Border Patrol Turns on Minutemen

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

The Department of Homeland Security employs Border Patrol agents to guard the United States/Mexican border by arresting illegal aliens and confiscating illegal drugs. Basically, if it's illegal and on or around the border, the Border Patrol gets involved. To many analysts, pundits and Americans, the Border Patrol is vital to national security and terrorism prevention.

So why is the Border Patrol working with Mexican officials to get illegal aliens across the border under the radar?

Because of the Minutemen. You've heard of them; volunteer American citizens fed up with the government's ineptness and unwillingness to effectively stop the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico. As a result of their presence, the Border Patrol has been sending intelligence to Mexico allowing illegal immigrants to know exactly where the Minutemen are:

According to three documents on the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Web site, the U.S. Border Patrol is to notify the Mexican government as to the location of Minutemen and other civilian border patrol groups when they participate in apprehending illegal immigrants -- and if and when violence is used against border crossers.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed the notification process, describing it as a standard procedure meant to reassure the Mexican government that migrants' rights are being observed.

"It's not a secret where the Minuteman volunteers are going to be," Mario Martinez said Monday.

"This ... simply makes two basic statements -- that we will not allow any lawlessness of any type, and that if an alien is encountered by a Minuteman or arrested by the Minuteman, then we will allow that government to interview the person."

Minuteman members were not so sanguine about the arrangement, however, saying that reporting their location to Mexican officials nullifies their effectiveness along the border and could endanger their lives.

"Now we know why it seemed like Mexican officials knew where we were all the time," said Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. "It's unbelievable that our own government agency is sending intelligence to another country. They are sending intelligence to a nation where corruption runs rampant, and that could be getting into the hands of criminal cartels.

"They just basically endangered the lives of American people."

Reading this story makes me wonder why we even fund the Border Patrol in the first place when they're revealing the location of volunteers who do nothing more than report alien sightings to the proper authorities.

The "Nobody is Illegal" crowd vilifies the Minutemen volunteers, portraying them as racist and violent, even though despite their outbursts they can't produce any records of Minutemen acting violent toward illegal aliens.

We hear they're a bunch of "heavily armed" gun-toters. And white, really white! But we're not seeing the shootings. We're not seeing the cross burnings. We're not seeing any of the negative embodiment they supposedly represent.

We are however, seeing the effectiveness of the Minutemen, as the higher-ups have been ordering Border Patrol agents to cease arrests in order to keep the Minutemen from "looking good," if you can believe the spitefulness. But they're getting the job done and keeping the illegal immigration issue on the front burner - with or without the backstabbing by the American government.