CONTACT:
Claudia Guevara, ACLU of Texas at 915-532-0921 ext. 27
Peter Simonson, Executive Director, ACLU of New Mexico at 505-266-4622

HACHITA, NM – Border Patrol authorities revealed to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that they arrested a member of the New Mexico Minuteman last week for smuggling/detaining a group of migrants outside of Hachita, New Mexico, a community on the U.S. border with Mexico.

The Minuteman volunteer, said to be from Colorado, was driving in Hidalgo County and came across a group of migrants who flagged him down for food and water. He was arrested while en route to the town of Hachita.

“We don’t yet have complete information on the Minutemen’s arrest,” said Ray Ybarra, Racial Justice Fellow for the ACLU of Texas, who has been monitoring the activities of the New Mexico Minutemen. “What we do know is that this individual was taken into custody, but that the charges eventually were dropped.

“If the report is corroborated, it would confirm our suspicions that the Minutemen are, at best, not well-supervised and, at worst, inclined to take the law into their own hands, including unlawfully detaining people who they think are undocumented immigrants.”

The Minutemen have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that states, “Minutemen do not verbally contact, physically gesture to or have any form of communications with suspected Illegal Aliens.”

The US Attorney’s office in Tucson is prosecuting Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss for transporting three migrants to a hospital on July 9th after finding them with symptoms of severe dehydration. Sellz and Strauss are volunteers for a humanitarian aid organization called No More Deaths.

Ybarra questioned why Sellz and Strauss would be more aggressively prosecuted than the Minutemen when they were performing as Good Samaritans. “Letting the Minutemen violate the law without accountability sends the signal that vigilante activity is welcome in New Mexico. This can lead to a very dangerous situation for migrants and New Mexican residents alike,” he said.