Volunteer Border Guard Spokesman Blasts Ineffectual U.S. Patrollers
by Chad Groening and Jenni Parker
January 27, 2004
(AgapePress) - A volunteer organization that protects private property rights says the largest Border Patrol station in the United States has been unable to keep criminal aliens and Mexican soldiers off a ranch adjacent to the station.Volunteers with the group Ranch Rescue have been conducting what they call "Operation Thunderbird" on a privately-owned ranch in Cochise County, Arizona. Their objectives are to provide security, rescue, and support services to area property owners and to help them with construction and repair of physical barriers to stop foreign trespassers.
According to Ranch Rescue representatives, life for American citizens and volunteers living near the U.S.-Mexico border can be fraught with dangers. In recent months there have been reports of landowners and their family members having their property invaded by illegal aliens, or being kidnapped at gunpoint and terrorized by armed Mexican soldiers in uniform. And just last month Ranch Rescue volunteers say they were fired upon by Mexican troops who had not only violated a rancher's property but also U.S. sovereignty.
Ranch Rescue national spokesman Jack Foote says all this happened with the extensive and heavily manned Douglas, Arizona, Border Patrol station only a short drive away.
"We are immediately adjacent to the largest Border Patrol station in the nation. Douglas Patrol station is so huge that it has its own water tower. They are our next door neighbors, and they could not keep the Mexican federal army off of our property," he says.
But despite the considerable size and resources of the Patrol station, Foote says its agents do not and will not tangle with foreign invaders. Instead, he says, the unpaid volunteers of Ranch Rescue must do the job. But Foote says the patrollers' apparent temerity and ineffectiveness is not all their fault.
"These agents in the field are hamstrung," he says. "Their hands are tied behind their back by bureaucrats who have no business making field decisions. [The patrollers] are told not to do their jobs, and they don't."
Foote contends that the Border Patrol is deployed to do one of two things: "either to drive around and be seen in their air-conditioned vehicles or to run away at the first sign of someone seriously armed."
Ranch Rescue's spokesman says these American Border Patrol agents are helpless to keep alien criminals off private U.S. property -- even when that property is right next door. He says this is because of the way the border patrol operates and the limitations placed on its field agents by Washington, DC, bureaucrats.
