Thread: Citizens Group Takes Fight Against Illegal Immig to Border

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A grassroots citizens’ group takes its fight against illegal immigration directly to the border.

Jun 16, 2005
By Andy Isaacson
Line Item: (left) A US Border Patrol vehicle, seen from across the fence in Naco, Mexico, monitors a stretch of border in Arizona that has rapidly become the busiest in the Southwest. Armchair Vigilantes: (right) Volunteer Minutemen scope out movement along the border, prepared to call any action in to border patrolmen via cell phone. Andy Isaacson
The warm, breezy summit of Coronado Peak, in Southeast Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains, offers a fine view of the seemingly endless arid grassland below, a high desert plain of brown earth accented by a fertile strip of green willow and ringed by gentle mountain ranges. A faint dirt road slicing the plain marks the division between the United States and Mexico. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado once ambled exhausted through this rugged terrain with a legion of soldiers, Indians and priests on a “missionary undertaking� seeking the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold� to the north.

Every day, more than 450 years after that historic expedition, the scene continues unabated. Under the hot daytime sun and the dark cloak of night, quiet squadrons of drug runners march right through the meager barbed wire cattle fence marking the US-Mexico border, and through the Huachucas. Indians from the Central American highlands trudge for days up dry washes lined with bramble bushes, some told that the ocean lies only a day’s walk ahead.

Church groups supply water to these migrants, hoping to stem the deaths that claim more than 100 lives annually. And Mexicans, finding no trace of gold in their homeland, flow illegally north seeking the fabled 7-Eleven, or just about any job that will pay.

Cochise County, Ariz., is evidence of how illegal immigration is hurting the United States at the very same time it seems to benefit from it. The intense enforcement effort concentrated on the California and Texas borders has shifted migrant flow into Arizona, and the Tucson sector has bore the brunt of that redirected stream. In 2004, approximately 350,000 migrants were caught along the Arizona border. This sits uneasily with locals here. In the wake of streaming migrants and smugglers come littered belongings, damaged property, strained social services, an enforcement presence and a violent edge. It’s a reality that local resident May Kolbe calls “living in a war zone.�

A CALL TO ARMS
Situated blissfully in the middle of the valley, two miles from the border fence, is the Miracle Valley Bible College, where the Minuteman Project has set up its headquarters.

Two months ago, hundreds of volunteers from across the nation heeded a call put out over the Internet by a loosely organized coalition of anti-immigration activists to join a grassroots gathering that would spend the month of April here, patrolling a 23-mile stretch along the nation’s most penetrated section of border. The volunteers, calling themselves the Minutemen, included retired military, teachers, and construction workers. They brought a modest air force, communications equipment, guns, lawn chairs and sunscreen to perform “the job the government won’t do.�

Not easy to typecast, the volunteers who descended on the desert represented a spectrum of backgrounds and views but were united by a core sentiment. They are indignant at an illegal invasion that sees immigrants, drug smugglers and possible terrorists streaming across a porous and undefended border, unchecked, by the thousands. Many are “Pat Buchanan Republicans� who feel “Bushwacked� by a president who looks the other way while lining his political pockets with the support of employers who profit off the exploitation of cheap labor. They see a corrupt Mexican government flagrantly assisting the illegal flow, washing its hands of impoverishment while collecting remittances from migrant workers who send back their wages in amounts that have now surpassed domestic oil revenues. And they arrived out of concern for the changes in their communities, the violence they feel is a byproduct of impoverished immigrants seeking economic opportunism and the demographic changes they view as threatening the American way of life.

They included Cindylou Dampf of Denton, Texas, whose job at Andrews Corporation ended last year when the plant closed and moved to Mexico. A displaced worker and single mother, she took fast food and housekeeping jobs. When she learned about the Minuteman Project, she quit her two jobs and drove the 900 miles to Cochise County. And there were those like Curtis Stewart from San Antonio, Texas, who felt they were the vanguard of a silent majority frustrated with the government’s ineffectiveness.

WHITE AND RIGHT
“How many demonstrations have we had in the United States for women, lesbians, blacksâ€â€

Originally Posted by butterbean

What’s to stop those now?

Thank God, that's an easy one.
The Minutemen.
They have proven it. It CAN be done. It is NOT rocket science.

Next question?