Minuteman Divisions

Now a retired accountant who lives in a gated Aliso Viejo subdivision with his wife and two elderly Chihuahuas, Jim Gilchrist served in the same Marine unit in Vietnam as Chase, though not at the same time. By his own account, Gilchrist was sent spiraling into a post-traumatic-stress meltdown by the September 11 attacks, and emerged with an all-consuming obsession about the dangers of illegal immigration that led him, in the fall of last year, to come up with the idea for the Minuteman Project. A small, nervous man, with an almost pitiable tendency to get lost in the current of his own rhetoric, Gilchrist seems to really like people, and, politics aside, it’s hard not to like him back. But already in the first week of the Arizona Minuteman Project, rumors were flying that Chris Simcox couldn’t stand him, and that the animosity was mutual. Both did their best to put a good face on the matter and denied they’d had a falling out. More recently, Gilchrist admitted with all possible tact that there was a “lack of communication” between him and Simcox. “He would make a decision and not clear it with me, and I would be upset. I would make a decision and not clear it with him, and he would be upset. It caused a rift.” Chase, who takes every opportunity to mention that he was “third in command” in Arizona (Gilchrist concedes that he was “one of the original organizers”), remembers it differently. Simcox, he said, fired a series of volunteers whom Chase and Gilchrist considered blameless, and Gilchrist failed to stand up to him. Eventually, the two sequestered themselves in separate headquarters 25 miles apart. “It got to be where I got word that one of [Simcox’s] people was coming down to fire one of my people,” Chase said. Gilchrist, Chase said, promised to “cut Chris off at the knees when we finished. That’s what he said he was going to do.” He didn’t. Ever conciliatory, Gilchrist patched things up with Simcox. “We talk at least once a week now to prevent that from happening again,” Gilchrist told me in mid-July. The two did split though, with Simcox taking control of something called Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Inc., charged with organizing future border-watch efforts, and Gilchrist presiding over his own Minuteman Project Inc., which will go after companies that employ undocumented workers. It is, Gilchrist said, in the “embryonic stage.” Through all the post-Minuteman infighting, Gilchrist has worked hard to downplay the divisions in the movement, admitting for now only that “it gets a little discouraging. It requires baby-sitting.” He even made a brief, supportive appearance in Campo two Saturdays ago, despite Chase’s record of mouthing off to reporters about his weakness of character. Gilchrist’s refusal to publicly take sides — to be specific, Chase’s side — and his docility in the face of conflict, Chase conjectured, is a symptom of Gilchrist’s PTSD. “I’ve encouraged him to get more treatment.” Andy Ramirez was pointedly not present in Campo and most likely will not be dropping by. “I fail to see what will be accomplished by [Chase’s] operation,” he huffed on the phone. Ramirez, who describes himself as a “third-generation American of Mexican descent” — his great-grandparents, he’s quick to insist, “came over legally” — is organizing his own border watch, called Friends of the Border Patrol, scheduled to launch in mid-September. He isn’t sure yet if he’ll be coordinating at all with Chris Simcox, whose four-state Minuteman Project expansion will be taking off October 1. “I need to sit down with my command team and discuss it,” Ramirez said. Given his past record of cooperation with would-be allies, it seems unlikely. On May 18 Ramirez issued a “press release” on one of his four Web sites announcing that he had received “several alarming e-mails” from Jim Chase “that indicate his outfit being more of a militia-like type of organization.” The e-mails, Ramirez wrote, were in addition “absolutely disrespectful to our chairman, Mr. Andy Ramirez.” “We shall not have anything to do with his organization under any circumstances,” Ramirez concluded. The dispute apparently started when Chase enthused to Ramirez about recruiting “snipers” to stake out the border. Chase later said he merely meant combat veterans with reconnaissance training — “I would never put snipers on the border with the intentions of shooting someone, never,” he insisted — but Ramirez took him literally. Ramirez also took issue with Chase’s brief-lived plan to team up with Ted Hayes, the founder of L.A.’s Dome Village homeless encampment, to truck bands of urban have-nots down to Campo, a strategy which Ramirez called “absolutely dangerous.” “Many homeless people have psychiatric illnesses,” he said. Ramirez himself comes off as only slightly more level-headed than Jim Chase. A one-time “semi-pro” hockey goalie who was forced to retire when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ramirez directs no less than three political organizations, none of which appear to involve many people other than Andy Ramirez. (When I called the telephone number listed for the Friends of the Border Patrol headquarters, Ramirez’s mother answered.) But if Chase is far out on the Chuck Norris edge of the Minuteman spectrum, Ramirez is going for a gentler brand of vigilantism. On the issue of weapons, he takes a more moderate approach than even Simcox and Gilchrist did. In September, he promises, “The only people armed will be law enforcement.” His relative moderation and eagerness to accommodate the political mainstream has brought Ramirez into conflict with others on the militant fringe of the movement. Soon after Ramirez blasted Jim Chase online in May, Chase was contacted by a young man from Ventura named Joe Turner. If you want dirt on Ramirez, Chase told me, “You really ought to talk to Joe.” But Joe Turner is the only one of his compatriots clever enough to surmise that airing dirty laundry to a reporter from an alternative weekly may not be the best way to further his cause, and he did not respond to my attempts to contact him. When I last spoke to him — on a street corner in Baldwin Park, surrounded by a handful of his anti-immigrant comrades, dozens of riot police and hundreds of angry Chicano counter-protesters — Turner would say nothing more than, “Andy Ramirez and I don’t get along.” Comfortably at home on the message boards of his Web site, SaveOurState.org (not to be confused, Ramirez said, with one of the groups he directs, which he insists is “the real Save Our State”), the 28-year-old has been more candid. In one posting he called Ramirez an “opportunistic snake.” In another, he wrote, “The guy is only in it for himself and his own glory.” The sniping began in January, when Ramirez published a press release denouncing a rally Turner was planning at a day-laborer pickup site in Redondo Beach. The protest was one of several that Turner’s group has organized at sites where immigrant laborers gather. It was also behind the KRCA billboard protests as well as two small but highly contentious demonstrations in Baldwin Park over the language inscribed on a monument to the area’s indigenous past. Turner’s tactics have been confrontational from the start. “SaveOurState.org,” he writes on the Web site, “is committed to creating a New Paradigm, one that consists of one singular tenet: the transference of pain.” In his press release, Ramirez denounced Turner’s “racism and neo-Nazi thuggery,” pointing to an earlier Internet posting in which Turner wrote, “Bring your bats, fellas. If we are lucky, we are gonna need them. PING!” Ramirez and Turner later met to attempt a reconciliation. “I didn’t leave pleased with the discussion,” Ramirez said. He responded with another press release: “There’s no room for such nonsense in our organization,” he wrote. The astonishing thing about this most recent wave of anti-immigrant mobilization is that despite deep fractiousness, an almost comical level of disorganization and the slapstick tendencies of their leaders, they have managed to touch a nerve. As spectacle at least, they haven’t yet exhausted the media’s patience, or the public’s attention. I asked Jim Chase if he thought all the infighting wouldn’t set his movement back. “We probably should have taken care of it within our group,” he admitted, but then asked with a chuckle, “What’s the saying in Hollywood — it doesn’t matter what you say about me as long as you keep talking about me?”