Border activists draw criticism

HERNDON, Va. – The cluster of middle-age men and women dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, with cameras and video recorders at the ready, peered across the street. Tourists are common in the Washington area, but these people weren’t looking for monuments.

The group, a newly formed chapter of the Minutemen, had its cameras trained on about 100 men gathered at an informal day-labor site in this northern Virginia town. When a truck or car pulled up, they began snapping shots in earnest. The Minutemen were there to photograph prospective employers, note license plate numbers and business names and then report them to the authorities, though it is unclear whether any official action would follow.

The Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, controversial for its border patrols, is trying something new: looking to fight illegal immigration in the nation’s interior by targeting employers. The group is organizing in communities such as Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Indianapolis and Charlotte, N.C., monitoring and reporting businesses that hire undocumented workers.

The self-appointed border security group is finding willing recruits. Since the Arizona-based Minutemen project began in April, more than 20 chapters have sprung up in the nation’s interior, said Chris Simcox, the national president. Today, he said, the Minutemen have “well over 100 requests” from people across the country interested in starting their own interior chapters.

“We’re struggling to keep up with the demand,” Simcox said. “It’s our aim, by next November, the ‘06 elections, to have Minutemen interior chapters in every congressional district in the country.”

The group has been denounced for its border activities, its members dismissed as vigilantes and spoken of disapprovingly by President Bush. They are no less controversial in Herndon, where Mayor Michael O’Reilly has called the national organization “a group that’s almost hate-based” and denounced the local chapter’s tactic of monitoring employers as “an attempt to intimidate.”

The Herndon Minutemen chapter has been growing, driven in part by the town council’s decision to create a taxpayer-funded day-labor site, which opened in December. The chapter has drawn teachers, retired military men and a police trainee – 120 members since George Taplin, a software engineer, founded it in late October.

Many, like Diane Bonieskie, are longtime area residents.

The retired social studies teacher said she got involved because houses in her neighborhood had become packed with immigrant dormitories. She suspects that most tenants in these rooming houses, including the house next door to hers, are illegal. She deals with roosters crowing and men urinating in the neighboring back yard, loud parties and empty beer cans outside the morning after. The dormitories, she fears, are driving down the value of her house.

“I’m angry,” said the 60-year-old widow for whom the fight against illegal immigration is deeply personal and broadly political.

“George Bush is in it for the Hispanic vote and we’re on the receiving end,” she said as she spoke of a federal failure to enforce immigration law. “That’s not fair. Before, everybody looked out for everybody else, no one locked doors,” she said of her neighborhood. “Now, we all have security systems.”

Herndon was once a sleepy farming town of gracious wooden homes and towering maple trees. In the early 1960s, there were fewer than 2,000 residents.

In the 1980s, Herndon’s proximity to D.C.’s Dulles International Airport drew high-tech corporations, and today this is one of America’s fastest growing, best educated and most affluent suburbs. Its main thoroughfare is lined with strip malls, and hundreds of new subdivisions eat into what remains of the fields.

The boom brought immigrants, many without papers. There are now about 375,000 illegal immigrants in the greater Washington area, almost half of whom arrived in the last five years, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. About 50,000 illegal immigrants have moved to northern Virginia since 2000, Pew estimates.

Herndon’s 23,000 residents are 25 percent Hispanic, largely from Central America. An additional 26 percent belong to other minority groups. They are building the new houses, working in the new stores and injecting their own ways of life into the local culture.

And some longtime residents find it unsettling to watch the character of the town change.

William Campenni, an engineering consultant and retired military man on Minutemen patrol one crisp November day, said there are seven dormitory houses in his upscale neighborhood. These often-controversial rooming houses are common in the eastern U.S. Typically, single-family homes are converted without neighbors being told. But it soon becomes apparent as 20 to 30 immigrants, usually men, often live in one house, sometimes sleeping in shifts.

“Once the house owners clear their mortgage, every tenant represents money in the bank,” Campenni said.

The son and husband of immigrants, Campenni believes the United States needs immigration. But it must be legal, and immigrants must want to become American, he said.

But many other residents do not see the day-labor center as a problem or threat.

“I understand the concern (the Minutemen) have,” said Tim Ogden, a 44-year-old youth counselor, “but this gives people an opportunity to improve their lives.”

Still, the Minutemen say they believe that the momentum is on their side.

“This is one of those rare issues, like the civil rights movement, where a few people get the ball rolling and get way ahead of the politicians,” Campenni said.