Minutemen Most Likely Exaggerators : AZ IMC

I found a two-year-old Salon.com article about Chris Simcox’s group called Civil Homeland Defense, which is a sort of earlier long-term, more localized version of the Minuteman Project. The article says, “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.’”

News media this week are mostly reporting as fact that around 1,000 people have registered for the Minuteman Project, what the minutemen people are calling a protest of the lack on the part of the U.S. government to secure the border. Participants are planning on patrolling the border, supposedly in a completely legal manner- only to report illegal immigrants to the proper authorities and to deter immigrants from passing through. The Minuteman Project claim, “we anticipate an attendance of at least 1,000 participants as of March 20, 2005, that number may double or triple by April 1.” Only a few media outlets question the contention that this is an accurate number. The Arizona Daily Star reported, “Organizers Chris Simcox of Tombstone and James Gilchrist of Aliso Viejo, Calif., still decline to turn over any information that would corroborate that 900-plus people have signed on. When asked Friday, Simcox said only 'no comment' and hung up."

Further investigation into the exaggeration of numbers surrounding Chris Simcox’s pet schemes leads to another example from AZStarnet.com:

●In November 2002, Minuteman Project founder Chris Simcox said dozens of people would come out for his much-debated Civil Homeland Defense, the Tombstone-based group that was supposed to patrol the border, gather up illegal entrants, turn them over to the U.S. Border Patrol and show up the federal government for not doing its job.
The group has seized about 150 illegal entrants, a far cry from the 4,000 Simcox contends have been apprehended since he started two years ago, according to Miguel Escobar, Mexican consul in Douglas. The consulate responds to every citizen's encounter.
By contrast, Escobar has tracked at least 65 incidents in which citizens stopped entrants since 1999, when groups and individuals such as Cochise rancher Roger Barnett, American Border Patrol and Ranch Rescue began apprehensions in Cochise County.

● The Border Patrol has had three to five instances in which citizens were standing with a captured group of illegal entrants in the past year, said Tucson Sector spokesman Andy Adame. By contrast, the agency receives 300 to 500 anonymous calls from other civilians each month, he said. The agency has adopted a "wait and see" attitude toward the Minuteman Project.

● A handful of people showed up at the first organizational meeting of the Civil Homeland Defense on Dec. 7, 2002. Fifty were expected.

● On Jan. 1, 2003, two volunteers showed up for the first training session. Four reporters were there to greet them.

These exaggerations mustn’t lead us to believe that there aren’t enough racist, immigrant-hating, xenophobic, U.S. nationalist, defending-us-from-terror patriots in this country to form a militia (or whatever they’re calling it) the size of what the Minuteman Project claims to be. Nor must it lead us to believe that this Minuteman project or the various vigilante groups before, during, and after it aren’t a problem. This is about exposing them for misrepresenting the truth and for making this activity look normal and justified.

This shouldn’t keep people from going out to protest or resist the Minuteman Project and the militant white supremacists they pretend won’t be there. There is a protest planned for April 1st in Tombstone.