No One Is Illegal

Over 3,500 people
have died crossing
the US/Mexico
border since
1994

Over 1.5 Million
Mexican Farmers
have lost their
farms as a result
of NAFTA

Why We Remain Anonymous

By standing in solidarity with migrant people, we have been exposed to a tiny fraction of the violence they experience every day, and even that is enough to reinforce our choice to remain anonymous. Even though the Minutemen and their supporters, while not backed by the state, only have a tiny bit of the murderous power that the Border Patrol has, their intentions toward us are openly, plainly violent.

While the Minutemen claim publicly to be non-violent and not racist, we here at SWARM have received many emails with death threats and racist slurs. We may be publicly publishing those soon, to unmask those underneath the white hoods and their real intentions and opinions.

Nevertheless, this is nothing new. The Minutemen are a present day example of a long history of violence towards people of color and migrant people in this country, starting with the extermination of 12 million native american people, 98% of their population, moving on to the murder of 20-30 million Africans under slavery, and continuing in the present with the militarization of the border which kills people seeking a better life every day. Lets not forget the War of Northern Aggression, or the U.S. invasion of Mexico in which at least 25,000 Mexican people were murdered for the land the Minutemen patrol today.

We expected to receive some of these threats. During the sixties, when the civil rights movement was struggling for the respect of the inherent human rights of African-Americans, the Klu Klux Klan was out in force. Today, when people all over the world are struggling for the recognition of the inherent human rights and dignity of migrant people, violent armed groups are rising up to oppose those movements.

People have to understand that the civil rights movement didn't end in the sixties, and the grainy black and white footage of the street battles then could've been shot on the streets of the United States yesterday. We are still living in a time and place where every moment is a battleground in the struggle for human dignity and everyone must decide where they fit into that struggle.

"We will remain faceless... because we are everyone... because the world is upside down, because we are everywhere. By wearing masks we show that who we are is not as important as what we want"

- Text on a bandana at the FTAA protests in Quebec, where face bandanas were banned by the city government

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