'Observers' plan to check actions of Minutemen
By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Teams of volunteer "legal observers" will be monitoring a group that plans to patrol the Arizona border for illegal entrants in April, despite fears for the safety of volunteers that led the Arizona ACLU to reconsider its sponsorship.
About 25 people showed up to be trained in Tucson on Wednesday by Stanford law student Ray Ybarra, who said he submitted a letter of resignation to his two-year fellowship from the American Civil Liberties Union when he learned the group might withdraw its backing.
The ACLU has not accepted Ybarra's resignation and it may yet sponsor the project, said Eleanor Eisenberg, Arizona ACLU director.
Despite the ACLU's concerns, 21 people signed up to observe the actions of the Minuteman Project, which hopes to attract 1,500 people from across the country to Cochise County beginning April 1 in its effort to prevent illegal immigration.
More training sessions for legal observers will be held next week in Phoenix, Douglas and Tucson.
Chris Martinez, a second-year law student who lived in Salt Lake City, said he signed on because he thinks the Minuteman group needs to be watched.
He doesn't discount the problems faced by border residents.
"I can understand the frustrations of the landowners," Martinez said. "The land gets pretty beat up, but if you're unhappy with immigration, there are more constructive ways to deal with it than to provoke violence."
Martinez wants to specialize in immigration law, something he began to consider when he worked in construction in Salt Lake City and was asked by his boss to use his Spanish skills to communicate with the immigrant workers. "I was inspired by their stories," he said.
At the meeting, Ybarra told the group that the duties probably would be more boring than dangerous. But he opened by saying, "The ACLU had a lot of concerns, like maybe we shouldn't be putting people out in the middle of the desert with crazy white supremacists."
"Armed!" interrupted Eisenberg, the state ACLU director, who attended the meeting and told the trainees that the group was "negotiating a way to carry out this project that accomplishes its purpose without putting people at risk."
Eisenberg said, "Particularly when we started getting the e-mail threats and because Arizona has such liberal gun laws, we became very concerned."
Eisenberg said she reported the threats to the FBI.
Ybarra said the goal of the program is to cut down on the potential for violence, to document any abuse that might occur and to highlight the real problems on the border.
"They're controlling the debate," he said.
Ybarra said he's been working with Chris Simcox, one of the Minuteman organizers, to ensure there is no conflict between the volunteers watching the border for illegal entrants and the legal observers watching them.
He said Simcox's concerns about national security were expanded into a different message - "that these individuals are ruining our society" - when James Gilchrist began recruiting volunteers on his Web site for the Minuteman Project.
That message was picked up on "white-power Web sites that attract the most extreme individuals," Ybarra said.
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