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Locals may 'patrol' Canada's borders
By Emelie Rutherford / Daily News Staff
Wednesday, August 24, 2005

After patrolling Arizona's border for immigrants darting across from Mexico, a Framingham man is corralling New Englanders to scour the Canadian border for foreigners sneaking into Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Jeffrey Buck, the director of the nascent New England Minuteman Association, visited western Maine with supporters last weekend to talk with residents and officials about illicit border activity and to scout out the terrain.

Local "minutemen" may venture to the Canadian border with binoculars, radios, search lights and cell phones -- prepared to report sightings of illegal entrants to federal border patrol agents as early as this fall.

Buck, who helped start the Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement, known locally as CCFIILE, said he suspects but has no evidence that people crossing the Canadian border illegally end up in Massachusetts. Yet, he said, "If it affects one state, it affects all states."

Canadian drug dealers and illegal immigrants from the Middle East and eastern Europe are of particular concern, said Robert Casimiro, a member of Buck's group, who acts as spokesman.

Yet Casimiro, who lives in Weymouth and leads the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform, still is researching exactly who hops the Canadian border.

"We're going to the Canadian border because it's a lot closer to us," said Casimiro. "If we lived in Colorado, we'd be going back to the Mexican border."

The New England Minuteman Association was inspired by the Minuteman Project, which drew national attention in April when it organized a patrol along a 23-mile stretch of border in Arizona.

Federal officials discourage such patrols by civilians, who lack the training and law enforcing authority of border patrol agents, said Mario Villarreal, spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

"They have a right to assemble peacefully, but we're the enforcement agency out there on the border, and our operations come first," Villarreal said.

"Having loosely affiliated groups out there patrolling the border or driving around on the border has potential for incidents not only with people they may encounter but also with agents, the environment."

More than 1,000 border patrol agents monitor the U.S. border with Canada, Villarreal said.

Buck said he supports such agents' work, yet wants their superiors to do more to stop illegal immigration, including possibly hiring more agents.

Border patrol agents arrested 6,652 illegal immigrants near the Canadian border from Oct. 1 through last Sunday, Aug. 21, Villarreal said. Of those, 1,770 arrests were in the Swanton, Vt., region, and 215 were in the Houlton, Maine, area.

Yet those illegal immigrants did not necessarily cross the Canadian border, and many likely were Mexicans already in the country who were nabbed at secondary checkpoints, Villarreal said.

John Connors, president of the Maine chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), said his state does not have a problem with illegal immigrants and questioned the logistics of Buck's group's operation.

"It's all brush and swamp, good luck to them," Connors said. "If they're coming here we'd be out there keeping an eye on them...but I think the black flies will take care of them."

Casimiro said he hopes to organize the first watch in October for the group, which he said has approximately a "half dozen" Massachusetts members.

He said he does not know what public land exists along the border in the three New England states, and no arrangements have been made yet for the group to use private land.