Ruben Navarrette Jr., the well-known token media Hispanic, [Email him] has piece attacking the Minutemen Project as "vigilantes" and "yahoos." (He also pauses to attack Cesar Chavez for fighting illegal immigrant labor) He doesn't have an unkind word for the Mexican border jumpers, though,

The Border Patrol agrees. It told the Minutemen to stay home and leave the border monitoring to the professionals. Agents have enough to do without having to keep an eye on a thousand U.S. citizens to make sure they don't get out of control and hurt someone.

But the Minutemen are defiant and plan to go anyway.

That's what I don't get about these yahoos. Eager to play cop, they talk a good game about the importance of law and order. But, when law enforcement officers tell them to back off, they wipe their feet on the directive and press on. [Handling illegal immigration vexing but pass on vigilantes, By Ruben Navarrette Jr.]

Here's my question: Why does he think American citizens are supposed to be obedient to a directive from the Border Patrol?

The Minuteman Project wouldn't be there if the Border Patrol had succeeded in closing off the border.

The police in your town, wherever that is, may tell you not to resist robbers. This is an automatic bureaucratic response, but it's wrong, morally, as well as tactically. And of course, the thing that Navarrette, and United States Congressman Raul Grijalva, [D-Ariz.] seem to be most concerned about, is making sure that the illegals don't get hurt.

Well, the Minuteman Project has promised not to hurt any of them, but I don't see the basic problem. I would have thought that the reason the U.S. government gave the Border Patrol guns and less lethal weapons was that they were supposed to hurt the illegals—if that was what it took to protect the United States from invasion. It's a civil service job.