The Battle for Immigrant Rights

F or the past two years, the United States has been quietly pursuing its largest anti-immigrant campaign in 50 years. President Bush, right-wing Republicans, and many Democrats are once again using immigrants as scapegoats in order to secure conservative votes in the November 2006 elections. 

Attacking recent immigrants is nothing new. Since the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1890s, Irish, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Japanese, and Filipinos have all been the target of attacks at various points in U.S. history.  

Not surprisingly, right-wing anti-immigrant forces have been using the Minutemen campaign to exaggerate the so-called “crisis” of undocumented immigrants after 9/11. From the first appearance of the Minutemen in the beginning of 2005 to the passing of the Sensen- brenner-King Bill before the year’s end, this was a well coordinated plan serving racist anti-immigrant forces that caught most social justice activists off guard. 

When Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, announced plans to go to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona to stop Mexican migrants from entering the U.S., it sparked a national movement against the racist group. 

For the next few months, several dozen Minutemen-sponsored actions across the country were met with counter-protesters, sometimes 30 times larger than the Minutemen’s numbers. While most cities didn’t welcome the Minutemen, some gave them a green light and even a police escort to support their racist activities. The Southern California cities of Garden Grove and Baldwin Park were two of the cities where Minutemen actions drew national attention during the summer of 2005. The media took great pains to avoid mentioning that their police department was on the side of the Minutemen, attacking and arresting the counter-protesters. 

On May 25, during a counter-protest against the Minutemen meeting in Garden Grove, community activist Theresa Dang was hit by a van driven by Minutemen supporter Hal Netkin. He was detained by police, but released and never charged. Instead the police arrested several counter protesters. 

After the car incident, Dang went to the Orange County District Attorney’s office to complain about the incident. On June 16, the Garden Grove PD raided Dang’s house and charged her with two counts of felony charges, falsely accusing Dang of stealing a police flashlight during the counter-protest. The case went to a jury trial in late November and Dang was found not guilty. Nonetheless, the Garden Grove police department never apologized for their abuse of power, and the corporate media has been almost completely silent about the case. 

Many feel that the Minutemen’s attempt to use anti-immigrant xenophobia to build their national movement has been a complete failure. However, this view  underestimates the political forces behind the Minutemen. Since the beginning, Gil- christ has been praised by some right-wing Republicans as a political celebrity. With this newfound fame, Gilchrist and his associates have been invited to speak in cities across the country. 

Gilchrist ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2005 elections for Orange County’s 48th Congressional District (a Republican stronghold) as the candidate of the American Independent Party (AIP), a racist party founded in 1968 by then presidential candidate and former Alabama governor, George Wallace. Gilchrist lost the election, but received almost 25 percent of the vote and declared he would run again in 2006.