Click to watch video

We’ve seen it here in Houston: Violence by racists against Hispanics.

Is it being fueled in part by the national debate over immigration?

11 News spoke with those on the front lines of the immigration issue about just who’s protecting the rights of Americans and the rights of those who want to live here.

Curtis Collier is preparing to patrol the Texas border.

“We’re going to be working a covert operation where we’ll actually be hiding along the border very close to the water line,” Collier said.

Collier does this on his own time; his day job near Houston is in pest control.    

He and hundreds of others who’ve joined his and similar groups say they believe illegal immigrants are a threat that should be obvious to any American.

“They can see the crime that they bring with them, they can see the disease they bring with them,” he said. “More important, we’re trying to show the threat they bring with them of worldwide terrorism.”

But while those who belong to groups, such as U.S. Border Watch and the Minuteman Project, say they’re defending America one man is highly suspicious of their motives and ideology.

“The major hate groups today are some of these border groups,” Morris Dees said. “Some of the most insidious hate groups today are those up and down the border from California through Texas.”

Dees is a liberal civil rights activist with rock star status.

11 News caught up with him in Austin speaking at the University of Texas School of Law.

“They call themselves so-called ‘patriots,’ but they’re really just wannabe soldiers walking around with camouflage on,” Dees said.

Dees made his name suing and sometimes bankrupting Ku Klux Klan groups.

Two years ago, he was involved in a suit against the Texas border patrol group Ranch Rescue on behalf of two immigrants who allegedly were pistol-whipped by a member.

“Very successful law suit,” Dees said. “We even took the ranch away from the border group that had a training camp down there.”

Dees and others who keep track of so-called hate groups say the groups have multiplied by the hundreds in the last few years. An increase in activity that they say parallels the growing intensity of the immigration debate.

As immigrants marched in Houston, groups including the Klan in Texas posted warnings on their Web sites that a quote “brown flood” of Mexicans was threatening to “take over” the United States.

“We look at their rallies and who attend their rallies,” Dena Marks said.

Marks is with the Houston Anti-Defamation League.

“Within the last year, we’ve noticed a rise in numbers,” she said. “They’re planning a rally coming up in Lufkin.”

The concern is that the rhetoric has encouraged actual violence against Latinos.

The near-fatal beating and sodomizing of a Hispanic teenager by a skinhead in Spring last year is cited nationally as an example.

U.S. Border Watch’s Curtis Collier says hold on.

“Not no way related to any race group in any way,” he said.

He said just being for more border enforcement isn’t racist.

He does agree though that some groups, but not his, are using immigration to stir hatred.

“Bring themselves back to the forefront so they can survive, because they’re dying in this country because Americans won’t tolerate racism in this country,” Morris said.

Many won’t, but for some what’s happening on the border may be an excuse for the worst of kind of intolerance.