====================================================== FROM: [Name Deleted], executive director, [Organization deleted] DATE: 11:45 p.m. Friday 25apr03 ====================================================== ... ====================================================== SON KILLED BY ILLEGAL ALIENS, MICHIGAN FARMER/VETERAN REMINDS US WHY WE HAVE TO KEEP WORKING UNTIL IMMIGRATION CHANGES ====================================================== I spent a fair part of today here in this office talking with Bob Eggle, father of Kris Eggle, the young park ranger who was murdered by illegal aliens last summer along the Mexican border. I was profoundly moved and encouraged to keep up our Citizens Battle to bring sense to immigration policies and to return the rule of law and security to our U.S. borders. If you've ever thought about giving up the fight, you need to take a few minutes and let me share with you a little of Bob's and my time together. (I wish you could have been here.) Furthermore, I think Bob provides some excellent insight into what we face on the Mexican and Canadian borders and how we could restore them again to U.S. protection. ===================================================== AN INCREDIBLE REVELATION: PARTS OF U.S. LESS PROTECTED BY U.S. MILITARY THAN COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD ===================================================== When Bob Eggle walked into our office this morning, the first thing we noticed was his eye patch, hearing aids and some scars. Multiple surgeries over 30 years have given Bob back a rugged handsomeness that belie the fact that an enemy machine gun blew away part of his face in Vietnam. What amazes Bob is that he is alive today and that his son who became a park ranger to manage our nation's natural resources is dead because working along the Mexican border turned out to be more dangerous than his father's combat tour of Vietnam. Until his son began working in Arizona, Bob hadn't thought too much about immigration policies. It was an incredible revelation to him that while our U.S. military is strewn around the globe protecting other nations and controlling other nations' borders, people who live and work near our own borders with Canada and Mexico are outside U.S. military protection! ====================================================== A CHILLING FOREWARNING A YEAR AGO ====================================================== Bob noted to me that just over a year ago, he was in Arizona working as a volunteer alongside his son, repairing barriers on the Mexican border and outfitted with night gear doing surveillance after dark through the forest. The massive invasion of illegal aliens is destroying the ecosystems in parks all along our borders. To manage natural resources near the border is to have to contend with the masses of illegal aliens, Bob discovered. He felt that Kris's work as a park ranger at times felt very similar to his time in Southeast Asia. It was there a year ago that Kris asked his dad to protect his mother from knowledge that would cause too much worry -- but the fact was, Kris said, that his work as a park ranger was quite dangerous. A half-year later, he was dead. ====================================================== OUTSIDE THE PROTECTION OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT & MILITARY ====================================================== As Bob has learned from several tours now with American ranchers and others along the Mexican border, the people who live and work in that 60-mile zone along the border are essentially outside federal protection. Yes, there is a Border Patrol. But everybody knows it probably needs three or four times more personnel to actually protect residents of the area from the illegal crossers. And Bob feels that lack of effective congressional oversight has allowed the Border Patrol to create rules of engagement that have made it even less effective than its insufficient numbers lend it. The federal government provided essentially no barrier to the heavily armed aliens who crossed our border and killed Kris Eggle and who every day are a potential threat to all Americans who live and work along the border. We may have the mightiest military of all history, but it basically serves no function in protecting actual Americans in the actual United States along its borders. The federal government continues to maintain a policy that it would be unseemly to use our military to protect Americans from threats coming across the borders. I think any one of you would share this feeling of bafflement if you spent a day on the border. Just a year before Kris was killed, I was on the Arizona-Mexico border in the dark hours before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My comments to my border guides were precisely that I couldn't believe a country with a military strength such as ours could leave the citizens of the country so almost totally unprotected at its borders. You know how when civil unrest in a foreign country gets too bad our State Department issues a travel advisory that it can't vouch for the safety of Americans who stay in that country? Well, the State Department should issue precisely that warning for people along our nation's land borders. THESE ARE AREAS OUTSIDE THE EFFECTIVE PROTECTION OF OUR MILITARY. ====================================================== THIS IS ONE BORDER DEATH THAT WILL NOT GO UNRESPONDED ====================================================== The