What 'minuteman' vigil accomplished

Still, to those on both sides of the issue, the Minuteman Project's initiative in Arizona came off largely without incident. Both the US Border Patrol, which was concerned that volunteer citizens would create problems for agents, and the ACLU, which worried that conflicts would ensue in encounters with illegals, now say the activists weren't overly intrusive.

"The month came and went and we are grateful that there were no major incidents to report, no one got hurt or killed," says Salvador Zamora, spokesman for the US Border Patrol. Early reports in US media and continued coverage by Mexican media created the wide impression that gun-toting vigilantes would be using physical force.

The Border Patrol does not encourage such actions by citizens, and says the minuteman volunteers and media presence "tripped off ground sensors and created distractions ... but nothing we were not able to overcome," says Mr. Zamora.

He says the vigil generated 1,100 phone calls to the Border Patrol and 2,000 apprehensions. Those statistics appear to differ from the minuteman's own statistics which claim that 335 apprehensions were directly facilitated by their volunteers who observed illegal crossings and called the Border Patrol. The difference can be accounted for by the number of possible calls by local residents.

Minutemen claim the 20-mile corridor directly patrolled by their volunteers dropped illegal crossings to from an average of 800 to 13 per day.

"The minutemen brought the problem of illegal immigration and the lack of support that the Border Patrol here gets from Washington," says Mike Albon, spokesman for Tucson Local 2544, a union of local Border Patrol agents. "We didn't have any problem with them and know of no incident to prove they were wackos and racists and supremacists."

Besides organizing continued vigils and boycotts, Gilchrist and Simcox met with Congressmen in recent weeks, telling them of their plans and issuing an ultimatum.

"We told them no compromises ... you will secure the border with National Guard or military or by deputizing or privatizing ... or we will continue these efforts," says Simcox. "The current Border Patrol with one guy covering five miles doesn't cut it. We need static observation posts 40 yards apart, with technology and sensors and we need obvious manpower on the border."

Now that the volunteer manpower has withdrawn, residents in the area already notice an immediate uptick in the numbers of illegals. Interviews with Mexicans in the border towns of Naco and Nogales show that thousands were just biding their time until the well-publicized event passed and are now set to continue their nightly attempts to cross.

Evencio Garcia, a 22-year-old carpenter from Veracruz, Mexico, says he has been biding his time until the Minuteman Project is over, to try and get back into the US.

"I can work here [in Mexico] for 11 hours a day, six days a week and maybe make 600 pesos ($60 US dollars), or I can make it to Iowa and make about $400 a week," says Evencio, standing on a main street in Naco, Mexico. The town stores have been socked hard by the Minuteman Project he says, with perhaps 1,000 fewer visitors per day staying away since Mexican media saturated the airwaves with news of armed US "vigilantes."

But not all border residents were sorry about the quiet streets.

"The minutemen did a great job of shutting off illegal immigration here, as long as they were here," says Dawn Walker Garner, who lives on a five-acre farm near the border. "Now they are gone and the crossing have started up en masse again."

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