This is the second of three articles by Pat Young detailing the evolution of The Minutemen, America's best known anti-immigrant movement, and is cross-posted from Long Island Wins. To read "Part-1 The Minutemen Become Heroes of the Right," click here
Founded in 2004, the Minutemen have attracted media scrutiny following the murder of a nine-year-old girland her father by Shawna Forde and members of the Minuteman American Defense group, scrutiny that unfortunately was lacking during their early years.
The Minutemen became the iconic symbol of the anti-immigrant movement in 2005. Depicted by conservative media as selfless heroes assuming the patriotic mantle of our forefathers at Lexington and Concord, their meager numbers and insignificant accomplishments were greatly magnified by the press. Although their "deployments" were sparsely attended, they issued press releases crediting their volunteers with 94% reductions in illegal immigration in the sectors they patrolled, and these statements were often reported uncritically in the press.
Some media outlets went beyond merely reporting the Minuteman line. When Lou Dobbs was criticized by the Wall Street Journal for placing his program in the service of the Minutemen, he embraced the allegations on a December 2005 show: "I just want to be clear to the Journal and to this audience: I support the Minuteman Project and the fine Americans who make it up in all they've accomplished, fully, relentlessly, and proudly." And people like Sean Hannity could well have made the same affirmation.
In 2005, Minuteman co-founder Chris Simcox was able to use the media spotlight gain access to levels of power that most of us can only dream of. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center: "More than 20U.S. congressmen attended a Minuteman rally he hosted in September in Washington, D.C. And six of those politicians actually signed up with his organization, strapped on handguns and participated in Minuteman patrols in October...That same month, Simcox met with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Texas Gov. Rick Perry."
Minuteman's other co-founder, Jim Gilchrist, also became a welcome ally to conservative politicians hoping to distract voters who were increasingly disaffected from the Republican Party by the war in Iraq and the September 2005 Homeland Security failure to respond to the human crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Soon after this huge media splash, however, Minuteman began to splinter.
Concerns emerged almost immediately after the inaugural Spring 2005 deployment that members of racist groupswere flocking to Minuteman. Assurances by the two founders that they were working with the FBI to do background checks on Minutemen were not true, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Simcox himself made statements during the Spring 2005 deployment that brought his own claims of racial color-blindness into question. For example, in a June 2005 documentary he tells a reporter that he has two goals. First, as one would expect, the militarization of the southern border. But his second goal has nothing to do with illegal immigration. After the border is militarized, he says "then I want a two-year moratorium on any immigration to this country from Mexico". Since that moratorium would be directed against legal immigration, it is obvious that his problem was less to do with illegal immigrants, and more to do with Mexicans.
Money problems also overtook the Minutemen.
The popularity of the Minutemen within the political right generated waves of donations every time the leadership appeared on FOX News or Lou Dobbs Tonight.
As some within Minuteman began to demand accountability for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations flowing into the group, few controls on funds were put in place, in spite of Gilchrist's own background in financial management. While Minuteman leaders said they were too busy protecting the border to provide fiscal safeguards, critics alleged that the two co-founders were getting rich off the movement.
Soon the worst charges of financial mismanagement would come from within Minuteman, often from one co-founder against the other.
Chris Simcox left Gilchrist in the Fall 2005 to form his own group called Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and began an at times brutal battlewith Gilchrist for publicity and donations. Jim Gilchrist has charged that Simcox was jealous of his popularity on radio and television. Gilchrist is said to have appeared on TV or radion 2,700 times in the first three years of Minutemen. Gilchrist would later tell theLos Angeles Timesof Simcox that "I think he was jealous and it was clear he wanted my segment of the Minuteman campaign to fail".
Even before the formal Simcox/Gilchrist split, nearly forty groupswith names similar to the Minutemen had formed around the country. It is unclear if any of these groups were under the control of the two founders of the "movement". Virtually anyone who wanted to could brand his or her group with the name "Minuteman" and head out for the border, and, perhaps more importantly, begin to collect donations online.
