Rancher Found Liable For Threatening Family

In October of 2004, Ronald Morales, his father Arturo, and his young daughters were hunting in southern Arizona. They happened to cross some state-owned land leased to a local rancher, and found themselves looking down the barrel of an AR-15 assault rifle. They said the rancher not only pointed the rifle at them, but also threatened them.

It seems that this particular rancher is an anti-immigrant activist, who claims to have captured as many as 10,000 illegal immigrants in the last 10 years. I guess he thought he was about to add to that total. But the Morales family were all United States citizens, and Morales was a Navy veteran. They claimed they were legally crossing the land owned by the state.

It is illegal to point a gun at someone and threaten them, except in the case of self-defense. But this was not a case of self-defense. It was a situation where an anti-immigrant activist was out hunting for illegal immigrants crossing the border. When he found the Morales family, he jumped to the wrong conclusion. He saw they were Hispanic, so he thought they must be illegal.

The Morales family was justifiably upset over the incident, and asked local authorities to file criminal charges against the rancher. They were just told they could not get a conviction in that area.

But the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Border Action Network saw the incident differently. They believed the rancher was a vigilante who abused the immigrants he detained. They filed a civil suit accusing the rancher of assault, false imprisonment, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

On Wednesday, a jury found the rancher liable on all counts, and ordered him to pay the family $98,000. Morales said, "We came to court and spoke the truth, and the jury heard that truth. Hopefully this sends a message that you can't point a gun at little kids -- or anybody for that matter -- and then threaten to shoot them."

Recently, in this country politicians have blown our immigrant situation out-of-proportion so they can get elected. They have succeeded in frightening many Americans. The result has been far too many incidents like this one, in which American citizens are abused simply because they are Hispanic.

We need to step back and take another look at our history and geography. Hispanics inhabitated our border states long before the Anglos moved in and took over. The border states have a long and valued tradition of a mixed culture. Here in Texas, Hispanics joined Anglos in the War for Texas Independence, and many were looked at as heroes. You just have to look at the names of many of our cities and counties to see this.

For our fellow citizens to now be abused, and treated as outsiders just because they're Hispanic is wrong. It must stop!