ADIOS, MINUTEKLAN!

If there is any indication that the right is afraid of something, it is this. As immigration gears up to be put on the front burner again, the Minuteklan announce that they are disbanding. Why? Because they are afraid that some of their members might just go a little above and beyond the call of sanity, and they don’t want to be held responsible. Carmen Mercer was the president of the group and she had to deal with neo-Nazis coming to their rally a few months ago. Her crew in Arizona is the only ones we have found to actually chase Nazis away from their crowd, but that might be due to the fact that they are also the crew that Shawna Forde & Co. were once involved with. After that nutjob and a few of her nutjob friends broke into a Hispanic family’s home looking to rob them and ended up killing two of them, including a 10-year-old girl, all of a sudden the warnings echoed by pro-immigrant advocates were right there for everyone to see. Now don’t think this is a case of everyone coming to their senses. No, they just don’t want to be held accountable as a group for the actions of one of their members. So keep an eye out for their next move. They will make one – and so will we.

Tri-City Herald

Arizona-based Minuteman Civil Defense Corps disbanded earlier this week, citing concern about being held liable if members take their anti-illegal immigrant crusade too far.

The decision was announced by e-mail to members Monday night and came two days after a massive tea party rally against health care reform in Washington, D.C., where angry protesters reportedly yelled racial and homophobic slurs at lawmakers.

Carmen Mercer, the organization’s president, said she fears the recent health care vote in Congress and the political atmosphere in general are frustrating people to a point of reacting violently.

“We are concerned that people will take matters into their own hands … It takes one bad apple to destroy everything we’ve worked for in eight years,” Mercer said in a phone interview from Arizona. “With the mood of the country the way it is, we do not want to risk that.”

Members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps — along with a separate group, the Minuteman Project — began drawing national attention to the issue of illegal immigration under the Bush administration and the government’s inability to monitor the porous U.S.-Mexico border by doing the job themselves.

The groups, which have been criticized as right-wing extremists, train volunteer “Minutemen” to spot and report illegal border crossings to authorities.

Some 12,000 people belong to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. About 300 live in Washington and more than half of those are in the Yakima area, said Joe Ray, president of the state chapter.

Though the national group is disbanding, the group’s Washington chapter will continue operating, Ray said.

“I’m still trying to get ahold of our folks to figure out exactly what we want to do,” he said. “We’re going to carry on the way we have in the past with a couple of exceptions.

“We won’t have to clear certain things with national anymore. We’ll be totally independent.”

Leaders of anti-discrimination and immigrant advocacy organizations called the reasons for the dissolution of the national Minuteman group disturbing.

“We’re just concerned that these groups are fomenting a kind of hatred,” said Jorge Baron, executive director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. “The focus here is on a sort of liability that exists or a recognition that this is a problem, that there could be violence — but not addressing the actual issue of violence … without being concerned with the fact that people are going to get hurt and people have gotten hurt in the past.”

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has sought to shed accusations that it advocates violence against illegal immigrants, especially since last June when Shawna Forde, a former member from Everett, was accused of killing an alleged drug dealer and his daughter in Arizona to fund a splinter group.

The national Minuteman groups condemned the killings.

Forde — who had connections to the organization’s Yakima-based chapter — and two others are awaiting trial.

Mercer, the Minuteman president, said the Arizona homicides had nothing to do with the group’s decision to disband. She’s worried about heated reaction to the passage of health care reform — which reportedly has led to death threats against some members of Congress.

“Do you see another way?” Mercer asked of potential violence. “We’ve tried everything to make our elite in Washington understand what this fight is for. It’s for the American people, it’s not for the illegal immigrants who break into the country and steal our jobs and depress our wages.”

She encouraged Minuteman members to continue conducting border watches, speaking up at city council and school board meetings and forming their own corporations. She added that many chapters were already independent and didn’t need much financial assistance from the national level.

In Yakima, Ray said his chapter has few expenses, which are mostly covered by its members and a handful of local businesses. He said the chapter would now have to figure out how to conduct background checks on all potential members– a job previously done by the national group.

He encouraged fellow members to join the tea party movement and Grassroots of Yakima Valley.

“Most of our members, at least here in Washington, already take part in tea party functions anyway,” Ray said, adding that the Washington chapter will likely stay active until the 2012 elections.