Despite plenty of finger-pointing, border protests relatively peaceful

CAMPO —— As the sun slowly set on the border, it left behind a sky full of stars dimly glowing over the green, rolling hills. It was a serene scene in an area that has been anything but calm recently.

The darkness didn't last long. A small group of civilian border watchers, who call themselves the California Minutemen, quickly powered up a 10 million-candle floodlight, illuminating the rugged terrain just across a line of rickety border barricades.

It was Tuesday evening last week, and Tom McMullen, a volunteer with the Minutemen, sat quietly in a makeshift camp staring intently toward the lighted area through a night-vision monocular. He was looking for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.

Though he hadn't spotted anybody, McMullen said he has seen dozens of people roaming the desolate area near the U.S.-Mexico border in the week and a half he has camped there. Most of them ran away when they realized they were being watched, he said, adding that he didn't have any contact with them.

"We're just extra eyes and ears; that's all," he said, while taking a break from his lookout. "We're just making a statement to Uncle Sam."

The group's "statement," like the first Minuteman operation in Tombstone, Ariz., in April, has brought scores of protesters to Campo, a tiny border community in the mountains between San Diego and Imperial counties. Since the California Minutemen set up camp several weeks ago, many conflicting and provocative statements have been made by people on both sides of the illegal immigration issue.

The Minutemen project was spearheaded by Californians who said they wanted to shine light on problems with border security. The group's mission, they said, is to observe and report illegal immigrants. A number of participants in the border watch and its opposition efforts are from North County and Southwest Riverside County.

On Tuesday, nobody was disrupting the border-watch group, but the volunteers reportedly engaged in heated and occasionally aggressive debate over the last two weekends with groups of protesters who arrived from San Diego and beyond.

The protesters come to counter what immigrant-rights volunteer Vicinte Rodriguez called the "rhetoric of the Minutemen."

And, Rodriguez said, they have not stopped at rhetoric. On several occasions, the protesters have followed the Minutemen around, employing a number of tactics to thwart their success, Rodriguez said.

"We go up to them and light up their vehicles, light them up where they're at, yell at them, and that disrupts their ability to hide and see anybody," he said.

These tactics have led to allegations and name-calling on both sides, as well as some allegedly heated confrontations and reports of minor violence.

Keeping the peace

Rodriguez lounged in a camp chair under a canopy set up next to a couple of tents, a few feet from the border where the Minutemen had been patrolling.

Like McMullen, Rodriguez had been camping in the area for a week and a half. He left the camp only once, to go to San Diego to take a shower, he said.


