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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Border Militia Divides Arizona Residents Border Militia Divides Arizona Residents Wed Apr 6, 1:02 PM ET BISBEE, Arizona (Reuters) - A right-wing militia patrolling the Mexican border to catch illegal immigrants is pitting some residents in favor of old-style frontier justice against critics who say the militiamen are the real threat. Between 300 and 400 "Minuteman" project volunteers, some of them armed, have come to Arizona to stake out a 23-mile section of the border throughout April. They say it is a peaceful political protest, although some are armed with pistols, and a number of local residents have joined the patrols or turned out to support them. Others, however, have held protests and watch with suspicion the volunteers' arrival in camper vans and four-wheel drive vehicles, some decked out with gun racks. In the old copper mining town of Bisbee, which reinvented itself as a refuge for writers and painters after the mine closed in the 1970s, many eye the vigilantes with suspicion. "I had a Salvadoran work for me for six months, and it's not uncommon for people here to drive a migrant north in their car rather than hand them over to the U.S. Border Patrol," said cafe owner Charles Lewis. Lewis and some other residents in this town in the Mule Mountains just north of the border say they fear the Minuteman volunteers much more than the migrants who trek across ranches and public land on the way north. "I'd rather take my chances with the Mexicans than one of these U.S. military type idiots taking part in the patrols," local truck driver John Porter told Reuters, as he took the sun on a sidewalk table outside the Daily Diner. "Migrants pay their taxes and I don't have a problem with them," he added. GUNSLINGERS BACK IN TOWN However, a few miles up the road in Tombstone, where the Minutemen volunteers come to register for the patrols at a local newspaper, gunslingers have been a part of tradition since Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday gunned down the Clantons and McLaurys in a legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. The sight of volunteers from across the United States treading the sidewalks with pistols riding on their hip, raises no eyebrows in the one-time silver mining town. "We have 500 people a day with guns on their hips, so for us it's nothing unusual," Tombstone Mayor Andrew Dejournett told Reuters. "The Minuteman fall within that long American tradition that includes freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, and I don't have a problem with that," he added. Standing tall in a Stetson hat in the main street outside the OK Corral site, Arcangelo Coco says he applauds the group of volunteers who have come into the area with their brand of frontier justice. "I support the Minutemen, and if I see them I'll shake their hand," Coco said, adding that they are not "gunslingers" but are just "out to defend themselves." Others in the town, which hosts re-enactments of the famous gun fight each day at two o'clock sharp on the site of the long vanished corral, feel at ease with the Minuteman goal of sealing the U.S. border to illegal migrants from Mexico. "I think they'll help, as there are so many people coming over who shouldn't be here," said retiree Vinnie Boxx, as he munched on popcorn in a gift shop selling cowboy souvenirs. "Something needs to be done about the border as it's wide open." Oh, where to start with this extremely biased piece of propaganda?
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