The Minutemen

For those of you not keeping up with just about everything under the sun, here we have a delightful story of a group (a large group, if the article gives any indication) of patriotic Americans who decided that the Border Patrol wasn't getting enough illegal aliens coming over the border in Arizona, so they decided to assemble and form a militia of their own and patrol one of the most porous sections.
They call themselves the Minuteman Project.
It has seemed from some of the press they have gotten that they are disrupting border agents from doing their job, and in the article below, it mentions a statement by the mayor of a border town saying, "All they accomplished was being a hindrance to the Border Patrol and creating international hard feelings."
The article also mentions several Border Higher ups making statements that sound like they don't want them there and that the cause for decreased arrests has been the presence of the Mexican army in that area. Which could be true.
It's also true that the Border Patrol local released this statement:

We want to make it clear because we've had a lot of questions about this.....we have not had one single complaint from a rank-and-file agent in this Sector about the Minutemen. Every report we've received indicates these people are very supportive of the rank-and-file agents, they're courteous, many of them are retired firefighters, cops, and other professionals, and they're not causing us any problems whatsoever. Reports of them causing "ground sensors" to go off are exaggerated because most of those are being set off by the ACLU sneaking around trying to find the Minutemen doing something wrong. The Minutemen have succeeded in shifting the bulk of the illegal alien traffic out of the Naco corridor. If only President Bush were so supportive of the rank-and-file agents... The Minutemen have made it very clear that they fully support rank-and-file Border Patrol agents. If only we had such support from the politicians we have to work for (aren't we really supposed to be working for the citizens of this country anyway?)

Nice. So the article from the LA Times is possibly being disingenuous about the Border Patrol quotes. And it also appears that the ACLU has been far more of a nuisance than the Minutemen have been.
Now it appears they are ceasing their vigilante patrols to pursue a more protestant phase of their existance, wherein the will protest businesses that use illegals and pushing for more government action.
This article got some quotes from Jim Gilchrist, one of the founders of the Minuteman Project, but also has lots of quotes from people who are antagonistic toward the Minutemen. This article is clearly against what they are doing. The types of quotes they use and the language clearly indicate that.
There's more of that too. Here's an undercover report of a reporter from KOLD in Tucson volunteering for the Project, with a hidden camera, revealing secrets of the patrols.

But the stories we get from our fellow volunteers when they don't know they're on camera give an uncensored version.

The article keeps saying things like that, but I didn't find anything REALLY scary about the group. Basically what's uncovered here is that the group tries really hard to control what information gets to the press (and from the tone of these two articles, I can see why), that some members have personal experience with illegal immigrants and didn't like what they experienced, and that controlling whackos who are not members of the Project running around out there can cause problems.