Thursday, May 15, 2008
Enraged by illegal immigration and traumatized by 9/11, Chris Simcox convinced hundreds of volunteers to join his Minuteman Project. Their goal: Seal the border and restore their American dream.
May 11, 2005 | High drama suits Chris Simcox. You imagine that even when he's home alone talking to his cat, he acts as if he's addressing a sea of people. The hyperactive and bone-thin 43-year-old is the key organizer of and barker for the Minuteman Project, the citizen border patrol that in April sought with a single bold stroke to put a stop to illegal immigration along the Arizona-Mexico border. On the eighth day of the project, in the Arizona village of Palominas, Simcox is briefing 10 new recruits in a dirt lot near an oily little restaurant called the Trading Post. Several R.V. campers squat in the lot near a Port-O-San. Beyond is the empty scrub desert and two miles away the Mexican border.
"The government can't afford to let this thing succeed," Simcox tells the anxious men. "So stick to the SOP. That's the most important thing." Standard operating procedure is to call the U.S. Border Patrol at the sight of anyone trying to sneak across the border. Added to the tension is the news that Simcox has received death threats, supposedly from a Central American gang lord; he wears a bulletproof vest.
He tells the men they can carry pistols but they should not try to capture or detain migrants; there should be no contact at all between the Minutemen and their quarry. "It's gonna get boring because we have to shut down this border," he continues. "But don't get suckered into an encounter. People coming across to work are victims. Just as you are. Your most effective weapon is your video camera. Someone approaches, your video camera is on!"
This is the new Chris Simcox, the politically correct, sanitized version. In January 2003, federal park rangers arrested Simcox after he wandered onto national parkland in search of illegal immigrants. In his possession was a loaded pistol, two walkie-talkies, a police scanner, a cellphone, a digital camera and what appeared to be a toy figurine of Wyatt Earp on a horse.
But being convicted on a misdemeanor firearms charge and serving a year of probation obviously got to him. He put away his revolver, re-angled his rhetoric and ultimately netted hundreds of volunteers to his cause. Standing near the border, whipped by the desert wind, Simcox tells me, "This is the Boston tea party! We are reestablishing the can-do attitude! We're tough and tenacious but humane and civilized. We are the American spirit. We say no, we mean no. The word is 'temerity' -- rock-solid character! We are challenging two governments. This is about will."
The Minuteman Project commenced operations on April Fool's Day in the cardboard cowboy town of Tombstone. Day and night, nearly 900 working-class men and women from across the country, nearly all of them white, stood guard at half-mile intervals along a 23-mile stretch of the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona. Some carried pistols, some binoculars, some held scribbled signs, some sat in lawn chairs. They were angry and worried and depressed. To them, the deluge of illegal immigrants stole American jobs, drove down wages, burdened city services, and spawned crime waves. They loved their country but hated their government. It was failing to protect them and its own sovereignty. The American dream was dying on the border.
At the end of the month, the Minutemen announced with great fanfare that their presence, and their reports to the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, had reduced illegal crossings on their little stretch of border by more than 98 percent, from 800 to 13 per day. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger swallowed the hype, declaring that the Minutemen had done "a terrific job" in preventing illegals from crossing the border. He even suggested that they move the operation to California's equally porous border.
Federal customs officials, however, responded that the Minutemen did little more than get in their way; they were especially annoyed that the good citizens kept tripping motion detectors hidden in the brush. What neither border officials nor immigration experts deny, though, is that the Minuteman Project focused the hot light of the media on the world of problems surrounding illegal immigration.
"It seemed there were more stories in the papers about the Minutemen than there were migrants apprehended," says Tamar Jacoby, author of "Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American." "But they put the issue back in the news, that's for sure."
In 2004, more than 1 million illegal immigrants were captured on the Mexican border. In the previous 10 years, at least 2,500 died in the crossing from sun, cold, thirst. If the wrath of the desert didn't kill them, the pitiful conditions provided them by black-market smugglers did. The human flood resulted in endless troubles for patrol agents, who in greater numbers than ever were being shot at, stoned, ambushed, both by migrants and drug traffickers. In 2004, there were 118 assaults on border agents in just the 30 miles of border stretching east and west of Palominas.
With the migrations, violence and human smuggling, "People are right to be frustrated and angry with the border problem," says Jacoby. "Nobody can quarrel with the point that the system's broken."
Simcox, with his maniacal and often shameless declarations about immigration, and his contradictory sympathy for migrants, whom he appears to hate for coming to his country, is already imagining an outsize place for himself in the history books. He sees himself as the lone man who will fix the system and close down the border.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
