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6 The Attempted Legitimation of the Vigilante Civil Border Patrols, the Militarization of the Mexican-US Border, and the Law of Unintended Consequences Marouf Hasian Jr. and George F . McHendry Jr. in April 2005, 1,200 rugged American individualists converged on the Arizona/Mexico border for 30 consecutive days and successfully conducted the largest minuteman assembly since the Revolutionary War. . . . The Project effectively deterred illegal entry in the United States. —Jim Gilchrist, “An Essay by Jim Gilchrist” [T]he “Prevention Through Deterrence” strategy has pushed unauthorized migration away from population centers. . . . This policy has had . . . unintended consequences. —nuñez-neto, Border Security:The Role of the US Border Patrol vigilante justice seems to have always been a key part of some of the genealogical histories of various populist movements that are associated with democratic governance (Abrahams;yoxall;Walker), and elite and vernacular communities have participated in heated debates about the merits of citizen activism and the heterodox policing of many imaged borders.1 Between 2002 and 2007, there would be several organizations—including Chris Simcox’s Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) and James Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project (MMP)—that would garner the attention of millions of viewers (Smith and Waugh; DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic imaginary”). We are convinced that in many ways the words and deeds of the members of these organizations served as key symbolic markers in the cultural and legal wars that were fought in the name of all sorts of border “deterrence.” As we argue below in our extension of the work of Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer; State of Exception), the demarcated Mexican-US border has been configured as the norm, while unrestricted flows of human populations have been treated as aberrant and illegal exceptions. The rise of the Minutemen helped develop a populist and legal sense of governmental failure, 104 / Hasian Jr. and McHendry Jr. where oaths were said to have been broken, and where porous boundaries threatened the welfare of the biopolitics of the mythic American nation.2 To heal these wounds, members of the George W. Bush presidential administration and other decision-makers had to make choices about whether they were going to align with the MMP or dissociate their activities from legitimate border patrols. This debate led to the infusion of billions of dollars and what we argue has been the militarization of the Mexican-US border. Long after US president Bill Clinton pushed through operation Gatekeeper in 1994—by which an experimental ten-foot wall was placed along a fourteen-mile stretch of the California-Mexico border—the Security fence Act was passed in 2006 that extended this work for hundreds of miles (Walker 144). Embarrassed officials who witnessed the rise of these civilian volunteer organizations declared several state emergencies, wrote about the importance of the national Guard, and tinkered with the idea of creating surveillance communities that would bring together local citizen groups and military patrols. Detention camps had to be expanded and cleaned up, amnesty plans had to be abandoned, new “virtual” zones of surveillance were created, and a host of organizations fought for credit in the immigration restriction wars. it is our contention that at the heart of all of these public and elite debates over the nature and scope of immigration restriction were questions regarding the legitimacy of the Minutemen Projects. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger perhaps spoke for many restrictionists when he argued in April of 2005 that the private “Minuteman” campaign had “cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants a huge percentage,” to the point where the MMP showed that “it works when you go and make an effort and when you work hard” (qtd. in nicholas and Salladay). As Doty noted in 2007, the MMP members may have been unofficial if we evaluate them using formalistic legal criteria, but they were not always operating illegally as they patrolled the borders that in their minds should have been adequately patrolled by the federal government. Using whatyoxall has called a “passive” strategy of claiming to avoid interactions with suspected undocumented immigrants, the members of the MCDC pride themselves on reporting violations to members of the Border Patrol while trying to maintain adherence to “no contact” rules as they approach “Mexicans” (Egan). We argue in this chapter that debates over the legitimacy of the Minuteman Project did more than just signpost some of the potential infrastructural problematics of the US Border Patrol’s policies that preceded the inauguration of the “Prevention through Deterrence” program. it forced ranchers, citizens in...

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