Disclaimer:
I have pur posefully changed some of the names of the people
as well as descriptions of certain areas in my book — simply to
insure their safety — and at their request.
This book has true encounters in all of its content!
At NO time would I want to endanger any body’s life — the lives
of these true heroes are very important to me.

This is an old story, of course, so much so that most of us in this country take the illegal immigration invasion crisis for granted, very often with the lament that there is little or nothing that can be done. Politicians, if they comment at all, as a rule have no real plan to stem the flow of the illegal immigration invasion across our border, or to send back those that are already here illegally.

Besides costing US citizens jobs, illegal immigrants are also having a very negative impact on the healthcare industry. Because as a rule they have no health insurance, when they get sick or injured it is common for an illegal resident to seek medical care in a hospital emergency room (where they cannot be turned away) and then later not pay the bill. The unpaid tabs have run so high in various parts of the country that it has put hospitals out of business, with the end result that many residents in poorer neighborhoods around the country now have to travel even further to seek emergency medical care.

It is early evening in the Arizona desert, just outside of Tombstone. I,
along with other volunteers of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps
(MCDC), including cofounder Chris Simcox, sit on lawn chairs and
wait for the inevitable appearance of the latest traffic of illegal aliens.
It doesn’t take long. As darkness grows, we hear the rustling in the
distance, a trace of voices, and then the footsteps. In the next couple
of minutes they almost run into us head long, barely visible in the
dark. We turn on our flash lights and they are stunned.
None of us exchange any words. Their next moves seem almost cho -
reographed, as though they had rehearsed them in advance in case
this happened. As though instructed by an invisible director, they all
sit on the ground at once, their hands folded in front of them.

My friend the ranch owner was in the kitchen when he heard voices
outside. He looked out side and there they were very plain to see,
men in black helmets and armored vests with automatic weapons,
who marched across the ranch. As they got closer, he wondered if
they might not be Border Patrol, and thought perhaps that he had to
be mistaken about what he thought he was seeing.
However, as they got even closer, there was no mistaking what he
plainly saw and heard. As they passed the barn and got closer to the
house, they were only a couple hundred feet away. He could plainly
hear the men speak in a language he had not heard before. While my
friend doesn’t speak the language, he was able to recognize it quite
well from his travels years before as a soldier in the Middle East.

 2009 by Carmen Mercer  ISBN 978-0-615-29928-0