http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20050331-083144-3740r.htm
ACLU ambuscade
By Michelle Malkin
Today, April Fools' Day, the American Civil Liberties Union will show us
what a joke its commitment to American civil liberties really is.
Today, if you haven't heard, is the launch date 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 to the U.S.-Mexico
border for a month to monitor illegal aliens and alert immigration
enforcement officials if they witness lawbreaking. Call it the mother of all
neighborhood watch programs.
In doing so, the Minutemen will exercise their constitutionally
protected freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition 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 Minuteman group is reportedly
targeted by savage illegal alien gangsters from Mara Salvatrucha (a k a
MS-13). Mexican officials lobby U.S. law officials to suppress Minutemen
rights to speak and assemble.
But instead of coming to the defense of the Minutemen who challenge our
government, the ACLU has warned the 1,000 volunteers it will send monitors
to document their activities. Moreover, the ACLU has already threatened
lawsuits against the American dissenters for exercising their rights.
Bullying of pro-immigration enforcement activists is no surprise to
those who follow the ACLU's aggressive open-borders agenda -- from its
support for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, to its opposing detention
of illegal alien terror suspects after September 11, 2001, and profiling
foreign visitors from terror-friendly countries, to trying to prevent local
and state law officers from helping federal homeland security efforts.
Arizona ACLU spokesman Ray Ybarra argues the mere presence of the
Minutemen at the border constitutes "unlawful imprisonment" of illegal
(excuse me, "undocumented") aliens (excuse me, "migrants"). Mr. Ybarra told
The Washington Times that the ACLU will have lawyers standing by to file
civil cases against the volunteers. He warned the Minutemen could "come to
our state as 'vigilantes' and end up leaving as 'defendants.' "
The Minutemen have made it clear on their Web site and in repeated
statements 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 including 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 so loudly condemns. And in putting the
protection of illegal aliens' rights over law-abiding Americans' civil
liberties, the ACLU shows on which side of the border its true allegiances
lie.
Michelle Malkin, a nationally syndicated columnist, is author of
"Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other
Foreign Menaces to Our Shores" (Regnery).
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