nation's news media essentially blacked out any coverage of Kris's murder -- as they have mostly ignored the loss of security and rule of law under which border Americans live daily. But his parents' relentless work ever since makes Kris's story more known and more potent by the month. Bonnie is the one who has spread the word by internet. She and Bob are incredible individuals. From their farm in north-central Michigan near Cadillac, they appear to have rejected bitterness or cries for revenge or diatribes against whole classes of people based on nationality of the murderers of their son. Instead, they have committed themselves to creating a truly selfless memorial to their son -- one that will benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans directly and immediately and that will benefit 290 million Americans for decades to come. >From the beginning, Bob and Bonnie have asked how an American citizen working inside the United States -- in a government job, at that -- caring for natural resources could be left so vulnerable to the attacks by citizens of other countries who are allowed to illegally cross the border almost at will. What happened to their son could happen to any American along our borders. In fact, hundreds of Americans each year are victims of violence at the hands of people illegally in this country. Ranchers report having to routinely call the Border Patrol about invasions that occur across their property and commonly having to wait two hours or more before anybody shows up to help them. Thus, the ranches must be armed camps as in Wild West days because of the undermanned federal border forces. Bob and Bonnie are determined that Members of Congress who make the decisions whether or not to leave our land borders outside of federal protection will have to be confronted with the story of their remarkable son. ====================================================== A QUESTION EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS SHOULD ANSWER ====================================================== I have a question to put to each Member of Congress: Do you believe the people who live and work along the border should be outside the physical protection of the government of the United States or should we re-establish security and the rule of law to those regions? If they favor restoring these border areas to the federal protectorate, they have to favor one of three proposals, it seems to me: 1. An immediate (over the next year) tripling or quadrupling of Border Patrol forces along both Candadian and Mexican borders with transferrence of the best of our military surveillance equipment (including sufficient fleet of helicopters) and training. 2. The deployment of small parts of our military to the border regions to provide long-term logistical, surveillance and support services to the Border Patrol (excluding actual police work involving apprehensions). The greatest benefit will probably be deterrence. A brief experiment at encamping the military in one part of Arizona a few years ago, almost dried up the flow, I was told when I visited there. 3. The temporary deployment of military until the Border Patrol has reached sufficient size and has been trained on the transferred military surveillance equipment. A refusal to back one of these options appears to be a decision to unofficially declare a Travel Advisory that Americans in the border regions are outside the ability of the U.S. government to ensure their safety! ====================================================== WOULD USING THE MILITARY MAKE AMERICANS FEEL LIKE THEY ARE LIVING IN A WAR ZONE ====================================================== I told Bob that I recently met with staffers of several House Members with top responsibility in matters of Homeland Security. All of them are big supporters of high Defense spending and agree that illegal immigration is totally out of hand. But when I ran down our list of changes that must be made and included providing military support to the Border Patrol, I was told that that was the one thing that was just off the table. The idea of using our military on our borders was just too controversial, I was told. That simply isn't a proper role for the military, I heard. Among other things, having our military stationed in rural areas along our borders would make the Americans living in those areas feel like they were living in a war zone. Bob Eggle doesn't shoot from the hip when he talks. He pauses before speaking and tries to keep his passions in check. But he had a firm reply to what I had heard. "Those people should go with me to the border and then they would understand that those ranchers and others already live in a war zone!" Bob said. When Kris Eggle got caught in what apparently was the crossfire of warring alien drug cartel armies on U.S. soil, HE WAS IN A WAR ZONE -- except the U.S. military had left the zone abandoned for easy use by other combattants. ====================================================== WE HAVE THE ABILITY BUT NOT THE WILL TO CONTROL OUR BORDERS ====================================================== Bob Eggle comes across to me as an humble man. He had left his family farm to be a career Army officer. The career ended after 5 years and a face full of bullets. But he has continued close relations with active and retired military ever since. He feels he knows a few things about military capabilities. His assessment after