Minutemen a mix of backgrounds and passions

TOMBSTONE, Ariz. - Al Phillips absent-mindedly fingers the well-worn leather holster of the .357 magnum on his hip and ponders a question about his intention to use the gun during his participation in the Minuteman Project along a patch of Arizona's border with Mexico. “I hope to not have to use it,” he says, smiling and squinting into the morning sun, “but there might be rattlesnakes.” 

Phillips is one of about 400 citizen volunteers who have flocked here to take part in the month-long effort to patrol the country's most porous border for illegal immigrant crossings. The 54 year-old from Tennessee  -- a former corrections officer, who has put down a couple of prison riots in his time -- says he’s ready for anything to happen, but hopes nothing does.  “I seen a lot of bad guys and I’ve read some of the reports… you don’t know what anybody’s thinking.”

Long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Phillips said he’d been concerned about illegal immigration and the permeability of U.S. borders.  He says he even wrote President Clinton, “and all I got back was a mimeographed letter that didn’t even mention the border.” 

So when he heard about the Minuteman Project, Phillips decided to “put my eyes where my mouth is, and that’s all I’m doing.”

A rag tag army
Those, like Phillips, who have gathered here comprise a crazy quilt of backgrounds.  Retired truck drivers, pharmacists, aerospace engineers, oil industry workers, ex-F.A.A. radio operators and Vietnam veterans all mingle.  Some speak in the clipped, measured syntax of former Marine officers, and others in halting double-negatives.  Some are armed, but most are not.  There's a degree of bravado in the atmosphere. They’ve all arrived reading from different pages of the same script -- frustration, and sometimes anger, about how the government has made it so easy for illegal immigrants to slip into the country.

Brock N. Meeks / MSNBC.com Al Phillips, retired corrections officer, waits to register for the Minuteman Project.  Phillips will wear his .357 magnum, shown here, during his participation.

The volunteers made the sojourn to this tiny frontier town that on April 1 became the jumping off point for a month of real-time activism against what the Minuteman organizers say is a looming social, economic and political crisis:  the nearly unstoppable flood of illegal immigrants coming across the southwestern border.

The Border Patrol says 1.15 million people were apprehended in the last fiscal year trying to illegally enter the country through  the 2,000 mile southwestern border.  Nearly 600,000 alone were caught trying to enter through Arizona. The Minuteman volunteers are now patrolling a 23-mile stretch of border in the San Pedro Valley of eastern Arizona.

Though project organizers promised more 1,000 participants, only a few hundred arrived for the initial registration and orientation.  And about 200 were pulling duty on the border during the first week, according to organizers. 

“My participation will be in public awareness,” said Greg Sheehan, 43, a hotel operator and former Marine with a criminal justice degree. Sheehan said he hopes the project is “making people aware that as hard as the Border Patrol is trying to do their job they are undermanned and that our government is doing little to nothing to stem the flow of uncontrolled immigration into our country.  And we need to have control.”

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