Scrimmage on the Border
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Meanwhile, the calls keep coming in to Congress, striking fear into incumbent politicians. During the summer of 2004, the most popular talk radio hosts in Los Angeles, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, decided to mount their own grassroots campaign against immigration. Fresh from a successful effort to help boot Governor Gray Davis in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger, John and Ken began daily rants during their drive-time show against Republicans, calling them corrupt pawns of big business’ addiction to cheap labor.
Immigration as an issue, it turns out, can be great for radio ratings, creating all the impassioned binaries that keep listeners from turning the dial. It pits the working man against the lawbreaker, the common voter against the elite politician, the radio host against the mainstream media. "Our language is being destroyed by George Bush and Bill Clinton to pay off their buddies who put them in power," ranted nationally syndicated Michael Savage over a southern Arizona station broadcast one day during the Minuteman protest. "Our culture is being destroyed to the point where there is no culture. We have no common culture. They want us to become a culture of the international. That’s why I tell you that civil upheaval in this country might also not be more than a few years off, sparked by this flood of illegal aliens that both the Democrats and Republicans are foisting upon this nation."
Last August, John and Ken rallied hundreds of listeners to a meeting at a middle school in the Southern California suburb of Temecula with Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. The congressman had asked Asa Hutchinson, Bush’s undersecretary for border and transportation security, to meet with his constituents and explain federal border policy. The room overflowed, and at several points the meeting seemed as if it would devolve into a riot. Hutchinson’s rejections of sweeps to round up illegal workers were drowned out by a torrent of jeers, and Issa had to intervene repeatedly to calm the crowd.
By September, John and Ken had focused their listeners’ rage on one Republican, Rep. David Dreier, who did not advocate a quick closure of the border and whom they promised to make a "political human sacrifice." Dreier, chair of the House Rules Committee, is one of the most powerful members of Congress. He spent more than $1.3 million against a Democratic opponent who spent about $23,000. But he survived the election with only 54 percent of the vote, 10 points less than in his last race. Back in Washington, one of his first actions was to introduce legislation that would make it harder to get fake Social Security numbers. "We got the best of both worlds," Tancredo said of that race. "He didn’t lose his seat, and he got the message."
JOHN STONE thought he saw something move in the brambles. "Uh-oh," said the retired trucker, who lives outside Front Royal, Virginia. He held binoculars up to his face. "No, it’s just a bush. I’ve been looking at this landscape so long that every bush looks like a person and every person looks like a bush." The Minutemen had spaced themselves out over two miles on a stretch of dust called Border Road, which passes between the towns of Naco and Doug-las, a few feet from the tangled cow posts that mark the international boundary. Their task was mercilessly boring. They sat on chairs or in their trucks, gazing over a wide desert plain that passed five or six miles into Mexico to a distant highway where the migrants would, on a normal day, be dropped off for the long walk to the United States. No one was coming now. The Mexican government, wary of gun-toting vigilantes, had mounted its own patrols. Every few hours, on the other side of the short barbed-wire fence, you could see another group of migrants get rousted from the bush, loaded into the back of a Mexican government truck, and driven back into the country’s interior.
In the absence of action, the Minutemen bided their time with the steady stream of international media who showed up to interview them. Behind them, up on a hill, sat a group of volunteers from the ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee, mostly students from Stanford Law School and Prescott College, who had given each other nicknames like Tumbleweed and Barbed Wire. They wore T-shirts that read "observadores legales." They videotaped the Minutemen, and the Minutemen videotaped them. Mexican television stations came to the border to shoot pictures of the spectacle, only to find elderly men and women sitting in lawn chairs aiming their own camcorders. It wasn’t exactly the sort of border standoff most participants had expected. For the first few days of April, this was perhaps the most well-documented piece of desert in the world. And, for once, nothing was happening.
A few miles down the road, Casey Nethercott, the militant leader of the Arizona Guard, kept watch over his border property, a place he calls "Warrior Ranch." It holds about 100 acres of dirt and tumbleweed, a few buildings, and a windmill with no blades. He keeps a 120-pound rottweiler trained to tackle grown men, and two black sport utility vehicles reinforced with steel plates to stop bullets when his militia patrols the desert. "Migration from Mexico is the catalyst that is starting the demise of America," he told me, sitting in his cramped office, which was decorated with diagrams of military attack formations. "It’s being flooded with illegals, people that are substandard humans. They don’t educate themselves. They don’t care about themselves. And if you think that’s racist, I’m sorry, you’re wrong. If a black man with a white wife and two adopted Mexican and Chinese children moved in next door to me, first thing I’d do is take over a bottle of wine and say welcome to the damned neighborhood. And if he was in the Army I would hit him up to join the organization. But these are illegals. They are illegal."
Nethercott, a large man with hound-dog eyes, had just been released after serving six months in prison, the result of a dispute with the local Border Patrol. Federal officers had tried to pull him over, but he drove onto his ranch and shut the gate. Agents feared a shoot-out, and a standoff ensued until local sheriffs arrived. A few weeks later, the FBI tried to serve Nethercott and his fellow militia member, Kalen Riddle, a warrant for threatening federal officers. The FBI said Riddle refused an order to stop moving in a Safeway parking lot, and an agent shot and injured him. Nethercott was acquitted of all charges in the case, but he still faces a 2003 aggravated assault charge in Texas. According to the district attorney there, he pistol-whipped an illegal Salvadoran migrant he found sneaking into the country during a patrol in 2003, a charge Nethercott denies.
Nethercott drove me out to the southern end of his ranch to show me Mexico, a dun land that looked just like America. There was no barbed wire to mark the international boundary, just a dry berm and a dirt road. "That’s hell," he said. He was already planning his next operation, set to begin on July 4, after his next court date in Texas. He hoped to dovetail with some of the Minutemen’s media attention. Not one for subtlety, he was calling the event "Operation American Revolution 2." "America will be closed when that operation begins," he said. "Just after the hot summer begins, we are closing the American borders."
BACK AT THE BIBLE COLLEGE in Miracle Valley, Gilchrist arrived at the communications center to prepare for another radio interview. "Let’s hear some squelch," he announced as he picked up the phone. A white-haired volunteer grabbed a walkie-talkie and began turning the dials to create background static, providing the illusion of a busy operation for the listening audience. "We’re the only ones who have any brains in this country," Gilchrist said, once he got on the air.
Outside on the front lawn, Mike Bird, a 22-year-old volunteer from Georgia, was pacing around, awaiting instructions for his night patrol up along Route 92. Bird stands 6 feet 6 inches tall, with a hunched back and a mumbled voice. He planned to spend the full month in Arizona. "You’ll never hear it from any of these guys," he confided between drags of a Dunhill, "but I have too big a gun." A .44 Magnum, the sort of cannon made famous by Dirty Harry, stretched down his right thigh. Bird was unemployed, but he hoped to get a job back home sampling air quality at the local coal plant. His new Peruvian wife, whom he had recently met in South America, had applied for a U.S. visa, which would take between six months and two years to process. While she waited for permission to enter the country, he had seen the suburbs of Atlanta fill with Spanish-speaking laborers. "Tons of them," said Bird. "Tons of them everywhere."
Word had filtered down from Gilchrist about the success that the Minutemen were having, about the waiting migrants backed up like cars in a traffic jam on the other side of the border. Bird was ready. "Tonight is the night," he told me, imagining them in the wilderness. "Think about it. They are hungry. They have been waiting two days. They are going to rush the line."
Michael Scherer is Washington correspondent for Mother Jones. Click here to ask him a question about this article.
Photos: Q. Sakamak/Redux
