Armed civilian groups are patrolling the
international boundary, scouting the rolling grasslands
and rough hills for people who have entered the United
States illegally, and in many cases detaining them until
the U.S. Border Patrol arrives to take them into
custody. The
leaders of these militias
say they are compensating for inadequate government
enforcement of misguided immigration policies that allow
undocumented workers, drug smugglers, and possibly
terrorists to "swarm" across the border, damaging
private property, harming the environment, and
intimidating rural residents.
"People were already
being harassed by the Border Patrol, and now things have
gotten even worse," says Jennifer Allen of the
Tucson-based Border Action Network. Mexican Americans
born and raised in the United States, she says, "used to
go out hunting or hiking, but they've been dragged out
of their tents and harassed to such a degree that they
don't go out of the city anymore. And now these
vigilantes are out there with the attitude that if
you're brown and out in the desert, you must be an
undocumented migrant. So even the residents are in
danger because the vigilante groups are bringing people
in that are racist and hunting for anyone with brown
skin."
Border Action Network
asserts that some
militia members have
openly consorted with out-of-state representatives of
racist groups. One public meeting in May
2000 was attended not only by such local militia
backers as Roger Barnett and Glenn Spencer, but also
by two representatives from David Duke's National
Organization for European American Rights
and
members of an
Arkansas Klan group.
QUESTIONS OF RACISM
aside, militia members
are reacting to, and contributing to, an already
dangerous situation. In
the past couple of years, smugglers have become
increasingly desperate, aggressive, and in many cases
violent. Groups of illegal immigrants have been fired
upon—and people killed—by
drive-by assailants who have never been apprehended.
Law-enforcement agencies theorize that the killers are
rival smugglers, while human-rights activists speculate
that the attackers could be
U.S. vigilantes.
Much of the militia
activity is centered in Cochise County, which by
frontier standards is relatively populous. Here, private
ranches cover hundreds of acres crisscrossed by roads.
There's more private land along the border in the other
Western states, but most of the organized militia
operations so far have taken place in southeastern
Arizona. The major exception is Ranch Rescue, based in
Texas with chapters in New Mexico, Arizona, and
California. According to its spokesperson Jack Foote,
Ranch Rescue has deployed about 200 volunteers in a
variety of "operations" over the past two and a half
years.
Two other high-profile
militias operate exclusively in Arizona. Tombstone-based
Civil Homeland Defense was formed by small-newspaper
publisher Chris Simcox to counter "the threat of
terrorism and out-of-control border crime" by tracking
and reporting suspicious groups in the desert. (Although
Mexican police in March arrested two Iraqis and an
American of Iraqi descent planning to enter the United
States from a Tijuana bus terminal, there is no clear
evidence that terrorists have penetrated this country
via Mexico.) Simcox estimates that 170 people
volunteered for Civil Homeland Defense during the first
four months of this year.
UNLIKE THE TWO other
groups, the Sierra Vista-based
American Border Patrol
does not detain undocumented immigrants, according to
founder Glenn Spencer; instead, it uses high-tech
equipment to post images of undocumented crossers on its
Web site.
Texas rancher Jack
Foote founded
Ranch Rescue in June 2000, inspired in
part by the exploits of Cochise County rancher Roger
Barnett, who patrols his 22,000-acre Cross Rail Ranch
with his brothers, his dog, and his Colt .45 and M-16,
forcibly detaining people he suspects to be undocumented
immigrants and turning them in to the Border Patrol.
"I've ridden along
with Roger on his ranch," says Foote. "These criminal
trespassers—that's what they are, criminals—have torn up
his infrastructure for his cattle ranch, they've torn
down his fences, broken his water pumps, killed his
cattle, and trashed his grazing areas."
Foote says he formed
Ranch Rescue to provide a volunteer force for repairing
damaged property—and, when invited, to make sure private
property remains private. "What we do is stand alongside
those border landowners as their invited guests on their
private property, and, shoulder to shoulder, we look at
our federal and state officials and say, ‘Either you
will keep these criminals off this private property, or
we will.'"
Activists charge that
some law-enforcement agencies are complicit in the
militias' activities. According to the Border Action
Network's "Hate or Heroism" report, "Ranch Rescue says
its members include former Border Patrol agents,
military personnel, law enforcement officers, and
members of Soldier of Fortune magazine. This may
explain why Ranch Rescue operates with impunity."
Garcia's charge of
racism rankles the militia organizers, but the rhetoric
of Foote and particularly Spencer could hardly be called
sensitive. "The United States and Mexico are two
entirely different nations," Spencer declares. "The
United States has as its founders people who came here
for intellectual reasons, freedom of religion. Mexico
was founded by a group of people who came to plunder,
the conquistadors.... We have a clash of civilizations:
the pilgrims versus the conquistadors, the civilization
based on Newton's Principia Mathematica and the
great philosophers of Europe versus the blood-and-sand
character of Mexico, which is based on Aztec warriors
and the conquistadors. We are asked to absorb millions
of people from this culture; we are unable to assimilate
them, so they are asking for their culture to be
maintained here in ours. This is a direct threat to the
Age of Reason, to the ascent of man, and will end in a
massive conflict. It has to be stopped."
The message of such
language is clear to University of Arizona professor
Edward J. Williams. "I think the main motivation for the
most contemporary manifestation of these vigilante
groups is racism," he says, "allowing for the fact that
there is a strain of legitimate concern based on the
trashing of the property of the ranchers and some small
degree of burglaries and robberies. But that's not the
major issue, certainly not with these more recent
groups."
The Border Action
Network report acknowledges that Simcox's Civil Homeland
Defense "does not appear to be associated with national
anti-immigrant or white supremacist groups," but also
notes that "Simcox denies that he is racist, but in the
same breath likens immigrants to a throng of insects,"
and the report finds links
between racist organizations and
Ranch Rescue and
especially
American Border Patrol.
"The American Border
Patrol's Glenn Spencer, for example, can be traced to
the Council of Conservative Citizens and to neo-Nazi
organizations such as the National Alliance," the report
states.
"Glenn Spencer founded
a white-nationalist, anti-immigrant organization in
California in 1992 with the help of a hefty grant from
John Tanton's funding organization, US Inc.," the report
says. "Spencer's nonprofit, American Patrol/ Voices of
Citizens Together, which agitated for English-only
legislation, supported Proposition 187 in California,
and broadcasts virulent anti-Mexican/ anti-immigrant
messages on the radio and the Web, is listed as a hate
group by the Southern Poverty Law Center."
Perhaps the local
attitude was best expressed by a Forest Service worker
patrolling for fires and other "unusual activity" near
the border one wet morning in February. He spends his
workdays, in part, contending with the environmental
damage done by large groups tramping through the
wilderness, then he goes home to live among neighbors
who
volunteer for militia work.
"I can appreciate some
of the problems the ranchers and those people are
having," he said. "But those guys running around out
there with guns are scary. Real scary."
James Reel is a
free-lance writer living in Tucson, Arizona.
Animal Rights Organizations
Action for compassion and delusion
The Border Action Network (www.borderaction.org)
Humane Borders (www.humaneborders.org)
BorderLinks (www.borderlinks.org)
The Human Rights Coalition (www.derechoshumanosaz.net)
Civilian Militias
"Troops under arms"
The American Border Patrol (www.americanborderpatrol.com)
Civil Homeland Defense (www.civilhomelanddefense.us)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.civilhomelanddefense.us/
Ranch Rescue (www.ranchrescue.com)
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ranchrescue.com/
