By Sylvia Maria Gross
Kansas City, MO – A couple of months ago, we reported on the expansion of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in Kansas and Missouri. The Minuteman Project is a California-based organization that organizes volunteers to patrol the US border with Mexico. In non-border states, local chapters will try to identify places where they think illegal immigrants live and work, and then they alert authorities. The Minutemen say they are just trying enforce laws that the US government is ignoring. But Devin Burghart of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community in Chicago says that the patrols remind him of militias organized by the Ku Klux Klan. Burghart was in town in October to speak with local immigrants rights advocates. He said that he's been following the Minuteman Project since it was founded in 2003.