Thread: Open-borders activism UCR student leads anti-Minutemen effor

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Open-borders activism

UCR student leads anti-Minutemen efforts

12:06 AM PDT on Friday, September 16, 2005

By SHARON McNARY / The Press-Enterprise

UCR grad student Jesse Diaz Jr. took an air horn to the California-Mexico border late on the night of July 23, planning to confront and disrupt volunteers of the California Minutemen as they silently watched for illegal immigrants.

He wasn't expecting a pregnant teenage girl in labor to be lifted over a border fence and thrust into his arms.

Diaz, 41, who left his job overseeing undocumented landscapers in 1997 to study the lives of Mexican day laborers and Latino gang members, vents his political beliefs by organizing committees, dialogs and protests. But this was extraordinary.
Mark Zaleski / The Press-Enterprise
Jesse Diaz Jr. teaches his social-problems class at Riverside Community College's Norco campus. Diaz is a leader of the opposition to the Minuteman Project.

He was holding the 16-year-old girl on the U.S. side of a 4-foot-high border fence, her acquaintances on the Mexican side were urging him to get her to a doctor and federal Border Patrol agents were yelling that he could be charged with human smuggling.

"I'm holding her, and immigration is saying, 'Throw her back, throw her back,' and I'm saying, 'She's having a baby, have a heart.' "
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She needed to cross the border to get medical aid near Jacumba rather than travel a much longer distance to a Mexican clinic, Diaz said.

Authorities ultimately took the girl to a hospital where she gave birth to a daughter, said Diaz and other witnesses. Both returned to Mexico and are in good health, said Diaz. His critics say the girl's cross-border handoff was a pre-arranged publicity stunt, an allegation Diaz and the witnesses deny.

The incident -- in which territorial lines threatened to overshadow the well-being of the mother and her unborn child -- validated Diaz's belief that the U.S. border with Mexico violates human rights. That belief forms the core of his political activism.

"I would let the poor in first," he said. "Then the ones that need it the most."

That is why he helped form La Tierra es de Todos (Spanish for "The Land is for Everyone"), a coalition of Inland and Southern California leftist, socialist, student, Latino, migrant rights and human rights groups formed in Riverside in May with the slogan, "Smash the Minutemen, Smash the Border."

Beginning in July and continuing through the next several weeks, he and other coalition members plan to confront volunteers from various Minuteman-style groups that monitor the border.

Diaz grew up in Chino. His family was four generations removed from Mexico. His father had a landscaping business and a trailer in the backyard in which he let his employees live rent-free.

"My dad would hire Mexicans, fresh, newly arrived, and they would work there and before you know it he would be helping them get their residency," Diaz said.

Diaz attended Protestant Christian academies in Pomona and Ontario and wanted to attend college, perhaps to be a state prison correctional officer, but he put it off until 1997 to provide for his family.

He supports his four children, ages 14 to 19, with his gardening business and by teaching courses in social problems at RCC and UCR. And he will continue to work for open borders, he said.

"This isn't a border issue. It's a human-rights issue."

There is no such thing as free employee housing it is inevitably part of a total compensation package. The truth is that the Diaz family are labor racketeers whose business depends on federal immgration law violation. As someone whose day job is a ciminal enterprise he should be prosecuted under RICO not respeced by the Border Police or activists in the immigration reductionist movement.