April 22, 2006
My Night With The Minutemen
By Bryanna Bevens
[VDARE.COM
note: Breaking News—Minutemen
plan to build 300 mile fence along US/Mexican border,
by David Marino, KVOA
Tucson, April 21, 2006]
There has been so
much chatter in the MSM about the Minutemen that I just
had to ask:
Who are these
Minutemen and what do they do?
For answers to
these questions, I headed to the California border with
Mexico, where the men and women of the California
Minutemen Project are patrolling for the month of April.
We were near
Boulevard, in the
eastern part of San Diego County. The border there
is a rocky, treacherous terrain spotted with vicious
cacti that I unfortunately did not notice until I bumped
into them...yeah, good times...sigh.
The fence was a
joke, by the way. Meaning there really wasn't one
I spent a Saturday
night with the Minutemen because that is reportedly the
best time to see the action.
Let me tell you a
little bit about these marvelous people:
Now these men are
volunteer Minutemen—great Americans and beloved war
heroes.
To be fair, there
have been myriad stories generated by the MSM about the
paramilitary-style of the Minutemen Corps.
Not to mention the
images the MSM just love to publish! For
example: if there is a
Confederate flag within a 50-mile radius of the
Minuteman camp that will be the footage the MSM focuses
on with some ghastly headline such as Neo-Nazi
Border Patrol
blah, blah, blah…
I suppose it
could be difficult for the average American to
ascertain the truth when the story is told almost
entirely from the (ahem!) not-so-objective
perspective of say, CNN.
Tim Donnelly is
President of the California Minutemen. He was kind
enough to open up the camp to me and show me the ropes.
In his day job, Tim
is a successful businessman. He volunteered to organize
the California Minutemen because, once again, somebody
needed to do it.
Tim’s wife, the
mother of his five sons, is Filipino. Her father spent
12 years separated from his family in order to
immigrate legally to the U.S.
As Tim explained it
“He says that was the price he paid to give his
family a better life in America.”
Unlike the MSM, I
didn’t see a single Neo-Nazi—or anything even in that
ballpark.
On the contrary,
when one member arrived for duty wearing full
camouflage, Tim instructed him to change clothes—full
camouflage or military-esque appearances are
forbidden by
Minuteman standard operating procedure.
Another Minuteman,
Carl, had the dubious honor of guiding me up a hill to a
main look-out point…
The path was
littered with “booties” and
garbage left by smugglers and their party. Booties
are strips of fabric that illegal aliens tie around the
feet to conceal their footprints from immigration
authorities.
Carl shared a
couple of recent events with me.
A few nights before
I arrived, a group of
four Arab men snuck across the border and walked
right through the Minuteman camp, apparently unaware of
its location.
Yes,
four Arab men.
(Caution: next part
contains graphic material).
Carl also told me
about a particularly horrifying event from the previous
week. He and the men with him heard the screams of a
woman piercing the quiet of the night. The screams came
from the Mexican side of the border, some distance from
where Carl stood.
A woman was being
raped by a
hired coyote who had brought her within site of the
American border and then demanded more money.
She couldn’t pay,
so he
raped her—they later found her panties tied to the
border fence as a trophy and a warning to
other women who can’t cough up more money.
The Minutemen never
found out what finally became of her.
The look on Carl’s
face made clear how frustrated he was that he was
powerless to help—the Minutemen
cannot cross the border…that would be illegal
entry into Mexico, a serious crime in
Mexican law!
Within an hour of
my arrival, one patrol group radioed back to camp that
twenty people were spotted hiding on the side of a hill
just on the other side of the U.S. border. They were
clearly waiting for the opportunity to
cross the border undetected.
The U.S. Border
Patrol was notified. Then the Minutemen just set up camp
on the U.S. side of the border directly across from the
border crossers and watched them—nothing more.
Border Patrol, of course, cannot approach anyone
unless
they actually cross the border. So would-be illegal
aliens usually just wait for the Patrol to leave.
By the early hours
of the next morning, the twenty would-be illegal aliens
had grown frustrated with the Minutemen, whom they had
now determined were not
U.S. Border Patrol.
They began to
hurl rocks at the Minutemen, hoping to
run them off…yeah, not a chance.
After hours of what
can only be called (ironically)
a
Mexican Standoff, this group of 20 left the area and
retreated back into Mexico.
Tim later emailed
me the weekend’s numbers:
This relatively
small Minuteman camp had spotted
114 such people. According to Tim,
“40 have been apprehended; 33 TBS (turned back south) and the rest
are heading to a
Home Depot, a
school, a peaceful, pro-American rally, or a
neighborhood near you.”
So who are the
Minutemen?
President Bush and various Members of Congress have
called them vigilantes.
After getting to
know the men and women of the California Minutemen
Project, I have a response for our illustrious leaders:
How dare you—you
are unfit to represent this nation in any capacity!
Our
government tells us that illegal aliens are just
doing the job Americans won’t do. Well…
The Minutemen
are
just doing the job our government won’t do:
Defending America!
Bryanna Bevens [email
her] is a political consultant and former chief of staff
for a member of the California State Assembly.
