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I personally know someone who works for the Department of Homeland Security as a Border Patrol Pilot and he's been sent to Arizona to help with this situation. I hope things don't get violent.
The ACLU vs. America
Mic e Malkin (archive)
March 30, 2005 | Print | Send
On April Fools' Day, the American Civil Liberties Union will show us what a joke its commitment to American civil liberties really is.
April 1st, in case you haven't heard, is the launch of the Minuteman Project, an all-volunteer effort by law-abiding American citizens to call attention to the nation's wide open southern border. Hundreds of Americans from New York to Michigan to California will travel down to the U.S.-Mexico border for a month to monitor illegal aliens and alert immigration enforcement officials if they witness law-breaking.
Call it the mother of all neighborhood watch programs.
In doing so, the Minutemen will be exercising their cons utionally protected freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to pe ion the government for a redress of grievances. Those would be fundamental civil liberties found in something called the, uh, First Amendment, of which the ACLU is supposed to be the foremost expert and champion. Or so the group and its celebrity supporters say. In sanctimonious new fund-raising ad campaigns, the organization features the likes of liberal actress Holly Hunter, who asks:
"Do you want to be heard without fear? I am not an American who believes that questioning or criticizing my government is unpatriotic."
Uh-huh. "Dissent is patriotic," the Left likes to preach. Except, apparently, if the questioning and criticizing deals with the government's abject failure to enforce immigration laws. Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist has been harassed by open-borders activists at his home. The group is reportedly being targeted by savage illegal alien gangsters from Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13). Mexican government officials are lobbying American law enforcement officials to suppress the Minutemen's rights to speak and assemble.
But instead of coming to the defense of the Minutemen who are challenging our government, the ACLU has warned the 1,000 volunteers that it will send monitors to do ent the Americans' activities. Moreover, the ACLU has already threatened lawsuits against the American dissenters for exercising their rights.
This bullying of pro-immigration enforcement activists comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the ACLU's aggressive open-borders agenda -- from its support for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, to its opposition to detaining illegal alien terror suspects after 9/11 and profiling foreign visitors from terror-friendly countries, to its efforts to stop local and state law enforcement officers from helping federal homeland security efforts.
ACLU of Arizona spokesman Ray Ybarra argues that the mere presence of the Minutemen at the border cons utes "unlawful imprisonment" of illegal (excuse me, "undo ented") aliens (excuse me, "migrants"). Ybarra told the Washington Times that the ACLU will have lawyers on standby ready to file civil cases against the volunteers. He warned that the Minutemen could "come to our state as 'vigilantes' and end up leaving as 'defendants.'"
The Minutemen have made it clear on their website and in repeated statements that they "will not violate anyone's civil rights, and will not abuse anyone from any country. . . . We will alert border patrol to the location of illegals, and wait for [the Border Patrol] to come and pick them up. We will follow illegal aliens from a distance and continue spotting them until authorities answer our cell phone and/or back-pack radio calls. All spotting, calls for assistance, and the response from the appropriate authorities will be chronicled and provided to any media representative."
Contrary to the ACLU and mainstream media representations of the group as racists and immigrant-bashers, the Minutemen are a diverse volunteer group that includes Americans of Mexican, Armenian, Russian, Lebanese, Indian and Cuban descent; and black and Native American minorities. Also among the volunteers are 19 legal immigrants from Mexico, Peru, Russia, New Zealand, England, Australia and the Philippines.
By recklessly linking the Minutemen to white separatists and casting them as outlaws, the civil liberties crowd engages in the very guilt-by-association smear tactics it has so loudly condemned. And in putting the protection of illegal aliens' rights over law-abiding Americans' civil liberties, the ACLU demonstrates on which side of the border its true allegiances lie.
I personally know someone who works for the Department of Homeland Security as a Border Patrol Pilot and he's been sent to Arizona to help with this situation. I hope things don't get violent.
Interesting. I can see the angle they are working with the Minutemen, but I don't really agree that it's nessecary, but this is the first I've ever heard of the situation.
Also, I don't think the ACLU ever supported DL for illegals, that would be just stupid. I'm for open controlled borders, not for the illegal crossing we have now. I don't know how the they could support that either, but I don't know yet.
aclu people are all ed up
House cracks down on illegal immigrant drivers
Bill bars licenses for unlawful visitors in anti-terrorism effort
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Republican House leaders hold a news conference on border security on Wednesday.
By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
MSNBC
Updated: 3:44 p.m. ET Feb. 10, 2005WASHINGTON - The House voted Thursday to put pressure on states to stop issuing drivers’ licenses to foreigners who are illegally in the United States. Ten states now do so.
By a vote of 261-161, the House passed the bill sponsored by Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R- Wisc., that would make driver's licenses unacceptable for federal identification purposes, such as boarding a commercial air flight, unless the issuing state required the applicant to show proof of American citizenship or proof of being a non-citizen who is legally in the United States as a permanent resident or applicant for asylum.
House Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Davis, R- Va., said, “We don’t tell states who they can issue drivers licenses to, that’s up to them. We do say if you want to use it for federal purposes such as getting on an airplane, you have to show what’s called ‘legal presence,'”
Not an immigration bill, leaders say
In a briefing for reporters Wednesday, Sensenbrenner and other GOP House leaders made great efforts to contend that their bill is not an anti-immigration bill, but rather a common-sense way of making it more difficult for would-be hijackers to board planes and for foreign terrorists to blend in to American society.
The Sept. 11 conspirators used American driver’s licenses, rather than their Saudi and other passports as identification when boarding flights in the United States because the driver’s license made them less con uous, Sensenbrenner said. He noted that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had a six-month visa but obtained a Florida driver’s license good until Sept. 1, 2007. Such disparities would be banned by Sensenbrenner’s bill.
“This is not an immigration issue, it is a national security issue,” said Davis.
“This is a border security bill,” said House Rules Committee chairman David Dreier, R- Calif. “We are clearly committed to dealing with the other aspects of immigration at a later point.” Dreier said, “I personally believe we need to have some kind of guest worker program and deal with the economic demand here.” The Sensenbrenner bill “in no way diminishes our commitment to dealing with the overall issue of immigration reform,” Dreier said.
Now illegal immigration, visa overstays, cross-border smugglers, and national security have increasingly become entangled issues. Concerns about terrorism make the Congress and the electorate even more willing to accept measures that will impinge on immigrants.
“The smugglers that move narcotics can just as easily move terrorists. It’s clear that this a national security problem,” said House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., as he praised the border fence provision in Sensenbrenner’s bill.
The effort to deter illegal immigration has sometimes been at cross purposes with President Bush's outreach to immigrants, especially Latinos, through his proposed guest worker plan.
National ID card?
The opponents of the bill include the American Civil Liberties Union which in a letter to members of Congress called the driver’s license provision an unfunded mandate on the states which “would further the growing trend, alarming to both conservatives and progressives, of transforming driver’s licenses into de facto national ID cards.”
That article does nothing to proove your point. It's an article about a bill the ACLU opposes on grounds that they don't want a national ID card.
The bill's purpose was to prevent licences being used as federal ID for illegals. The ACLU opposed that. That is the point.
Now the Mexicans are sending in a notorious gang called M13 to harrass the Minutemen. The whole situation has all the ingredients to get very nasty very fast. The Bush administration must act.
I have a feeling, Dan, that you would criticise whatever they choose to do. So, what would your action be?
no matter what bush does you will say it is wrong...
I dont' have a problem with the group going, in fact I support it. I wish teh Bush administration would act to close off those borders.
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