This is the third and final installment by Long Island Wins blogger Pat Young on the rise and collapse of the Minuteman anti-immigrant movement. The Border Storm series gives a close-up look at how the Minutemen first captured the imagination of conservatives and were later trapped in a mire of violence and alleged corruption. Read the complete Border Storm series:
Part 1-The Minutemen Become Heroes of the Right
Part 2-The Minutemen Splinter Amidst Charges of Racism and Theft
In the first articles in this series, you were introduced to the two founders of Minuteman, Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox, and you learned that after making a huge media splashin 2005 the group soon split into twolarge factions, with dozens of smaller splinter groups. Gilchrist and Simcox, rivals and critics of each other almost from the start, were also targets of accusations of racism and mismanagement from among their own supporters.
You might have thought that their ride was over in mid-2007 when both men appeared to have been driven from power by factions in Gilchrist's own Minuteman Project and Simcox's self-created Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. But that wasn't the case.
Just as internal politics had nearly destroyed Minuteman, national politics would revive it, however briefly.
The 2008 Republican Presidential race was shaping up to be what pundits described as "the Lou Dobbs primary." With a crowded field, many Republican candidates believedthat the path to victory lay in mobilizing the base around a red meat issue like immigration. Candidates who had previously been moderates on immigration, like Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney began to sound like they got their talking points from long-time anti-immigrant Congressman Tom Tancredo. By all appearances, political strategies in the early days of the race in 2007 tried to harness the excitement generated on the right by the Minutemen.
As a result of these misguided campaign strategies, four Republican presidential campaigns wound up participating in a rally organized by Shawna Forde, who sits today in jail waiting trial for murder.
There was a broad jockeying for the endorsement of the Minutemen for president. Let's understand this point. Accomplished men who had served in Congress or had lived in their state's governor's mansion were competing with one another for the approval of Gilchrist and Simcox, both plagued by scandal and each in danger of losing control over even his own fraction of the movement.
When Jim Gilchrist bestowed his favoron former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, the event brought Minuteman its last national headlines before the murders of Brisenia and Raul Flores in 2009.
The Washington Post's political diary reported that:
Mike Huckabee, under fire for some of his immigration stands while governor of Arkansas, picked up an endorsement in Council Bluffs, Iowa, from the ultimate illegal immigration opponent: Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, the group that has roamed the border for the last several years operating effectively as an independent border patrol.
President Bush called the group "vigilantes" two years ago. But Huckabee seemed eager to announce the endorsement, as it came on a day when former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney started running an ad that slams Huckabee for backing a provision that would have allowed the children of illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition in Arkansas.
"Frankly, Jim I've got to tell you there were times in the early days of the Minutemen I thought what are these guys doing, what are they about," Huckabee said. "I confess I owe you an apology." He said of Gilchrist, "nobody can question his commitment to his country."
Gilchrist, an ally of the candidate who has been most anti-illegal immigration in the GOP field, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, said his endorsement of Huckabee stemmed from the former governor's recent statements on the issue, particularly a plan that Huckabee put out last week that would require illegal immigrants in the country to go to their country of origin before trying to return. The plan also would build a border fence and increase fines on employers who hire illegal immigrants, similar to proposals offered by some of Huckabee's opponents in the GOP nomination process.
"It was a plan I myself could have written," said Gilchrist, who noted the Huckabee campaign reviewed the proposal with him before it was released.
Just so we all understand, this was Mike Huckabee, who would soon win in Iowa, apologizing to the by-now discredited Jim Gilchrist and having Gilchrist review his campaign's positions on immigration. All less than two years after Huckabee said he thought of them as vigilantes!
Why the about-face? Here was the Washington Post's answer:
Illegal immigration has become to the GOP nomination process what health care is for the Democrats, an issue every candidate must speak about and present a detailed plan for how they would tackle the challenge if elected president. Huckabee yesterday started running an ad saying he would stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border just as Romney dialed up his anti-Huckabee rhetoric on the issue. Polls in the early states have shown immigration is on the minds of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, even though they are not border states. Both Republican and Democratic candidates find themselves constantly asked about the issue.
But those days of renewed Minuteman glory faded after John McCain emerged as the Republican presidential candidate. Unlike many other Republican office holders, McCain knew the reality of Minuteman deployments in his home state of Arizona and wanted nothing to do with them.
With Obama and McCain as the candidates of the two major parties, immigration virtually disappeared as a national issue.
In November 2008, insightful articlein the New Republic caught up with the old Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist. Gilchrist confessed that factionalism within the Minuteman "movement" had left his opponents embittered and turned him into a target of potential violence. "I get more hate mail from members of my own movement, from so-called Minutemen, than from the open-border people". He told reporter Zvika Krieger that he no longer regularly patrols the border because "I'd be wary of going down to the border myself these days," he says. "I'm worried about what [the Minutemen] would do with a sidearm."
Gilchrist characterized the recruits drawn by Minuteman as riddled with "troublemakers with personality disorders and criminal propensities."
Before she leaves Gilchrist, Krieger sits down with him in a scene that, in a different context, would fit well in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel:
But even Gilchrist, sitting at his kitchen breakfast nook with pie-wielding Mammy salt-and-pepper shakers
and a tablecloth decorated with Sambo-style figures eating watermelon, has concluded that most of the
people left in the anti-immigration movement are "xenophobic, racist, schizophrenic, wackjob ne'erdo-
wells." He's having a difficult time raising even half the money he raised in 2006. And his legal budget,
which he was saving to fight "organizations that were violating [immigration] law," has been tied up with
cases against members of his own movement, amounting to over $200,000 in legal fees. His most recent
suit was against someone using the Minuteman name to release a video "encouraging people to shoot
illegal aliens to death with a rifle and bury their bodies in the desert." He wears a bulletproof vest at public
events to protect himself from his own onetime supporters.
