Vigilantes or Helpful Volunteers? : Alien Arrests Uproar Fails to Deter Border Watchers

J.R. Hagan, repo man and paramilitary buff, is basking in the excitement he has caused--the talk shows, the constantly ringing telephone in the sweltering office his collection and repossessions service shares with a towing company.

Never mind that the U.S. Border Patrol has called him and his pals a bunch of vigilantes. Never mind that Tucson’s Latino community is outraged and demanding a criminal investigation, that federal authorities do not believe his story.

He thinks he and his group did right, being down on the border, looking for drug smugglers, scouring the Arizona desert with night vision goggles and carrying semiautomatic weapons, purely for “defensive” reasons. He was only giving the government a hand, he says. And as for the illegal aliens he happened to round up, well, they just sort of dropped in his lap.

But authorities say Hagan’s version of the facts may gloss over a number of important details, including, among other things, a possible violation of the neutrality act with Mexico.

Hagan and 19 other self-styled border watchers apprehended 16 illegal aliens last Saturday night in Arizona’s Lochiel Valley, about three miles north of the border and 30 miles east of Nogales. But they were there for an entirely different purpose, they say: to help stem the flow of drugs into the United States--at least for the evening--by scanning the desert for smugglers.

Hagan is the Arizona and Utah director of operations for a group known as Civilian Materiel Assistance,--formerly Civilian Military Assistance--a right-wing, Alabama-based organization most noted for its private aid to the Nicaraguan contras. It claims to have 5,000 members in all 50 states.

The watch along the Arizona-Mexico border was a departure for CMA. The national director of the organization, Thomas Vincent Posey of Decatur, Ala., called the operation a “testing ground” for the group’s own personal war against drugs.

As Hagan describes the night’s events, his band radioed for the Border Patrol, never pointed a gun or fired a shot, and left when the illegal aliens were in federal custody.

But unnamed dissident members of Hagan’s group have charged that the two cars the aliens were traveling in were stopped only because they ran into booby traps the group had set, that the aliens were apprehended and held at gunpoint after a “fire fight” and that the group’s patrols had ranged several miles across the border into Mexico.

Hagan insists that his group did not stop the cars and that its members only pointed flashlights and headlights at them while waiting for the Border Patrol to arrive. And certainly, he said, his men did not make a foray into Mexico.

“If shining a flashlight at someone is illegal, then I’m in trouble,” said Hagan.

Investigating the Case

But Chief Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Knauss is not convinced, and he said Thursday that he is investigating the case, particularly the possible violation of the neutrality act with Mexico.

“We’re running down some leads on that right now,” he said of the alleged armed border crossing. And he is dubious about Hagan’s claim that the aliens were not held at gunpoint.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “My understanding is that they did point their weapons.”

Posey said the idea for the patrol was Hagan’s. But this is not the first time the CMA has attracted national interest. In 1984, two of its members, one of them a Huntsville, Ala., policeman, were killed while flying in an American helicopter on the Nicaragua-Honduras border where they were working with the contras.

Posey also contended that the publicity over the Arizona border incident had been a boon.

“It was good for the organization,” he said. “We’ve had 1,000 phone calls to join or give financial help.”

Outraged, Disturbed

Others, however, are outraged and disturbed by what they say are men working outside the law, overstepping their bounds.

“We need immigration reform, we don’t need vigilantes running the border,” said an irate Harold Ezell, the western regional commissioner for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Bill Duckham, the Border Patrol’s deputy chief in Tucson, was also critical of CMA.

“We don’t condone any of this action,” he said. “It could really start something off, and aliens, or these people, could be hurt.”

And Border Patrolman Stu Dutcher was even more succinct: “This whole thing has been a pain in the rear,” he said.

‘Domestic Terrorists’

On Wednesday, a Latino coalition called Civilian Materiel Assistance a group of “domestic terrorists.” One of the members, lawyer Antonio Bustamante, said telegrams calling for a grand jury investigation into the events of last Saturday had been sent to Arizona’s congressional delegation, Gov. Bruce Babbitt, state Atty. Gen. Bob Corbin and Cochise County Atty. Alan Polley.

The Latino groups also are seeking a congressional investigation into possible links between Civilian Materiel Assistance and the Reagan Administration.

‘We know that the CIA funneled money through this particular organization to the contras,” a spokesman said. The CIA has in the past denied any dealings with the organization and both Hagar and Posey said that the group is funded by private donations. Bustamante said he had already heard rumblings of reprisals within the Latino community, talk of going out on their own border patrols to stop CMA.

“Everyone is so up in arms,” he said. “It’s so scary because it’s organized. Before, it was never like this. But these guys, they’re armed to the teeth.

“What if we go in and arrest these people for violating the rights of the undocumented?” Bustamante asked. “It could be a blood bath, and I can’t believe the state and federal government would let it go that far.”

Group Feels Justified

On a radio call-in show this week, Hagan held his ground, saying, among other things, that his group was justified in its patrols because of the government’s inability to stop drugs from flowing across the border.

The telephoned responses to Hagan were almost all positive.

“The United States of America was founded by volunteers and this is probably the best group of volunteers in the country,” said one man.

The woman caller who said CMA was “a bunch of little boys getting it out of your system” was clearly in the minority.

Donations to Missionaries

Later, in the office of his collections and repossessions service, Hagan talked of how his group had given clothing to Baptist and Pentecostal missionaries in Mexico. He displayed a crucifix he was wearing and said 144 of them had been sent in Christmas packages to the Miskito Indians in Central America.

“We are definitely humanitarian,” he said.

Hagan said the allegation that members of the organization went into Mexico was “crazy,” that it was made by a disgruntled member who is “trying to stir up the pot.”

“Crossing the border--it never happened,” he said. “Our organization is very up on the law and what we can and cannot do. There’s no way we’ll deal with any illegal activity.”

He said it is true that some members were carrying semiautomatic weapons--AK-47 assault rifles and a version of the American M-16--but he dismissed that by saying most who belong to Civilian Materiel Assistance are veterans and want the best guns available.

“You’d want one if someone was trying to kill or rape your wife,” he said. But, “We don’t want people in this county to think we are a bunch of gun nuts waiting for something to shoot at.”

More Missions Planned

Hagan said that although he and his men had previously scouted the border for tire tracks where vehicles had crossed, Saturday’s patrol had been their first large-scale effort to spot drug smugglers. And he said there will be more.

“We are going to put these people (CMA) in a position to observe U.S. territory. We have the right to do that,” he said.

But he added that the publicity of the last week had brought one change--no guns.

“We don’t need those weapons to do what we’ve got to do,” he said. “We have enough people to jump all along the border. If they want to bring drugs over, they better be real good at it because we are going to watch them all along the border.”