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Border monitor drive begins


By: Wire Reports -

An alliance of legal agencies today announced a drive to recruit observers to monitor civilian border patrol groups that plan to deploy at the U.S.-Mexico border next month, as they did earlier this summer.

The "San Diego Legal Observer Coalition" is a joint project of the American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Lawyers Association, La Raza Lawyers of San Diego and National Lawyers Guild of San Diego.

The effort comes in response to the actions of a group calling itself the California Minutemen, which sent volunteers to the international border near Campo in mid-July following a similar effort in Arizona a few months earlier.

The self-proclaimed mission of the loose-knit organization ---- and another one dubbed "Friends of the Border Patrol" ---- is to help prevent illegal immigration and violence and property crime that purportedly accompany it.

Civil rights groups have decried the California Minutemen and Friends of the Border Patrol as armed and dangerous reactionaries with grudges against Latino immigrants.