Gilchrist, his face leathered from spending days under the scorching desert sun, takes a drag of a Pall Mall
cigarette as he ponders the unforeseen turn his movement has taken. "Twenty, forty years from now, my
name may pop up in the history books. It may say, 'He was all wrong--Loon Gilchrist, he caused this,'"
Gilchrist says. "Or because of what I did, 'He preserved our strength as an economic and world power.'"
But it's more likely that Gilchrist and even his breakaway followers will end up causing nothing at all.
Enrique Morones, the founder of the San Diego- based immigrant advocacy group Border Angels recently
arranged a 300-person prayer vigil for supporters of immigrant rights. An urgent "call to action" by the
Minutemen yielded only one counter-protester.
If this was a Marquez novel, Gilchrist would have faded off into a symbol-filled sleep. Unfortunately, real life held one more lurid chapter for him.
Because, while Gilchrist receded over the years, the Minuteman movement mutated into new and ever more dangerous incarnations.
The San Diego Minutemen were one such metastasis.
The San Diego Minutemen are a group which has been closely monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center for the last several years. Since 2007 it has competed with the national Minuteman groups for power and funds within the movement. It has tried to differentiate itself through confrontations with Latino and pro-civil rights groups.
The San Diego Minutemen, which acknowledges that its members are armed, maintains a list of their enemieswhich they post prominently on their website and appear to update frequently.
The "enemies" list includes some people you'd expect to see like Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. What right-wing hate list wouldn't have those two on it? Then there is just about every local officeholder with a Latino name. Next are the representatives of most of the local Latino, Jewish, and African American groups. For some reason Elliot Spitzer is on the list, as is Geraldo Rivera of Fox News! My personal fav enemy is George Lopez who is listed as "La Raza Comedian". And then there is the Catholic Church in the person of Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, as well as any Republicans to the left of Attila the Hun.
After the June 2009 murders of Brisenia and Raul Floresby members of Minutemen American Defense, the San Diego Minutemen tried to depict that group's leader as an outlier to their movement However, I note that the enemies list not only continued to be posted after the killings, it was actually revised and updated after the arrests of Shawna Forde and two of her associates. Strange that the San Diego Minutemen have no problem putting up an enemies list when their own leader has said recently that there are people connected to the movement who are unstable, armed, and dangerous.
As for Shawna Forde's group, as I have shown elsewhere, far from standing outside Minuteman mainstream, it has been hailed as heroic by people like Gilchrist, and as recently as June the national Minuteman Project was still offering to put combat-ready Minutemenunder her command.
Chris Simcox has stepped down from heading Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to run in the Arizona Republican primary against Senator John McCain. According toPolitico, the one-time vigilante is given little chance of winning. "I don’t believe he has a prayer," Clark Dierks, a former state treasurer and current Coconino County GOP chairman, told Politico. "I think they’ve been portrayed for a long time as being a bit radical," Dierks said of the Minutemen. "How’s he going to raise enough money to be significant?"
And Politico says that the same actions with the Minutemen that made Simcox are also breaking him:
Questions about Simcox’s colorful and controversial past range from character issues to concerns about his fiscal stewardship of the Minuteman organization. In 2006, Simcox appeared in a documentary film about border security called "USA Under Attack," in which he referred to Mexicans as "enemies of the state" and said, "I think they should be shot on sight, personally." Simcox doesn’t back down from the statement, saying his comments referred to drug dealers. "No, I don’t regret it, because at the time I was pretty angry," he told POLITICO.
The financial management issues that I reported on in the second installmentof Border Storm are also haunting Simcox, says Politico:
Also in 2006, the Washington Times raised serious questions about how Simcox spent hundreds of thousands of dollars as head of the group. The president of the Texas Minutemen said Simcox’s failure to account for the donated money led to a loss of trust and respect among many in the anti-illegal-immigration movement. "It was deceitful for him to ask for all that money," said Shannon McGauley, who became familiar with Simcox when he volunteered to help patrol the Arizona border. "They said there would be transparency, but anybody who asked where the money was was booted out," McGauley said.
Former McCain aide John Weaver said that Simcox's appeals to fear only works with extreme elements within the Republican Party; "There’s a wing of the party that would like to terrify us into a party that would fit into a phone book. They’re not in the mainstream nationally, or even in Arizona. And [Simcox] wouldn’t be electable in the general," Weaver said to Politico.
It seems unlikely that Minuteman will recapture the soul of the Republican right as it did between 2005 and 2008. Internal battles, accusations of apostasy and profiteering by the leadership, and a reluctance of mainstream politicians to tie themselves to such psychologically unstable individuals means that Minuteman as a national force will sink into an uncomfortable obscurity.
But the hundreds of armed Minutemen scattered from California to Suffolk County(in dozens of unaccountable and progressively more extreme chapters) will, as the Shawna Forde story demonstrates, pose an ongoing danger of potential physical violence against immigrants and those who support them.
(Mike Huckabee photo by Marc Nozell via Flickr and Raul and Brisenia Flores photo via Komo News)