Living In Florida gives me no excuse for not empathizing with my fellow Americans who are going through hell at the Arizona border with Mexico I can’t feel their terror and pain, but I can certainly imagine it.
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I am a successful rancher in Arizona, and facing daily danger from the illegal aliens who sneak across the border with their knives and handguns and play havoc with my family, my home, and my property.
You heard right. It’s no longer just illegal aliens jumping the border and harassing us, now it’s ARMED illegal aliens jumping the border and threatening me and my neighbors with pistols and knives.
At this rate, it won’t be long before our border goes from a bad nightmare to a damn battlefield. And me and the other ranchers and our families are caught right in the middle of it.
Hearsay? Like hell. In fact, just a couple months ago Border Patrol agents reported 12 arrests of undocumented immigrants carrying knives or handguns. Fact is, agents last week reported that they got shot at while patrolling the desert. And according to Frank Armarillas—he’s the spokesman for the Border Patrol down here—the agents confiscated three pistols from the migrants.
But the real kicker is this: Jen Allen, the director of an immigrant rights group, has the gall to say that our civilian patrols are responsible for the rising number of undocumented immigrants packing weapons. “Immigrants have heard about civilians patrolling the border, carrying rifles, and they are afraid of being attacked.”
How about them rotten apples? THEY threaten us, tear down our fences, cut loose our cattle, barge into our homes, intimidate our womenfolk, and THEY are afraid of being attacked! If that ain’t a kick in the butt, what is?
Here we are in 2003, and while illegals are stampeding across our border, the U.S. government is not only NOT stopping the invasion, it is actually preventing American civilian patrols from doing so!
If they don’t have enough Border Patrols and National Park Rangers to stem the tide of illegals and protect us and our land (and they don’t), why do they keep turning down volunteer help from us ranchers, who are being assaulted? Something’s fishy in Denmark.
I’ll tell you what I think. I think that the more illegals they can cram into the U.S. and get them documented and signed up right quick, the more votes they’re going to pull in for their party. (Politics is dirty in more ways than one.)
To help them do this, they have to cut off all opposition to illegals any way they can. And one of those ways is to call us and our civilian patrols, Vigilantes. That way they can tell the rest of the country that in Arizona we’re taking the law into our own hands.
Well I got news for those Washington stonewallers. Vigilantes of the Old West used to hang people and ask questions later. We don’t do that around here. When we round up illegals we turn them over to the Border Patrol.
So, to call us vigilantes is unfair, unreasonable, and dead wrong.
What we are is 4th Amendment Americans. We believe in “the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” And by George, under that constitutional mandate we’re going to take action against foreign intrusion and personal harm, in any way we can, like it or not.
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And so, I sit here at my computer, in Florida. But the terror and heartbreak of living on the Arizona border with illegal, armed intruders crossing over, although on my mind, is a feeling not easily stomached.
Worst of all, is the knowledge that our own U.S. government is not only NOT protecting the citizens of Arizona, but is actually hindering the Arizona people from protecting themselves!
In this writer’s view, that is worse than Un-American. It is Anti-American. The perpetrators of this detestable rejection of constitutional duty deserve something for their efforts. I suggest that a good dose of Old West vigilante justice might be just the thing.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”