ACLU Defies Its Name

According to a WorldNetDaily article today, the national ACLU has suspended the entire 14-member board of the ACLU of New Mexico chapter.

What was the offense? One of the board members, Clifford Alford, is forming a Minuteman group in New Mexico. And this has upset the national ACLU.

WorldNetDaily states:

Gary Mitchell, a Ruidoso attorney and president of the ACLU board of directors, said the suspension of the southern chapter was a technical move to make sure the leader of the New Mexico Minutemen, a civilian border patrol group, no longer had authority to act or speak on behalf of the ACLU.

"We will not tolerate racism and vigilantism in the leadership structure of our organization,'' Mitchell told the Albuquerque Journal. "They are repugnant to the principles of civil liberties and the mission of the ACLU.''

Did the ACLU even ask their members who staked out the Minuteman project in Arizona whether or not those Minutemen behaved like racist vigilantes? Exactly which principles of civil liberties were violated in Arizona? And which principles do they expect the New Mexico chapter board member and his group to violate?

Alford has said he's not a hateful vigilante and that he would like to see immigration policy reformed. He has said that if the federal government allowed more immigrant workers to enter the country legally, many problems on the border would be solved. He reportedly scouted the New Mexico-Mexico border two weeks ago for sites to station his 42 volunteers to detect illegal immigrants sneaking into the country. His group plans to offer food, water and medical aid while reporting the illegal immigrants to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Alford sounds pretty "civil" to me. He is apparently a man who believes in the ACLU's guiding principles, or he wouldn't be a board member. That the national board can be so hostile to him so quickly is surprising. It emphasizes the ACLU's knee-jerk reactions to so many issues.

"We are not going to tolerate anyone depriving anyone of liberty without due process of law, not going to tolerate vigilante groups on the border without speaking out against them and without monitoring," Mitchell said.

So the ACLU believes that when the Minutemen hang out by the border and report the whereabouts of non-Americans who illegally cross the border, that constitutes depriving someone of liberty without due process of law. They seem to overlook the fact that when the US Border Patrol arrives to take the illegal border-crossers into custody, this actually is "due process of law." And the vast majority of these people crossing the border already had liberty in the countries they are trying to leave.

The dictionary defines "vigilante" as "One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one's own hands." What the Minutemen do is not vigilante activity. They leave the law enforcement to the proper law enforcement authorities.

Alford said the dust-up is the result of a lack of understanding about how the Border Watch group plans to operate. He said the ACLU didn't ask questions, "just attacked."

The ACLU, therefore, is mis-named. They do not support American interests at the border. They are not civil to people whose activities they oppose. They mis-apply the meaning of liberty to people who are not entitled to it in our country. And they are not very unified, since they are willing to suspend whole chapters of their organization without discussing the issues first.