Their critics, however, maintained that the move is counterproductive.
"They have a lynch-mob mentality," said Ray Borane, mayor of the border town of Douglas, whose population is mostly Latino. "They have no training and no sensitivity."
President George W. Bush has called them "vigilantes," and the Border Patrol also views the volunteers as a menace and is concerned that they could set off ground sensors, complicate video surveillance and create security problems.
"Having a large number of people walking about the migrant trails is not beneficial," spokesman Rob Griffin said.
In Mexico, where the local media portrayed the Minutemen as trigger-happy "migrant hunters," reports said Mexican authorities have beefed up patrols on their side of the border and have posted flyers at migrant hotels instructing immigrants to go to other places.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Harvey insisted that the Minutemen are focusing on the wrong target.
"The posse went the wrong way," he wrote. "It should ride to Wal-Mart, which hired illegal immigrants to clean the floors ... to the farms that have hired illegals to cut costs. It should ride to Washington, where Congress sees a few thousand dead border crossers as a small price to pay for an endless supply of cheap labor."
Ultimately, people on both sides of the argument agreed that the only solution can come from legislation that would legalize the flow across the border. Bush has talked often about a temporary migrant-worker scheme but has so far been blocked by more conservative members of his own center-right Republican Party who fear that the measure and the workers it would legalize would eventually become permanent residents of the country.
The more immediate danger, however, is that some of the Minutemen would clash with a band of well-armed smugglers and set off a bloody battle. Luckily, that has not yet happened.
The worst case so far has been when three Minuteman, including a man named Bryan Barton, forced a 26-year-old migrant to pose for a picture with a T-shirt that read, "Bryan Barton caught an illegal alien and all I got was this T-shirt."
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