful in taking down a captain of industry. "One high-profile perp walk," he says, would give the law some teeth again.

The nonprofit Judicial Watch recently uncovered a suppressed Border Patrol poll of illegal immigrants, conducted at the behest of the administration. It found that Mr. Bush's proposal for temporary guest workers, which aliens interpreted as a broad amnesty, had inspired 45 percent of them to cross illegally.

The cost of illegal immigration is galling. While Americans celebrate our cheap produce and cut-rate lawn service, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that illegal immigration costs U.S. taxpayers $2,700 annually per illegal household. That's not including the thousands of American workers whom illegals displace every year.

As some watchdogs, including Mr. Simcox, point out, building a Texas-to-California border wall like the one around the West Bank is largely dismissed as chimerical. But if it were built, the estimated tab of $2 billion to $8 billion would be considerably less than the $20 billion we pay annually in social services for illegal immigrants.

One morning, we set out from Tombstone for a Minuteman recruiting meeting in Las Cruces, N.M. We worked our way through the boot heel of New Mexico and along the southern border, stopping at ranches along the way to secure private property owners' permission to let the Minutemen walk the line during their four-state extravaganza next month.

One of our posse is Al Garza, husband of Mr. Simcox's assistant Lucy, who moved to Tombstone a few years ago after retiring as a private investigator in Los Angeles. The former Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran was originally suspicious that Mr. Simcox was a white supremacist.

Mr. Garza went to interview him, liked what he heard and saw, and now goes out on patrols almost every other night. He makes no apologies, even though Hispanic detractors and some of his own relatives call him "coconut" (brown on the outside, white on the inside).

As we cruise through New Mexico, Mr. Simcox explains how he became the nation's most politically correct "vigilante." Born in Moline, Ill., the son of a small-arms machinist and a surgical nurse, he moved around most of his childhood after his parents divorced.

He says he spent most of his life sticking up for black kids and battling racism, sometimes even among family members (he married a black actress and had a child, but they divorced when their careers took divergent paths).

Mr. Simcox's life was transformed by a single event: Sept. 11. "That was it," he says. "Just one of those seminal moments in your life that changes things. You know that your country's going to be different."

To clear his head after 9-11, Mr. Simcox went on a camping trip in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border. What he saw next gave him his life's mission.

Sitting on rocks drinking water in the backcountry, he heard Spanish voices. He looked around and saw a procession of 60 illegal immigrants. The next day, he looked across a valley with binoculars and saw another procession, guys carrying AK-47s escorting vehicles with camouflage netting. "I'm wondering, 'What the hell is this? Are these freakin' terrorists bringing nukes into the country?' "

He ran to the Park Service, whose agents, like Border Patrol, said they were outmanned and outgunned, didn't have any support from Washington and couldn't get the support they needed.

"That was it," says Mr. Simcox. "Bam. Right there, I said, 'Wait a minute. You and I can't get a pair of [...expletive] fingernail clippers through airport security, the Patriot Act is going to put us under the thumb of the government, and our borders are wide open, and our government says, 'Yeah, there is nothing we can do about it'?

"You can go smoke your political correctness. If enforcing the rule of law and getting tough on crime and telling the rest of the world you better not tread on me, if that offends you, go see a [...expletive] therapist. ... If our officials cower and risk American lives and sovereignty by not securing our borders, then they'd better get out of the way, because Americans are going to do it for themselves."

In Columbus, N.M., I temporarily peeled off from the Minutemen to shoot across the border to Palomas, a mere three miles away. My Spanish-speaking guide, whom I'll call Paco, used to be the police chief of Palomas, a stink hole of a smuggler's town that looks like Fallujah with Mexican food.

Paco has brought me to Palomas to introduce me to some aspiring border jumpers, but he does me one better when we go to the town's central park. Under a creaky gazebo, amid signs giving phone numbers to report suspicious activity, a half dozen coyotes hold court. They refuse to part with their names to the gringo who's writing everything down.

The Minutemen shouldn't be out there, says one coyote, sounding like an ACLU lawyer. "They are not law enforcement." One can't blame the coyotes for wishing to stick with the law enforcement they know. Most have been apprehended and thrown out of our country anywhere from a dozen times to "too many to count." They take it about as seriously as an overdue library-book notice.

When asked why their customers would risk death, the coyotes pull over a smiling Indian from Chiapas. They tell Paco and me he's trying to find enough scratch to make it over, but probably won't come up with it. He hasn't eaten in two days. Where he's from, he makes about 4 pesos a day doing fieldwork. In America, even 10 bucks a day would be a tremendous step up.

I ask him if he's afraid to cross. A coyote interjects, "He's more afraid of being hungry."