To the Rescue

He says he's encouraged by what happened in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the City Council passed an ordinance to identify and financially penalize business owners and landlords who employ or house undocumented immigrants. Hayes wants Kansas municipalities to pass similar resolutions (though the controversial measure is under injunction awaiting a lawsuit in federal court).

Hayes tells the people in the audience that they can become members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps for $50 — the cost of the required criminal background check.

Then he opens the meeting to comments.

"If they had uniforms on, they'd be an army," a woman says.

"They are an army," another says.

A dark-haired woman in the back row chimes in. "I was driving down Metcalf the other day, and there was a big truck that said 'Viva La Raza.' I mean, they're already here."

"We're under a well-organized invasion," Hayes says. t's the last day of September, a few days after the Operation U-Turn confab at the Clarion. At 4 p.m., Randall Cox is on his third beer at the Jazz Louisiana Kitchen in Lee's Summit.

Cox and Dave Griffin, the second in command in the Missouri Minuteman organization, have spent a good part of the afternoon discussing organization business that Griffin says is "not for public distribution." Cox says two TV stations — one in Springfield, the other in St. Louis — have called him about sending reporters to the border with the Minutemen. Cox says he's confident that, if the TV producers pay his expenses, he could be their guide to some serious action.

"It's big-time creepy," Cox says of the scene along the border. "The adrenaline rush is pretty awesome. You've got your night goggles on, knowing that some coyotes" — paid human smugglers — "are carrying the latest and greatest of technical equipment and high-powered rifles, the type of thing the military wish they had. You see the mules" — Mexican drug runners. "You see the violence. It's extreme."

Cox says he would take the TV reporters to El Paso, Texas. "In El Paso, there's a tremendous amount of violence. If they want action, we'll show them action."

The two friends, who met thanks to their adjacent cubicles at a local engineering company, were inspired to join the Minutemen by a trip to the border in March 2006. They set aside 10 days for the trip and checked into a hotel just outside Tucson, Arizona. The plan was to spend three days driving down to the Minuteman Command Center, 50 miles southwest of the city, check in for a briefing and then head to "the line."

They admit that they didn't see much. Griffin says "the line" is actually 30 miles from the border. Volunteers there station themselves on public lands and on the private property of ranchers who are supportive of the Minuteman mission. Cox says they ate a lot of peanut-butter crackers.

Though they didn't witness confrontation, Cox says, they did hear about it.

"It didn't happen directly in front of us, but, from what the Border Patrol said and during different shifts in different areas, a number of the people they were finding coming across the desert weren't from Mexico. A large contingency were from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan — many that had confirmed ties to Al Qaeda."

After the two returned, Cox was convinced that more needed to be done in the Show Me State. Over the past six months, he says he's been in touch with potential and current chapter leaders in Joplin, Poplar Bluff, St. Louis, St. Joseph and Springfield. He describes interest in the Minutemen as "astronomical." He thinks he knows why.

"I think when these [immigrants' rights] groups started doing demonstrations and burning the American flag and wanting to sing the national anthem in Spanish — these people that are here as criminals, these people who came here illegally and started demanding their rights as U.S. citizens — I think that just took some good old Americans and pissed them off," he says. "I guess, being a U.S. Army vet, I don't take too well to burning the flag, either, especially when it's foreign nationals doing that."

Cox and Griffin say their patriotism was honed by military service. Cox says he spent three years in Germany as a bodyguard for a four-star general. (He says the two played friendly tennis games and shared cookies baked by the general's wife.) Griffin was in the Air Force and, during the Vietnam War, worked with unmanned drones to gather intelligence.

What bothers them, they say, is that the America they fought for seems to be fading as the country's population shifts.

"If we don't do something now, I see us becoming nothing more than a Third World country," Cox says. "The middle class will cease to exist. Unions will no longer exist. We'll look like a Third World country."

"If we're basically importing the entire population of other countries and giving them citizenship without having to earn it," Griffin adds, "it's like, OK, all of a sudden, we've got an entirely different cultural population that has nothing to do with America inside American borders."