Fox News’ Trace Gallagher put forth such a sanitized picture of immigration vigilante Jim Gilchrist last week that it would be funny if Gilchrist didn’t pose a real threat to the safety of both the Border Patrol and others. Gallagher seemed to care nothing about that threat.
Gallagher’s report was part of an hour-long special on The Kelly File called “Showdown at the Border.” It just happened to coincide with Obama's announcement that he intends to take action on immigration reform despite GOP objections. In this segment, Gallagher gave positive spin to Gilchrist’s planned return to border vigilantism.
It's hard to know why anyone – even a Fox News reporter – would paint Gallagher as anything but a dangerous sleazeball. Gilchrist, you may recall, was part of the 2005 vigilante border watch group, the Minutemen, founded with Chris Simcox. In July,Southern Poverty Law Center explains what happened since then:
“The entire effort splintered apart and both Gilchrist and Simcox fell under the shadow of claims of mismanagement and misappropriation of funds.
Even more significantly, the border watch movement became a major magnet for some of the most vicious and violent elements of the far right, including neo-Nazis and various white supremacists who participated in the initial April 2005 effort in Arizona.
More from The SPLC:
(M)ultiple murder charges (were) filed against onetime Minuteman leader Shawna Forde, a close associate of Jim Gilchrist who on May 30, 2009, led a gang of killers into the rural home of an Arizona family and proceeded to murder a 9-year-old girl named Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul “Junior” Flores. They also shot the girl’s mother, a 30-year-old woman named Gina Gonzalez, who eventually drove them from her home in a hail of gunfire, and wound up providing the testimony that put Forde and her chief co-conspirator, Jason Eugene Bush, on Arizona’s Death Row.
The “criminal charges” against co-founder Simcox are only somewhat less disturbing: He is currently in the Maricopa County Jail, awaiting trial (now scheduled for September) on three counts of child molestation.
In September, Gilchrist wished he could take up arms against the U.S. government to stop it from using immigration to impose “one-party communism.” He also theorized about an “executive order that we will all now obey Sharia law.”
But on The Kelly File, Gallagher and host Martha MacCallum painted Gilchrist as a good Samaritan just trying to help his country.
In her introduction, MacCallum said that politicians in Washington “might do well to keep an eye on what some average Americans are doing along the border.”
Enter Gallagher. He reported:
The same man who helped organize the Minutemen 10 years ago is now actively recruiting some 3,500 armed volunteers to help patrol what he calls the poorous areas between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas.
…The volunteers are already said to be setting up camps and training, though they wouldn’t allow themselves to be videotaped. They will be armed. But the plan is for them to be non-aggressive, to simply support federal agents who are already patrolling the border.
Except it turns out the Border Patrol doesn’t want their help. Gallagher noted that the Border Patrol said “any private group” could have “disastrous personal and public safety consequences.” Even one of Fox’s favorite immigrant haters, Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, warned of the “chaos” the militias can cause.
But after reading the Border Patrol’s objections, Gallagher added this sympathetic ending:
But Jim Gilchrist says someone has to step up and do what the government has refused to do, saying, “Our federal, state and community governments have failed to address and fix this calamity. It is once again time to bring unprecedented national awareness to this decades long illegal alien crisis.
So far this year, nearly 130,000 unaccompanied minors and families have crossed our southern border illegally.
Watch it below, from the November 7, The Kelly File. Also below is a Daily Show interview with Gilchrist that nails him with the kind of reporting that makes Gallagher look like the joker.