that TV reporters who started coming in 2003 soon found appealing, as he described his adventures with his newly organized Tombstone Border Militia and the urgent need to have better border security because of the “invasion” from Mexico.
The attitudes that were roaming the desert with Simcox’s patrols were voiced by one participant caught by a documentary filmmaker who filmed an exercise by Simcox’s militia group, now renamed Tombstone Civil Defense Corps. As cattle roamed in the background, the militiaman turned to the cameraman and said, “No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. After two or three are shot, they’ll stop crossing the border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”
Simcox was flamboyant—he had a penchant for posing with a pistol down the front of his pants—and in him the border-militia movement now had a figurehead who made for a good story. Pretty soon Simcox was getting broader media attention, appearing on CNN with Lou Dobbs in November 2002 and on Fox News shortly thereafter with Sean Hannity, both of whom described him and his endeavors to organize vigilante border watchers in admiring tones. He also began popping up on right-wing talk radio all over the country.
One of the people listening in was Jim Gilchrist, a retired real estate salesman from California who had decided to devote himself to immigration activism and was attracted to right-wing theories about the “invasion.” Inflamed in part by a Simcox interview, he conceived the notion of creating a nationwide “citizen border watch” event that would draw people from all over the country to Arizona for a month in an attempt to stop the flow of border crossers.
Gilchrist called it the Minuteman Project, and got ahold of Simcox to ask if he’d be interested in playing a central role in the project, since it would all take place down south of Tombstone, in Simcox’s stomping grounds. Simcox was all in, and in short order stories about the project naming Simcox and Gilchrist as its cofounders started appearing in the right-wing media.
Within a few weeks, the two men were back on national TV, telling Dobbs, Hannity, and a number of visiting reporters about their plan to bring “thousands” of Americans down to the desert for a month-long “border watch” that they hoped, if nothing else, would send a message to politicians that people were tired of seeing immigrants flooding over the Mexico border.
The media reportage about the Minutemen’s planned month-long event drew concern from officials in Mexico, who feared that their citizens might be mistreated and targeted by armed militiamen in Arizona. President George W. Bush—never a favorite of the Patriot crowd—stepped in and, in a joint presser with Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, denounced the Minutemen, calling them vigilantes.
The whole thing came together in a big circus near the border in April 2005 that drew a media horde of TV crews, newspaper reporters and photographers, radio reporters, and Internet journalists who outnumbered the 900 Minutemen who showed up. The media gamely recorded the photo-op site established near the Mexico border of motor homes and campers. Many of the Minutemen were photographed scanning the desert wastes with their binoculars from the comfort of their lawn chairs.
Over the course of the first week of April, the Minutemen proved far more successful at attracting media coverage than they were at catching border crossers, none of whom came within their sights that week (although a couple of men were caught late one night in the second week). Sean Hannity even flew out to Tombstone and held a live broadcast from the Minutemen’s gathering site in which he interviewed both Simcox and Gilchrist. Less noticed but silently lurking in the encampment were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
The most exciting thing to happen was a late-night alarm, spread through the Minutemen’s operations center, that Salvadoran drug gang members were about to descend upon them with machine guns. The pickups scrambled, roaring through the dust with their floodlights glaring and their passengers’ long guns at the ready. Then they gradually realized that it had been a false alarm, and everyone returned to their campers and motor homes and went to bed.
By the second week of April, most of the participants began clearing out, and so did the reporters. By the third week of April, the border watch had pretty much petered out, the Minutemen had gone home in their campers, and their leaders, Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist, had flown out to Washington, DC.
Actually, the two men had a deeply acrimonious relationship that had manifested itself only a few days into the April media circus, caused mostly by Simcox’s intense jealousy of Gilchrist’s genial way with reporters. By December the rift had grown so intense that the two men announced they were officially splitting into two separate organizations: Gilchrist’s operation would still be called the Minuteman Project, while Simcox’s outfit was now named the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
Within a few months, the two organizations had descended into open and intense rivalry and had begun competing for members. Initially, Simcox held something of an upper hand, because he was already putting together the events for which the Minutemen were now known: civilian border watches, as they liked to call them. And in addition to organizing several such watches along the California border, in the summer of 2006 his MCDC began organizing a Minuteman watch in Washington State, along the Canadian border near Blaine. Of course, Canadians or other undocumented immigrants coming over the border aren’t really a problem in Washington State, but Simcox mainly wanted to be able to point to the Canadian watches as proof to reporters that the Mexico border watches weren’t racist in nature.
One of the people drawn to these Washington border watches was Shawna Forde, a hairdresser and former Boeing worker from Everett. One day after returning from a long road trip to California and back during which she had gorged on right-wing talk radio most of the way, she told her husband she had decided what she wanted to do with her life: “save America from illegal immigrants.”
Forde was a diminutive but brassy and busty blonde who liked to play the tough gal in the testosterone-laden world of the mostly male Minutemen border watches. Indeed, Forde had a rap sheet dating back to when she was eleven years old that included sex work, shoplifting, credit-card fraud, and car theft, though none of her colleagues were aware of that. She was ambitious, and soon began climbing the hierarchy of the state Minuteman organization by putting together immigration-related meetings around the state. When Chris Simcox came to Bellingham for a public hearing about the Minutemen, Forde attached herself to him and introduced herself around as the state MCDC’s press secretary.
Her raw ambition, combined with her propensity for thievery, put her sideways with the state’s MCDC leadership, even though she had formed a close relationship with Simcox. After a prolonged internal fight, they fired her; she walked away vowing that she would form her own anti-immigrant border watch organization.
Forde promptly jumped ship to Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project, and sponsored a couple of Gilchrist speaking appearances in Washington state. In return he helped publicize her new group, Minuteman American Defense (MAD), and its plans to organize border watches in Arizona. Forde subsequently oversaw a number of these watches in various Arizona locales, including in the Altar Valley of the Sonoran Desert, and often hung out at Glenn Spencer’s ranch in south-central Arizona, near Hereford.
A little after midnight the morning of May 30, 2009, Forde and three men dressed up to look like Border Patrol officers approached the home of Raul Flores Jr. in Arivaca, with the intention of robbing him. One of the vigilantes, Jason Eugene Bush, fatally shot Flores in the chest and head and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez, hitting her twice, though both shots were nonfatal. Gonzalez collapsed to the floor in a fetal position and pretended to be dead, then listened to them interrogate her nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia, as to the whereabouts of her older sister before they shot her twice in the face and left. Gonzalez called 911, but as she was doing so the gang reentered the home to retrieve a forgotten AK-47. The chief gunman, Bush, was lightly wounded by Gonzalez, who had retreated to the kitchen with a handgun. The gang fled, and authorities arrived