Jim Chase, who was a prominent early member of Minuteman, left to form his own group, the California Minutemen, which said it wanted to recruit "all those who do not want their family murdered by Al Qaeda, illegal migrants, colonizing illegal aliens, illegal alien felons, alien barbarians, Ninja-dressed drug smugglers". Gilchrist and Simcox denounced their former ally'sCalifornia project. In June 2005, Gilchrist issued a statement disowning the California Minutemen: "Mr. Chase has no authority to use the Minuteman Project name," Gilchrist declared in a June statement. "Neither does Mr. Chase have permission to trade upon the Arizona Minuteman Project's April record in any future border-watch initiatives."
With the June denunciation by Gilchrist, one would think that the Minuteman Project and the California Minutemen would have nothing further to do with each other, but this was not the case. In what would over time become a pattern, Gilchrist both repudiated the rival group and supported it!
In July 2005, the California Minutemen, numbering less than 100 members, began adeployment in Campo, California, along the border. They were confronted by a large and unruly group of protestors. The protestors tried to disrupt Minutemen activites and yelled insults at the Minutemen. After Minutemen threatened to kill protestors, the situation turned potentially deadly. Jim Gilchrist put out a nationwide "emergency call for reinforcements in Campo". The call to arms included the following: "Be warned that roving gangs of belligerent, death-threatening, anti-American adversaries engaging the California Minutemen WILL physically attack you if they outnumber you. I repeat, they WILL physically attack you...Stay in groups and stay LEGALLY armed."
This pattern of denyinga connection to a splinter Minuteman group while at the same time providing support would be repeated later in the Minuteman Project's association with Shawna Forde and Minuteman American Defense. On the one had, Gilchrist denies that she was anything more than a rogueusing Minuteman as a cover for criminality. He and others like to point out that Minuteman American Defense is a separate organization, with a separate leadership. But he also has endorsed her work and as recently as June, 2009, the Minuteman Project was offering to put Minuteman volunteers under her command.
Money issues helped to splinter not only the original Minuteman Project, but also the successor MInuteman organizations.
In 2006, Chris Simcox was the target of charges by his former allies that he had misappropriated money raised for what Simcox called an "Israeli-style" fence to protect the border. The href="50-per-foot fence was depicted by many in the border protection movement as an effort to bilk supporters for Simcox's benefit. Glenn Spencerof American Border Patrol poked fun at the Minuteman fence saying; "It wouldn't stop a tricycle..It's shameful that [Simcox] would deceive the American people in this way." Barbara Coeof the racist California Coalition for Immigration Reform saidat the time that "Simcox doesn't seem to know that his days on the Minuteman gravy train are ended".
Many more mainstream conservatives were also becoming disenchanted with the financial antics of the Minutemen. The Southern Poverty Law Center quotesa July 20, 2006 Washington Times article that warned that a "growing number of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leaders and volunteers are questioning the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in donations collected in the past 15 months, challenging the organization's leadership over accountability." The Washington Times followed the article up with a focused blast in an editorial aimed at Simcox: "As supporters of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, we were disheartened to read ... about questions and criticisms of Chris Simcox's management of the organization...The truth is that no one except Mr. Simcox knows how much money has been donated and what it has been used for. So far, Mr. Simcox has been unable to come up with a good explanation -- at least one that can be independently verified."
Visitors to anti-immigrant bulletin boards know that charges that Simcox has gotten rich off his activism abound among rival and former Minutemen.
But Simcox was not the only leader to be charged with misfeasance by his one-time followers. In 2007, Jim Gilchrist too was the focus of allegations of financial irregularities. These charges nearly led him to be drummed out of the movement entirely.
When Gilchrist first incorporated Minuteman, he was the only member of its board of directors, an extremely unusual arrangement. When three other anti-immigrant activists joined the board, they alleged that, in the first two years of the project, $750,000 had gone missing. In 2007, concerns over where the funds went were cited as the reason board members deposed him from power in the organization he started.
In aninterviewat the time with the LA Times, Gilchrist said he was often distracted from financial aspects of his organization by the need to control extremists drawn to the Minuteman Project. In a statement that today sounds eerie, he spoke disparagingly of the board members who had deposed him saying: "My adversaries still have more wackos than we have...This will keep us from moving ahead for a very long time, but hopefully we will triumph in the end. I will stay in this war."
One of the "wackos" whom Gilchrist had enlisted in his war was Shawna Forde.
Next week look for the final chapter in this series: Border Storm 3-The Minutemen: Disintegration and Death
"Money" photo by Andrew Magill via Flickr and Lou Dobbs photo from NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org