Some campus groups were infuriated that Chris Simcox, president and co-founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an organization they consider to be racist, was allowed to speak on campus last Thursday.

Much of the controversy stems from the group's mission, which is to secure the U.S. borders and coastal boundaries against unlawful and unauthorized entry of people, contraband and foreign military. Its members patrol the border while armed.

Critics say they are racially motivated.

Anna Pegler-Gordon, an assistant professor in James Madison College, said the group is not as much about illegal immigration as it is about racial hatred against Mexican immigrants.

"Their presence on the border is largely to cause confrontation," she said.

In the past five years, U.S. border patrol agents used Minuteman intelligence to apprehend more than 14,000 people trying to cross into the United States illegally and seize thousands of pounds of drugs, Simcox said.

The Minuteman group reported more than 1,200 unauthorized immigrants to border patrol in the past month, he said.

"Every government agency in the country relies on citizens," Simcox said in a phone interview Sunday. "All we do is report to them things that we feel are suspicious. There has never been one incident of someone taking the law into their own hands."

Simcox's group is composed of 85 chapters in 37 states. Citizens patrol the U.S. borders and report people they suspect of crossing into the country illegally.

While the national immigration debate tends to focus solely on the U.S.-Mexico border, most undocumented immigrants don't come across the border illegally, Pegler-Gordon said. Instead, they come legally with a tourist visa and stay past their allowed time.

In 2006, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that there were about 12 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., and as many as 45 percent of those entered the country with temporary visas.

After Thursday's protest, family community services sophomore Sierra Lopez called Simcox racist. She said MSU administrators should not have allowed hate speech on campus.

"You could call them border patrol with weapons," she said. "They claim they're ready to defend and fight at any second, but they have nothing to defend against because these people are coming with only the clothes on their back."

Simcox said his group has "rescued" 299 people who would have otherwise died in the desert. He finds it confusing and disappointing that people want to portray his discussions about how to solve a problem as "hate speech."

Simcox, who is on a speaking tour of eight colleges and universities, said the Minuteman group is trying to educate college students about the seriousness of the problems at the border.

"Their protests come out of ignorance and hate of a subject that they know very little about," he said.

Pegler-Gordon said no border patrol will ever be fully efficient, and there are better ways to halt illegal immigration.

"If you want to stop illegal immigration, the way to do that is to go to the workplaces and regulate people from working illegally," she said.

"By focusing on the border, you make it seem like the only people coming in illegally are Mexican immigrants."

She also said the Minuteman group takes the law into their own hands, making the U.S. border patrol's job more difficult.

"It would be like a group of armed citizens coming to MSU's campus and patrolling around, saying the MSU police aren't doing their job," she said.

"That's essentially what they are doing on the (U.S.-Mexico) border."