The Problem With Vigilante Justice…

An outspoken anti-immigration activist from Everett has been arrested in Arizona in connection to a deadly home invasion robbery.

Shawna Forde, the executive director of the Minutemen American Defense, is one of three accused in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Raul Flores and his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, at their home in Arivaca, Ariz., a town 10 miles north of the Mexican border…

According to the Pima County Sheriff’s Office, two men and a woman posing as police officers forced their way into the Flores ‘ home in the middle of the night on May 30.

It is not known exactly what transpired next, but Raul Flores and his daughter were shot and killed. The girl’s mother was wounded and is recovering in a local hospital, deputies said.

Hmmmmm. The Minutemen are one of those groups who sit uneasy on my mind. Not because I like the the idea of illegal immigration; from a human rights standpoint alone the illegal border crossings are horrendous. “Coyotes” raping women, ripping off immigrants and then leaving them in the desert, people dying of dehydration and much of the money going towards illegal crossing ending up in the hands of the Tijuana cartels.

So, illegal immigration is bad, and if the only thing the minutemen were doing was acting like a neighborhood watch group and aiding local and federal police forces, I wouldn’t have a problem with them – but that’s not all they do. They are a political advocacy organization as well – and if all they were advocating for was was beefed up security, I’d be OK with that too.

However, they’re not just pro-security, they are stridently anti-immigration. They advocate for a complete moratorium on immigration, and as of today, their website has a headline of “Stop Obama amnesty – register now.” So, they aren’t just police support organization, they are a militia with a political agenda. Furthermore, they’ve been generally rejected by political society, so they are inclusive with an ideology which blames Mexican immigrants for many of America’s problems.

And it’s just that kind of inclusive, self-feeding that has a subculture of ethnic denigration, which attracts the kind of racist loons who feel it’s OK to kill and rob a Mexican family.

-Marc-