There’s a good reason why the modern Minutemen
– volunteers who for months have sporadically
”
helped
”
the Border Patrol stop illegal immigrants on their way into this
country
– studiously avoid using classic shoot-’em-up vigilante
tactics.
There’s a good reason why the modern Minutemen – volunteers who for months have sporadically “helped” the Border Patrol stop illegal immigrants on their way into this country – studiously avoid using classic shoot-’em-up vigilante tactics.
They fear that if they carried guns and circumstances somehow led them to begin using those weapons, they could lose much of what they own.
Two young Salvadoran immigrants named Edwin Mancia and Fatima Leiva combined with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center to put this fear into Minutemen organizers.
On the near-freezing desert night of March 3, 2003, Mancia and Leiva were on their way to illegally join relatives already living in America.
They paid smugglers for a ride from the border to the south Texas hamlet of Hebbronville, about 50 miles east of the border city of Laredo.
Unarmed and left by their driver to walk around a Border Patrol checkpoint outside Hebbronville, they were spotted on a game ranch nearby.
Moments later men shooting into the air surrounded them, cursing them in Spanish and shouting threats to kill them.
The two were shoved around, blinded by flashlights and camera flashes, attacked by a 120-pound rottweiler and clubbed with a gun.
So far, the Minutemen have not been involved in any similar incident, and what happened after the Hebbronville incident might be one reason.
Within a day after Texas Rangers found the two Salvadorans lying beaten and helpless beside a road, local officials arrested Casey Nethercott, the burly, shaven-headed organizer of a vigilante-style group called the Arizona Guard, which owned a 70-acre spread near the Arizona-Mexico border at Douglas.
Nethercott, a Southern California bounty hunter, was later convicted of a weapons violation and sentenced to five years in prison.
Before turning himself in, he engaged in a shootout with FBI agents. In Texas, he was a participating member of another ad hoc border-watch group called Ranch Rescue, whose founder has called Latino immigrants “dog turds…ignorant, uneducated and desperate.”
Desperate Mancia and Leiva surely were while in the hands of Ranch Rescue. But not for long afterward.
Three months after the assault on the ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and a Laredo lawyer sued the men involved in the assault and ranch owner Joe Sutton –who had invited Ranch Rescue onto his property.
Sutton settled out of court for $100,000. But Nethercott and Ranch Rescue founder Joe Foote did not defend themselves and the Texas judge in the case entered $850,000 and $500,000 judgments against them.
Eventually, Nethercott agreed to deed his Arizona compound to the two beating victims to settle the case.
It was the latest in a string of cases where the poverty law center won civil judgments bankrupting hate organizations like the Aryan Nations and two branches of the Ku Klux Klan.
Among the bankrupted: Tom Metzger, the north San Diego County television repairman who founded and led a white supremacist group called White Aryan Resistance (WAR) until a court judgment after the Skinhead beating of an Ethiopian in Portland, Ore., cost him his house and all his money.
The south Texas case led several white supremacist/border watch websites to post warnings against physical abuse of illegals.
“The misadventures of Foote and Nethercott illustrate what NOT to do in running a private border watch,” said one website.
“Don’t let yahoos on your land. Don’t touch the aliens…tell previously convicted felons to take a hike. It’s just not worth the risk.”
Which explains why, no matter how strong their feelings, the high-profile Minutemen, whose co-founder ran second in a December special election to fill an Orange County congressional seat, ban volunteers from carrying firearms. Nor do they beat anyone they catch, instead turning illegal immigrants over to the Border Patrol immediately.
It may take restraint on their part to act this way, but they have seen what can happen to those who let their emotions run rampant along the border.
(For more information on the Southern Poverty Law Center, go to www.splcenter.org).
