Volunteer force's aim to cut off flow of illegals raises alarm bells with rights groups

By ALAN FREEMAN
Friday, January 28, 2005 - Page A12

 WASHINGTON -- Accusing the U.S. government of failing to protect the border from an influx of illegal immigrants (aliens), a California man is hoping to seal off a swath of the U.S.-Mexico boundary with the help of hundreds of volunteers.

"We're literally being invaded, not with armies but by millions of illegal aliens," said James Gilchrist, a Vietnam War veteran and retired accountant.

He heads the Minuteman Project, which plans a 30-day border blitz in Arizona's central Cochise County, starting on April 1.

Using foot patrols, all-terrain vehicles and aircraft, these amateur border-control agents say they plan to halt the flow of Mexicans and other illegal aliens who sneak into the United States in search of work and a better life.

Mr. Gilchrist said he has already attracted more than 200 volunteers, including several pilots, from more than 30 states to participate in the project, named for the minutemen self-defence force established during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

Civil-rights activists call Mr. Gilchrist's followers "vigilantes" and racists who will be breaking the law if they capture suspected illegal immigrants and hold them against their will.

"The situation is ripe for something bad to happen," said Ray Ybarra, a law student in Douglas, Ariz., who works with migrants in a program sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union.

He fears that the Minuteman Project will attract white supremacists and terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. (The masterminds were Middle Eastern Iraqui's, McVeigh was just a pawn in the plot.)

Immigration is becoming an increasingly hot political issue. Conservatives say lax border controls pose a terrorist threat.

Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush is trying to promote an immigrant guest-worker program that would allow hotel, restaurant and agricultural industries to retain a low-cost source of labour.

Only this week, James Sensenbrenner, the Republican chairman of the influential House of Representatives judiciary committee, called for national legislation that would bar illegal immigrants from getting driver's licences.

The Minuteman Project clearly has broader goals than simply slowing down the flow of illegal migrants across the border.

According to the group's website, the United States is heading toward "political and social mayhem" and will be taken over by a "tangle of unassimilated, squabbling cultures."

Mr. Gilchrist said he fears that if the flow of migrants isn't stopped, the United States will turn into a multilingual, multicultural "chaotic hellhole" like India.

He chose Arizona because the rate of infiltration across its border with Mexico has soared in recent years as border controls have been tightened in more heavily populated states, such as Texas and California.

According to the U.S. Border Patrol, 586,000 illegal aliens were caught attempting to enter the United States through Arizona in the year that ended last Sept. 30. That figure is up 175,000 from the previous year.

Mr. Gilchrist said his ultimate goal is to "remove" the 22 million illegal aliens he believes are already in the United States, which he says will allow his country to once again become "coherent, and return to the rule of law."

The project is working in conjunction with Chris Simcox, an anti-immigrant activist who runs a small newspaper in Tombstone, Ariz., and who also founded a local border-control group called Civil Homeland Defence.

"We're exposing the hypocrisy in Washington," Mr. Simcox said. "We have 100,000 soldiers protecting the borders of other countries. We demand that they be deployed here to defend