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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Arizona militia members, a Colorado Republican and a national group with white supremacist ties have made a remote stretch of the Mexico border a flash point for anti-immigrant hostility.
May 22, 2003 | It's high noon in Tombstone, Ariz., a dusty little town that's part ranching outpost and part Old West theme park, and over on Toughnut Street, a block away from the tourists and the tacky souvenir shops, Chris Simcox is toiling away inside the cluttered office of the Tombstone Tumbleweed. An Associated Press feature on Simcox has just been wired to every newsroom in the country, and the atmosphere is chaotic. Phones in the little newsroom are ringing off the hook.
Simcox, the Tumbleweed's editor and owner, is in his element. After a failed marriage in Los Angeles, a stint of unemployment, the shock of Sept. 11, and three months camped out in the Arizona desert, he arrived here last year and has fashioned for himself a new life as the poster boy for the American anti-immigrant movement. He bought the newspaper in August; by October, he had clearly stamped it with his own personality. "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!" declared the Tumbleweed's front page that month. "A PUBLIC CALL TO ARMS! CITIZENS BORDER PATROL MILITIA NOW FORMING!"
Within a month, Simcox claims, an untold number of Tombstone residents and others signed up to join his militia, called Civil Homeland Defense. Militia rules mandate that each member carry a pistol, for which a background check is required, and he or she must also wear a baseball cap emblazoned with an American flag. The group patrols along the Cochise County chaparral between Tombstone and Mexico, searching for people who look like illegal immigrants. When suspected illegals are caught, Simcox says, they are "humanely" placed under citizen's arrest and turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol.
There are those in Tombstone who say that the 41-year-old former teacher is an eccentric, an egomaniac and a threat to the local tourism industry. While Simcox says his militia has 600 members, others here say the number is far smaller. "Chris can only get a three-man patrol going," says Jeff, a bartender at the Crystal Bar on Main Street. "Basically, the kind of people who want to join his group can't even pass a background check."
However quixotic his character, Simcox is a leading figure in a loose but committed alliance of anti-immigrant forces that have turned Cochise County into a national flash point for escalating tensions over illegal immigration. The alliance includes not only local ranchers, landowners and law enforcement officials, but also former high-ranking Border Patrol agents and U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican. Quietly backing their efforts is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a controversial anti-immigration group that in the 1980s and 1990s received more than $1 million from a shadowy group accused of white-supremacist leanings.
In Cochise County alone, self-styled vigilante groups in recent years have harassed and detained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants suspected of entering the country illegally. They claim they are only enforcing U.S. laws too often ignored by law enforcement officials. But human rights advocates are worried about a climate here and through much of southern Arizona that seems increasingly primed for violence.
In 2000 Miguel Angel Palafox, a 20-year-old migrant, was shot in the neck by two horsemen dressed in black who attacked him near the border town of Sasabe, about 50 miles east of Cochise County. Palafox crawled back to Mexico with a T-shirt wrapped around his wound and lived to tell the tale, though the riders remain unknown.
Last October, in the small town of Red Rock, between Tucson and Phoenix, two undocumented immigrants were found shot to death by a roadside. Manuel Ortega, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, says the two victims were part of a group of 12 migrants resting around a pond south of the town. While most of the group slumbered, one of the migrants told the consulate staff, two masked men dressed in camouflage and armed with machine guns appeared from the woods, firing upon the group and killing the two before the others scattered. The Pinal County sheriff's office is treating the killings as a dispute between rival people smugglers, or coyotes, but Ortega says his office has never seen a killing like that involving coyotes.
As co-director of the Tucson human rights group Derechos Humanos, attorney Isabel Garcia has campaigned to bring anti-immigrant vigilantes and brutal coyotes to justice for more than 25 years, and she sees good reason to question the focus of the sheriff's investigation of the Red Rock murders. "It seems highly unlikely that coyotes would use camouflage clothes and highly unlikely that they would kill people who would bring in more money," she said. "We've never seen that."
No one has suggested that Simcox's group is involved in the deadly violence. But critics say he is the embodiment of a troubling climate of intolerance and impatience that poses a vivid threat to Mexicans and other illegal migrants near the border. Local officials have condemned the vigilante activity. U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Tucson, a Democrat, has called for an investigation of the growing militia movement there.
But the office of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has not yet replied, and in the meantime, Simcox has grown bolder.
"I dare the president of the United States to arrest Americans who are protecting their own country," Simcox said, in comments carried by the Washington Times earlier this year. "We will no longer tolerate the ineptness of the government in dealing with these criminals and drug dealers. It is a monumental disgrace that our government is letting the American people down, turning us into the expendable casualties of the war on terrorism."
When White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked whether President Bush approved of Simcox's militia, his response was carefully ambiguous: "The president believes that the laws of the land need to be observed and the laws need to be enforced." Which might mean one of two things. Perhaps it was a warning that militia groups should stay within the law. Or perhaps it was an acknowledgment that federal agencies have failed at the border -- and a careful way of cheering on the vigilantes.
