Fear, Hate and Hand Grenades: Extremists' Unrelenting Assault on Immigrants

By Tara McKelvey, The American Prospect. Posted November 7, 2007.

It was a May afternoon in Washington's meridian Hill Park. Forty-year-old Ricardo Juarez Nava was at a rally in support of immigrants when he saw a neatly dressed man approaching the group. As it turned out, the man, Tyler J. Froatz Jr., was protesting the rally and had brought along an anti-immigration flyer (a crudely drawn illustration of border officers firing on an immigrant with the caption, "THE ONLY WAY TO STOP A FLOOD ..."), and a back- pack with a claw hammer, a Taser, and pepper spray inside. Froatz, who is 24 and a New Jersey native, also had a fully automatic M1 carbine rifle in the trunk of his car.

"He was pushing and trying to fight with me. He had a knife here," Juarez says, gesturing toward a front pocket in his jeans as he describes Froatz's efforts to disrupt the pro-immigration rally, which had been organized by a local group Juarez founded called Mexicans Without Borders. After Froatz's arrest, police discovered a hand grenade, a Molotov cocktail, and 1,000 rounds of ammunition in his Northwest Washington apartment.

On the afternoon of our September interview, four months after the assault, Juarez is sitting in a bookstore in Woodbridge, Virginia, sipping coffee. One of 12 children, Juarez was raised in Mexico by his widowed mother, who did laundry and sold firewood to support the family. He attended Mexico City's School of Sciences and Humanities and came to the United States in April 1995, where he found work in construction. In 2002 he founded Mexicans Without Borders to provide legal advice, counseling, and other kinds of support for immigrants in the Mid-Atlantic region.

For Juarez, it has been a rocky summer. In July, members of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors took aggressive steps against undocumented immigrants in Woodbridge and other cities in the county where Juarez lives. The July 10 county resolution passed by the Prince William Board recommended restricting such public services as access to senior centers for undocumented residents. The still more controversial aspect of the resolution instructs police to check into the immigration status of suspected illegals who have been detained -- even for minor traffic violations; previously, police had checked on the immigration status only of those accused of violent crimes.

The resolution is the most stringent anti-illegal immigrant measure to be passed in Virginia. It was first drafted in June with the help of a 1,850-member group called Help Save Manassas, which works to oppose illegal aliens. After the resolution was approved in July, a series of public meetings on the details took place this fall. As the Prospect went to press, the board was still debating how to implement the restriction of services to illegal immigrants and whether to provide training for police in checking on immigration status at a total cost of roughly $14 million; the vote had yet to be scheduled.

Juarez and Mexicans Without Borders, which now has approximately 3,000 members, have been fighting the board's efforts. They organized a week-long boycott of local businesses that had not supported their organization (the group had asked businesses to display posters) and brought more than 3,000 people to a Sept. 2 rally at the seat of the Prince William County government. During the rally, Juarez stood close to a microphone and -- over a frayed sound system --shouted to his followers. "Our constitutional and civil rights are being violated by this resolution," he said. "We are taking the case to court against the county of Prince William." The crowd broke into thunderous cheers and applause.

There have been death threats by e-mail, angry phone calls, and accusations from Republican county leaders that Mexicans Without Borders is trying to bully its opponents and whip up fear and hysteria in the Hispanic community. Meanwhile, bloggers and activists are investigating to see if Juarez and his family are legal, and have been posting their (inconclusive) findings on a Web site, Black Velvet Bruce Li, considered "the most influential local blog in Virginia" by some in the anti- illegal immigrant community.

"There are messages by e-mail that say they are going to kill me," Juarez says. He pulls on the collar of his red, checked shirt, fiddles with one of the buttons, and looks down at the table. "I don't want anyone to kill me."

Prince William County is a comfortable, though traffic-clogged, community 30 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The county, like the rest of the area, has undergone demographic changes. In greater D.C., the Hispanic population has doubled over the past two decades, according to U.S. Census data. In 2005 the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that roughly 250,000 illegal immigrants live in Virginia and, as happens with any dramatic influx of immigrants, they are blamed for an array of problems: crowded elementary school classrooms and hospital emergency rooms; violent gang activity; run-down rental units in residential neighborhoods; even the high cost of diapers for newborns in a hospital maternity ward.

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