The Hunted

On October 19, Quintanilla arrived at the labor center to help the workers choose an interim leadership council. It was a bright morning, and between 80 and 100 workers gathered around Quintanilla and another man as the two handed out 200 work boots they'd donated. Quintanilla stood on one of the benches and asked who wanted to be interim president. Jimenez had planned to nominate a man named David, but before he could say his name he heard Quintanilla call out, "I nominate Jose Jimenez!" He looked around at the other men. They were nodding. Quintanilla beckoned him up onto the bench. "All in favor raise your hands," Quintanilla said. Hands shot up in the air, and Jimenez found himself standing above the crowd. He was the interim president of the new Garland Day Laborers Union.

In the days that followed, the group met with representatives of advocacy groups and scheduled a meeting with the mayor, and Jimenez was interviewed by several Spanish-language television stations. That's how his wife found out. He hadn't told her because he didn't want to worsen her already-fragile state—plus he knew she wouldn't approve. One night when he walked into her hospital room, she asked why he was on television. "What have you gotten yourself into?" she said. "They're going to throw you in jail, send you back to Mexico."

Asked later why he'd risk deportation to take part in a union, Jimenez grew quiet. "It was my son," he finally said (his wife delivered by cesarean on October 27). "I thought, 'My son's about to be born, and I have nothing to offer him.' Maybe we're poor, but we have dignity, and money can't buy that. I'm tired of people looking at us like the guy who cleans the bathroom, the guy who sweeps. I'm tired of being humiliated." His voice grew stronger, his eyes brighter. "The problem is the system—that they want us to work, but they don't want to give us rights. If they deport me, there will just be more Jose Jimenezes. Maybe this is just a spark, but that's how the biggest fires begin."

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Kirby said he'd heard about the newly formed union. "I have no interest in what they do. They can do whatever they want. Their right to work is in their own country—we can't take everybody's poor, everybody's unemployed."

In the past year, he has made numerous trips to the Rio Grande Valley to monitor illegal border crossings. Last April he camped for nine days in his RV, though he declined to divulge the exact "operating area" for security reasons.

"I have seen the invasion with my own eyes," he said over lunch one day, his blue eyes intense. His most exciting moment on the border was the first time he spotted a group of immigrants through his night-vision scope. It was around 1 a.m., and he was standing on a dirt road near a ranch fence that cut through the scrub.

"I saw this guy running kind of hunched down, bent over," he said. "Then I looked more closely and saw 33 people all lined up along the creek bed, hunched down trying to hide." He radioed Minuteman CDC headquarters, who notified the Border Patrol, but by the time the agents arrived the group was gone.

On the same trip, Kirby heard traffic on the radio from a group of volunteers who spotted 30 Asian immigrants. He later found out from Border Patrol agents that they had taken a ship from China to Panama, then made their way through Central America and Mexico.

"They made it to Texas and got caught," Kirby said, "all because the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps saw them. They'd almost made it—if they'd made it past us they'd have made it to the Promised Land."

Kirby takes pains to distinguish his organization from the collection of anti-illegal immigrant groups that have gained a reputation for vigilantism near the border. In order to avoid confrontations, Minuteman CDC has a "no-contact" policy with illegal immigrants. Volunteers are under strict instructions to avoid conversation with the targets of any surveillance efforts. "It's one of our S.O.P.s," he says. "If anyone ever does anything, says something obscene or makes an obscene gesture, we don't respond—we remain above it all."

Given the record of some of the civilian border groups, it's not hard to see why Kirby repeatedly says his organization is "peaceful and non-confrontational." Take Casey Nethercott, a former leader of Ranch Rescue and the Arizona Militia, groups known for donning camouflage to stalk immigrants with assault rifles. Nethercott is serving a five-year prison sentence for felony firearm possession after he was accused in 2003 of pistol-whipping an immigrant at a ranch in Hebbronville, Texas. In a civil suit last year, he lost his Arizona ranch to two illegal Salvadoran immigrants who said he held them against their will and threatened them with a gun.

Another figure that looms large among border vigilante groups is Roger Barnett, recently the subject of a front-page New York Times story about lawsuits filed against him by immigrant rights groups. One accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants and threatening them with dogs.