Minutemen tell Young Republicans we should shoot border crossers

When Texas A&M student, Dan Garcia invited a group of local Minutemen to speak to the Brazos County Young Republicans, he was hoping simply to increase attendance to the summertime meeting. With members away for vacation, he thought the controversial border vigilantes would attract a crowd. And they did. Instead of just five or six members as usual, the meeting was attended by 25 people.

Everything was going swimmingly at first, until the Minutemen began expounding upon their vision for "border security". The uncomfortable crowd listened on as one Minutewoman complained about why it was that ranchers could shoot diseased cattle at the the border, but not humans.

Texas Minuteman Director of Public Relations, Sandra Beene than added, "Once, in this country, we imported a lot of people who were black, and we created a slave class of human beings, and we're still paying for that, through all the resentment..."


tags: immigration, minutemen, shooting , Texas Minutemen, racism


The meeting opened inauspiciously enough with a presentation by Minuteman leader Shannon McGauley.

McGauley, a stubby man with a necktie that stops about four inches too soon, called himself a "bail bond enforcement agent." He and a brother bill themselves on the Web as the only known pair of twin bounty hunters.

Before they hunted border crossers, they might have been hunting something else

-snip-

Early last year, after volunteering in a Minuteman Project patrol in Arizona, McCauley registered the name Texas Minutemen.

…McGauley began with a routine report on risks along the border. He described the cat-and-mouse game Minutemen play watching the border, the rumors of Iraqis crossing illegally and the plans for another patrol Sept. 11 along the Rio Grande near Laredo and Del Rio.

The volunteers simply watch for border crossers and alert the Border Patrol, he said. They carry concealed weapons for self-defense, as allowed under state law.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Things started to get uncomfortable when the minutemen leader began discussing the secret plan to ""merge Canada and Mexico with the United States"

But it was the comments by another minuteman leader that shocked the crowd the most.

A small group of Hispanic students and adults from Texas A&M University watched from a front table…

They bristled when McGauley's co-founder, a retired Dallas software engineer named Sandra Beene, started talking about shooting "varmints" and about how ranchers used to shoot cattle that crossed the border for fear they might have diseases.

"Now, we're bringing all the diseases that we wiped out right back in," she said.

-snip-

Late in the discussion, Beene made this telling comment:

"Once, in this country, we imported a lot of people who were black, and we created a slave class of human beings," she said. "And we're still paying for that, through all the resentment. And black people are still paying for it, too."

With that, Garcia quickly cut off the conversation, thanking his "guest" and apologized to the crowd. Telling the Young Republicans his goal was "just to set up a forum where we could hear different opinions," he added later that the discussion "got out of hand a little too quickly."

The Minutemen have been making the rounds of many "border-minded" Republican groups as of late, accepting speaking engagements in hopes to raise funds and awareness for their special brand of border security.

McGauley with Rep.Tom Tancredo (R-CO)