surveying the Mexican-U.S. border is that it should be relatively easy to control if the federal government wanted to do it. But the federal government would have to take a stand on the side of security instead of its long stance of siding with a minority of corporations who lobby for only loose border controls so they can have an abundant supply of illegal labor that allows the corporations to cut the wages and even jobs of American workers. It is important for everybody concerned with this issue to always understand that we have virtually open borders not because of our lack of ability to control them but because virtually open borders serve certain political interests that are willing to risk the lives of Americans like Kris Eggle in order to be able to make more money. I apologize if that statement sounds overly dramatic and perhaps overly cynical. But I defy you to give me another explanation as to why we leave the keys in the locks to the doors to this country and make only the most half-hearted of gestures at keeping illegal aliens from entering through the broken windows. Army officer Bob Eggle who has a close relative who had years of responsibility for surveillance along the German border with the Soviet Bloc says our military knows exactly how to control our borders because we do it on boundaries all over the world. "We should use abandoned military facilities along the border to train for this border surveillance work." And he said it only makes sense that when we train our military to perform these functions around the world that we have them train on our own borders so that the American people could get direct benefit from the training. Bob repeated that Arizona already is a war zone. He went back to the park "for some closure" on Kris's death. While there, a report came in that bodies of illegal crossers had been found. "I had done that kind of work in Vietnam, so I volunteered to go help pick up the remains. It is hard to believe this is happening in this country." The people who favor keeping our borders beyond the protection of our military are responsible for the deaths of the illegal crossers who are lulled into taking unacceptable risks by organized crime syndicates that have risen to make money off the opportunities created by the lawless border zones, Bob said. ====================================================== AND THEN THE PHOTOS ====================================================== At the end of our time together, Bob pulled out a small photo album. Bob atop a John Deere with a toddler-Kris in his lap. A child-Kris fishing. A teen-Kris apparently in an organized run alongside Bob. An emerging-Kris and Bob hunting in Colorado. A man-Kris home from his park ranger work, visiting the Michigan farm a month before his murder in the war-zone of Arizona. He was an exceptional woodsman, Bob said. He outshone his dad in the ability to read nature and live close to the land. Bob had signed up for military service, willing to give up his life for his country. His men thought he was dead after the machine gun encounter. But he returned to Michigan and with Bonnie raised Kris in what looked from the photo record like the picture of the American agrarian ideal in pure peace and loving co-existence with the American natural world. So Kris signed up to serve his country in managing its precious natural resources. Bob and Bonnie Eggle never dreamed their government would be so cavalier with the lives of its precious human resources -- that the military that they held so dear and that would send the Bob Eggles around the globe would be forbidden to protect its own citizens at home. ==================================================== LET'S NOT FORGET ==================================================== So many victims have gone before Kris Eggle. It is not that his story is more important than any of the others. But Bob and Bonnie seem to have the tenacity, the vision and their own particular personal credibility to refuse to allow what happened to their son to be swept under the rug and forgotten. And if they succeed, scores of other examples may be brought back to light and remembered as well. Bob and Bonnie don't want any other parents to go through what they did because somebody didn't care enough to fix a broken, dangerous sytem. The comfort that you and I can feel is that we were working on the fix long before the broken system killed Kris. We are not johnny-come-latelies on this. But this is a reminder that there are grave costs to our inability to move faster and to persuade tenfold more of our fellow citizens to work with us. And this is a reminder that a decision to drop out of the fight because it is too long or too discouraging is a fundamentally selFISH action. So, I thank you for all of your selfLESS work toward controlling illegal immigration and reducing overall immigration numbers. We are fighting to save our nation as we have loved it -- and we may also save some actual lives, both American and foreign. -- [NAME DELETED] P.S. Don't forget to keep up with your fax-sending. You should find a fax to send that refers specifically to Kris. -- WANT MORE (OR LESS) INFORMATION FROM [ORGANIZATION]? As a [Organization] subscriber, you will receive occasional emails about immigration-related opportunities. If you want to increase or reduce the frequency of these emails, click here and make the change at the bottom of your registration form: http://www.ORGANIZATION.com/user