Human rights and civil rights activists said they will be monitoring the situation with their own observers to make sure that the rights of illegal immigrants are respected.The National Alliance for Human Rights, headed by UC Riverside professor Armando Navarro, is also organizing rallies, protests and vigils against the minutemen on both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border.
Minuteman Project leaders have said they hope to deploy more than 1,000 volunteers throughout April to a stretch of the Arizona border with Mexico to spot and report illegal immigrants. They said they want their efforts to call attention to woefully inadequate resources to stop migrants from entering through the border.
The group's leaders, who say they are swamped with media calls, could not be reached Tuesday.
Navarro said that despite organizers' assurances that volunteers will avoid contact with migrants, he is concerned that members of hate organizations and vigilantes will be among the Minuteman Project's volunteers.
"The essence of what we are doing is trying to prevent any violence," Navarro said. "The intent is to call attention to the fact that this anti-immigrant sentiment is growing."
Minuteman Project organizers have said that they are doing their best to weed out racists and extremists from their pool of applicants. More than a dozen people have volunteered from San Diego and Southwest Riverside counties to participate in the Minuteman Project, according to organizers.
"Our policy of passive activity will be to observe with the aid of binoculars, telescopes, night-vision scopes, and inform the U.S. Border Patrol of the location of illegal activity so that the Border Patrol agents can investigate," according to the group's Web site. "We will not be confrontational with anyone."
The group has attracted national and international media attention since it began asking for volunteers via the Internet nearly two months ago.
Organizers have said they have received applications from hundreds of ordinary Americans who are angered by the apparent inability of immigration authorities to stop illegal immigrants from coming. They said that they don't know how many people will actually participate.
Latino and immigrant rights activists, who initially hoped the Minuteman Project would fizzle away, said they are no longer taking the group lightly.
Christian Ramirez, director of the San Diego office of a human rights organization called the American Friends Service Committee, said heightened national security concerns have created a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Recent political developments, such as the passage of Proposition 200 in Arizona, a measure passed by voters to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants, have intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric, he said.
"My sentiments are still that I don't see (the Minuteman Project) moving thousands of people," he said, noting that a federal measure known as the Real ID Act to deny some benefits to illegal immigrants has helped fuel the anti-immigrant environment. "But it is Prop. 200 and the House passage of the Real ID Act that has created this climate that has allowed them to exist."
Ramirez said he and a small group of volunteers from San Diego County will be traveling to Arizona later this month for meetings with immigrant rights organizations there to discuss how to address the Minuteman Project. He said he fears that if the Minuteman Project is successful in attracting people to Arizona, others will attempt to mimic the effort along other parts of the border.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, a civil rights organization, announced earlier this month that it will train observers to document the activities of the Minuteman Project in April.
"The purpose of the legal observers is to deter abuses, document the actions of these individuals and highlight the real tragedies that occur along the border," said Ray Ybarra, a spokesman for the civil rights group in Arizona.
April is said to be one of the busier times of the year for illegal immigrant traffic through the Arizona desert. Many of them use the corridor between the towns of Douglas and Sierra Vista in southeastern Arizona, where the Minuteman Project volunteers will patrol, to cross the border illegally into the United States.
Immigration authorities say that nearly half of the 1.1 million illegal immigrants caught by the U.S. Border Patrol last year entered the country through Arizona.
Much of the illegal immigrant traffic has been pushed toward that area since the mid-1990s when authorities reinforced the border in California through Operation Gatekeeper.
Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at (760) 740-5426 or esifuentes@nctimes.com.