Armed Radical 'Minutemen' Kill Father and 9-Year-Old Daughter in Anti-Immigrant Hate

By Sally Kohn, Center for Community Change. Posted June 18, 2009.

A week after a white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and on the day three teenagers are being sentenced in Shenandoah, Pa., for brutally beating to death a Mexican immigrant, it's time we confront the fact that behind violently anti-immigrant and supremacist rhetoric is a real urge and a real encouragement for actual violence.

On May 30, 2009, a group of armed men and women killed 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arivaca, Ariz. The vigilantes were Minutemen, members of a "civilian defense corps" that polices the U.S.-Mexico border for undocumented immigrants. When Jason Bush, 34, Shawna Forde, 41, and Albert Gaxiola, 42, allegedly busted down the front door of the Flores home and killed Raul Junior Flores and his daughter, and seriously injured Flores' wife, the armed gang was supposedly looking for drugs and cash to fund their anti-immigrant organization.

Arizona police allege Shawna Forde was the ringleader. Forde was the executive director of Minuteman American Defense and a spokeswoman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, often touted as a "mainstream" voice opposing immigration. But if Forde was indeed involved, the bloody acts in Arivaca reveal the true hatred and contempt behind anti-immigrant organizations in our country.

Many well-meaning, average Americans who have understandable concerns about our economy and how they're going to support their families have been convinced that anti-immigrant organizations are on their side and feel their pain. But the reality is, organizations like the Minutemen and FAIR are only co-opting our economic insecurity (an insecurity that's shared by immigrants and citizens alike) to mask their real agendas, motivated purely by hatred for those who are different.

It was the same thing in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler started by talking about how Jews were threatening the German economy and should all be expelled from the country. And then he killed 6 million.

Are we really so naïve as a nation to think that the anti-immigrant fervor, from Lou Dobbs to the Minutemen, is anything about our economy or our well-being or our way of life? After all, our nation was built by immigrants, our strongest economic times in recent years have been driven by high rates of immigration, and even now, our economy actively lures low-wage workers from across the border to get back on firm footing. Do we really think we'd be reacting as negatively if the immigrants coming here had light skin and spoke French?

Jason Bush, one of the other Minutemen charged in the Arizona homicides, was charged in another slaying in 1997 in Washington state. He allegedly bragged to a police informant about "killing a Mexican." The man Bush killed was a 29-year-old homeless man who had been sleeping under a blanket near a parking lot when Bush stabbed him several times with a knife.

Regarding the Arizona slayings, the Minutemen American Defense group has placed the following statement on its Web site:

See more stories tagged with: minutemen, immigration, hate, white supremacy, fair, shawna forde

Sally Kohn is the director of the Movement Vision Project of the Center for Community Change, which is interviewing hundreds of activists across the country to determine the progressive vision for the future of the United States.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Politics! Sign up now »