 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | October 2005 
'Minuteman' Effort Moves Northwest
 John Ritter - USA TODAY
| | Washington state Minutemen Claude LeBas(L) and Tom Williams at their Lynden, Washington headquarters near US-Canada border. The two men have organized the state's volunteers from the Minuteman Defense Corps and have started 24-hour watches of the US-Canada border looking for illegal immigrants. (AFP/Cathryn Atkinson |
From a parked van, Ben Vaughn and Larry Loop, a couple of middle-aged Vietnam War veterans, peer across a 3-foot-wide drainage ditch - the U.S.-Canadian border.
Two-lane roads run on both sides of the ditch. No fences or barriers are there to keep someone from walking across the border. Houses line the Canadian side of the road, behind them forests and farmland.
Vaughn and Loop, members of a volunteer "Minuteman" contingent like those that stirred controversy earlier this year in Arizona, hang out for several hours but see nothing out of the ordinary. It is a far cry from the desert of the U.S.-Mexican border, where undocumented immigrants try to sneak into America every day. That doesn't matter to these Minutemen. They say they're here to make a political statement about the vulnerability of the nation's borders.
"If we can help keep some terrorists from coming across that would be great," says Vaughn, 58. "Even just slow them down."
The Minuteman presence at nine "posts" along 26 miles of the 4,000-mile northern border's far western sector so far has been uneventful. Minutemen called in once to report a suspicious vehicle, but it turned out to be an unmarked Border Patrol SUV.
Human rights groups say the Minutemen foster immigrant bashing and racial profiling. The ACLU of Washington is monitoring their activities. The Bellingham City Council passed a resolution deploring border vigilantes and Whatcom County, where Lynden is located, is considering one.
"It's wholly inappropriate for untrained citizens to be out there on the border. It's putting them in a dangerous position," says Rep. Rick Larsen (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash., whose district includes Whatcom County.
Magdaleno Rose-Avila, director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle, says: "People they're going to target are people who look like me, not like them. Canadians could walk right by and they wouldn't know it."
But Minutemen insist that the borders are porous because the White House and Congress have failed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to deploy enough agents, airplanes and surveillance equipment to keep out undesirables.
"The borders are absolutely wide open, and we're under invasion from drug dealers, criminals and people from all around the world," says Chris Simcox, president of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, based in Tombstone, Ariz. "Our Department of Homeland Security is absolutely impotent."
The Minutemen won't go away "until we're relieved from duty by the National Guard and the United States military," Simcox says. Their efforts appear to be growing. Volunteers are watching the northern border during October in seven states, he says, though full time only here in Washington.
Minuteman groups are springing up in non-border places like Chicago and Indiana. "All you have to do is look around and see that the invasion is up here, too," says Rosanna Pulido, an organizer in Arlington Heights, Ill., outside Chicago. Her group plans protests at local banks that she says make home loans to undocumented immigrants.
Next month, the Minutemen will begin protesting at day-labor sites where undocumented immigrants gather to seek work and at construction companies that hire illegal laborers, Simcox says.
He says Minutemen will continue to watch the Mexican border. Although he tries to dispel the group's Rambo image - it prohibits contact with immigrants - there have been incidents, and splinter groups have emerged whose agendas are unclear.
Last month, organizers called off a patrol south of San Diego after a scuffle with counterdemonstrators. A Minuteman was arrested in New Mexico last week allegedly for detaining a group of migrants. Local officials in Texas have asked Minutemen to stay away.
However, their patrols apparently have had an impact. In April, the Border Patrol in Arizona reported that undocumented immigrant traffic had dropped by half where Minutemen were stationed. Nearly 600,000 people were arrested last year trying to cross the border into Arizona.
In 2005, agents in the Border Patrol's 89-mile Blaine, Wash., sector caught 332 undocumented aliens trying to cross from Canada, an average of six or seven a week, says Joe Giuliano, the sector's deputy chief. A much more likely catch is "B.C. bud," a particularly potent marijuana strain grown in British Columbia, typically dropped off in a hockey bag for someone on the U.S. side to pick up. Last year, the Border Patrol seized 3,861 pounds of pot.
Giuliano says he has 132 agents now compared with 48 before Sept. 11, 2001, and substantially more surveillance gear, including remote cameras, sensors and aircraft.
Tom Williams, a retired Marine who leads the Minuteman contingent in Washington, says he tells the Border Patrol where his Minutemen are posted. Volunteers are screened and trained to "observe and report," never to confront or harass anyone, Williams says. Volunteers, however, can carry handguns with a valid state permit.
Not far from where Vaughn and Loop are parked, Canadian and U.S. agents last summer busted an elaborate reinforced tunnel dug from the Canadian side, apparently to smuggle drugs into the USA.
Just down the road from Vaughn's van, Kevin and Meralee Byker are building a house on 5 acres. They invited the Minutemen to park on their property.
"We're glad they're here," Meralee says. "We're not against immigrants. We've lived overseas and love other cultures. But what other country can you walk in illegally and take a job and not pay taxes?" |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us