On January 29 a dozen members of the Illinois Minuteman Project marched in the drizzling rain down Keller Road in Waukegan toward a grassy area the police had cordoned off for them across the street from Holy Family Parish. Two weeks earlier members of the church had met with village officials to protest a crackdown on drivers who didn’t have licenses, many of whom were Hispanic. Now the Minutemen were holding a counterprotest. They carried signs that read COME LEGALLY, WORK LEGALLY, DRIVE LEGALLY, and AMERICANS ARE THREATENED. WHY? They waved American flags, Spirit of ’76 flags, and Gadsden flags, with the coiled rattlesnake warning DON’T TREAD ON ME.
“C’mon and do it, then!” one man yelled back. “We’re right here!”
Pulido went to work for Illinois Bell right after high school and stayed with the company for 20 years. “At one point they sent me to school to learn to be an auto mechanic,” she says, then laughs. “I think I was part of a quota. I was working on big trucks. I didn’t mind it, but after a certain point you can’t get all that black gunk off your hands. I hate to say it, but it really is a man’s work.”
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Pulido was badly shaken by 9/11 and the subsequent homeland-security threats, and she grew increasingly angry about illegal immigrants who broke the law, especially when they used services–schools, hospitals–that had been paid for and set up for citizens. “VA hospitals are closing and cutting back across the country,” she says. “These people built our country. Now they’re getting old and gray, and they need a little help. But we have politicians that would rather give the money to illegals.”
Pulido read about the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps on the Internet in early 2005. She was irritated to learn that Bush had called for an additional 2,000 border guards a year but that the money appropriated wouldn’t pay for nearly that many. (The 2006 budget pays for 210.) “There are men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan that are fighting a war, so it’s up to civilians to do our part in protecting our borders and homeland security,” she says. “Our government is not doing the job.” Last April she spent four days working with the Arizona Minutemen on a monthlong patrol of a 23-mile section of their state’s border. The patrol attracted media attention and a lot of new members to the Minuteman groups; Connie Hair of the national organization says more than 120,000 people now volunteer with or support the Minutemen nationwide.
Pulido says the bill is weak, but she’s willing to support it until something stronger is proposed. “If you have a leak in the sink and you keep mopping the floor, you’re not fixing the leak,” she says. “All anyone is doing here is mopping the floor. Our borders need to be sealed.” That’s why she’s contemptuous of the Senate bill sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy, which would allow foreign nationals to get temporary visas and allow people who are already here illegally to become legal through a long process that involves paying penalties. “Passing the McCain bill would be selling out the American worker, American sovereignty,” she says. “It would really be a violation of their oath of office to protect America from foreign invaders.”
