I was in Arizona last week, right on the Mexican bor­der. And let me tell you, a whole bunch of folks are about to make asses of them­selves there on Friday.
2,200 fed­eral agents are assigned to keep watch over the 260-​​mile stretch of bor­der known as the “Tucson Sector,” which cov­ers pretty much the entire state, except for Yuma. And those agents do a pretty bang-​​up job, nab­bing about a half-​​million aliens every year. (Compare that to a big city cop, many of whom only make an arrest every few weeks.)
But there’s only so much those 2,200 can do. Hundreds of thou­sands — if not mil­lions — of peo­ple ille­gally enter the coun­try through the Tucson Sector every year.
So a team of geniuses call­ing them­selves the Minuteman Project have decided that they are going to start polic­ing the bor­der on their own. Starting on April Fool’s Day, the Project will dis­perse an esti­mated 1,000 vol­un­teers to a slice of the bor­der near Tombstone.
Now, the Minutemen says they’ll only be “observ­ing” and “report­ing” the move­ments of ille­gals. This is “not a call to arms,” the group swears. But if you think, in that part of the world, that any orga­ni­za­tion call­ing itself a “grass­roots effort to bring Americans to the defense of their home­land” is going to be gun­less, you need to get off of the pey­ote. Of course the Minutemen are going to be pack­ing heat.
And so will the smug­glers. Since October, 180 Border Patrol agents have been assaulted by the “coy­otes” who haul peo­ple north. That includes 14 shoot­ings and 20 attempts to run agents over.
Remember, those are attempts on fed­eral agents’ lives. Do you think the coy­otes will have even the slight­est of doubts about pulling the trig­ger on some self-​​proclaimed defender of lib­erty? We all know the answer: hell, no.
But the Minutemen are going to be doing more than just endan­ger­ing them­selves. They’re going to be reduc­ing the effec­tive­ness of the Tucson Sector agents, too. Those agents are trained to stop any unknown vehi­cles sit­ting on the bor­der line — which, for the month of April, is going to include a whole bunch of Minutemen. So that will mean less time actu­ally going after ille­gals. The agents are also track­ers, used to pick­ing up fresh tire treads and foot­prints — and fol­low them to coyote-​​led groups. That’s going to be a whole lot harder, with so many Minutemen mess­ing up the trails.
Clearly, these agents, they need help. They’re absolutely over­whelmed by the tide of immi­grants pour­ing into this coun­try. Maybe this lit­tle bit of polit­i­cal the­ater will shame DC into hir­ing a whole lot more agents, and sig­nif­i­cantly upping the amount spent on bor­der secu­rity. If that’s the case, then the Minutemen have done some­thing right. But in the mean­time, a whole of peo­ple are going to get hurt in the process.
THERE’S MORE: “The Homeland Security Department will assign more than 500 addi­tional patrol agents to the porous Arizona bor­der,” the AP is report­ing. “About 155 agents will be imme­di­ately sent to Arizona… More than 370 addi­tional agents — all new trainees — will be per­ma­nently assigned to the Arizona bor­der through­out the year.” Good stuff.