Minutemen monitor, get monitored at Arizona-Mexico border

GDO Report

The number of migrants crossing the desert has fallen. Word is out in Mexican border towns that the Minutemen are watching. And the federal government is paying attention.

Still, not everyone is happy with the 1,000 or so volunteers who pledged online to show up in Arizona to search for illegal crossers

Border agents say the volunteers are complicating their job - and costing taxpayer dollars every time an agent responds to a tripped border sensor, courtesy of the Minuteman Project.

All this and three weeks left to go.

This month, volunteers from across the country converged in Arizona for the project, fed up with what they see as the government's inability, or refusal, to protect the nation's borders.

On April 2, Border Patrol agents made 344 arrests near Douglas. A day later, on the eve of official Minuteman patrols, agents made 178 arrests. The decrease was a result of stepped-up Mexican patrols, said Andrea Zortman, spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Agents say the dip in apprehensions isn't because of Minutemen. Historically, when Mexican troops increase patrols, the number of crossings decreases, which is the current case, Zortman said.

From April 1-6, the Border Patrol says, it stopped 1,630 illegal immigrants crossing in the Douglas area. Minuteman leaders couldn't say how many of those arrests were the result of their efforts.

Opponents also joined the debate, though in fewer numbers, holding silent vigils in protest of potential migrant abuse while legal monitors stood alongside the Minutemen to ensure no one's rights were violated.

At the end of April, most of the Minutemen will leave, as will many of the migrant-rights advocates. Until then, both sides will stamp their impressions on southern Arizona, which has transformed into the center of the immigration debate.

Some scenes from the border:

One is a retired accountant. The other is a small-town newspaper editor.

Both share a passion for sealing the borders and reforming the country's broken immigration policies, they say.

Jim Gilchrist, an Aliso Viejo, Calif., resident, founded the Minuteman Project after listening to a radio show one day. On the way to Starbucks for coffee, he thought up the Minuteman name.

Chris Simcox, a Tombstone, Ariz., resident, has taken out search groups for years as part of Civil Homeland Defense, a similar but much smaller Minuteman-like effort he leads.

Both leaders drank in the attention with glee. They joked, offered sarcastic rebuttals to journalists' questions and warned that the "media can be your enemy."

When one reporter asked what kind of planes the Minutemen would be flying, Simcox replied, "F-16s," to the applause and laughter of fellow volunteers. And so it went for the first week.

TOMBSTONE

Wyatt Earp must have rolled in his grave this month.

Rugged Tombstone, the town called "too tough to die," found itself the center of the illegal-immigration universe.

At the site of the infamous OK Corral, there were real cowboys and fake cowboys, real guns and fake guns, newspaper reporters, TV cameramen, miles of cable, European tourists, damsels, horse-drawn carriages, photographers, Arizona Rangers, a congressman, and a fleet of satellite trucks that resembled small tanks.

Media at times outnumbered the Minutemen.

Goal No. 1 was complete for the project's leaders. The Minuteman Project had become a "victim of its own success," Gilchrist said.

The world was watching.

VIGILS AND VIGILANCE

Poetry slams. Volleyball games. Silent protests.

Opponents of the Minuteman Project also came armed to the desert, with signs, slogans and events, hopeful of drawing attention to the plight of migrants.

Armando Navarro, a University of California Riverside professor, led a contingent of Southern California students and human-rights advocates into Arizona to protest what they called the politics of violence and hate.

At the border, a few legal observers with the ACLU watched the watchers. As of week's end, there had been no trouble, authorities reported.

GRUPO BETA

In Agua Prieta, Mexico, the orange trucks trundle all day long through the Sonora desert, doing as the Minutemen do, but for different reasons.

Clad in orange uniforms, Grupo Beta is a 24-hour watch group. On a wall inside their offices in Agua Prieta is a giant laminated map with dozens of bull's-eye marks. Each shows where a migrant died, when and how.

One reads, 39-year-old Efren Gutierrez-Hernandez died in 103-degree heat on July 12, 2003. Another reads, 47-year-old Delia Herrera-Atilano died of heat, five miles from Douglas on July 15, 2003.

Grupo Beta shuttles crates of water, baby formula and food into the desert, searching for migrants. Several tall blue flags waving through the Sonora desert identify water stations set up by Grupo Beta personnel.

Government-funded, the organization deploys to pick up migrants found by Mexican state police and offers food and water if needed.

EARL'S MISSION

Soft-spoken Earl Schweitzer was like a lot of the Minuteman volunteers who showed up in Arizona to search the desert.

The Orange, Calif., resident didn't carry a gun or shout vitriol against Mexicans. He was retired and felt a calling to drive his trailer into the desert and watch the borders, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

People have it all wrong about the Minuteman volunteers, he said, glaring through a spotting scope: "They aren't the radicals they're made out to be."

He'll man his post, near a hissing natural-gas line, for 30 days. It's not too bad, actually. He's made new friends and the desert can be a peaceful place.

"We heard Rush Limbaugh today," he said with a smile.

CATTLE AND GHOSTS

About a half-mile from Agua Prieta, Mexico, is the marble-columned Gadsden Hotel, an historic landmark built in 1907 and rife with ghosts and legends.

At the front desk, Brenda Maley keeps a tattered spiral notebook filled with ghostly tales.

Doors rattle. Figures walk through walls. Locks open.

Maley hears so many stories from frightened and nervous guests that she asks them to write them all in the book.

"Everyone calls me and tells me the stories," she said. "I couldn't remember them all."

A sampling:

Dec. 30, 2003

"A customer checked in at 1:30 a.m. into room Number 211. Ten minutes later they came down the stairs saying that things were moving in their room and they wanted their money back. ..."

Jan. 24, 2004

"A customer came down the stairs, looked spaced-out and nervous. He asked if we had someone from the hotel working on the mezzanine. I told him "no." He said he just saw a man on the mezzanine walk through a wall and he never came out."

SIDESHOW

If there was a class clown among the Minutemen it was Bryan Barton, a 25-year-old San Diego native who garnered the distinction of being the first Minuteman volunteer to have a complaint filed against him.

Authorities said Barton and a fellow Minuteman appeared to detain an illegal immigrant against his will April 6. Barton gave the man money and filmed the migrant holding a T-shirt that read, "Bryan Barton caught an illegal Alien and all I got was this T-shirt," said Zortman, the spokeswoman with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The investigation was closed a day later, authorities said, after it was determined that Barton had not detained the man, something Minuteman volunteers pledged not to do.

A story in the Arizona Daily Star last week labeled Barton a thorn in its editorial pages, calling his actions "reprehensible." Barton, who is running for Congress, according to his Web site, was quoted in the paper as saying the stunt was meant to be funny.

On Friday, the Minuteman Project issued a release saying it had dismissed Barton. In a press release on its Web site, Minuteman co-founder Simcox lauded Barton's actions of providing food for the man.

"The volunteer's actions were admirable, justified and undeniably humane but unfortunately they jeopardized our established procedures and overall purpose of passively monitoring the border."