Word: hanigan
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Some 250 miles east of where the party of illegal immigrants died in the desert, Douglas was the site of an episode that reflects another bitter and brutal aspect of the problems stemming from aliens crossing the border. Two ranching brothers-Patrick Hanigan, 26, and Thomas Hanigan, 23-were on trial last week in federal court in Tucson, charged with beating and robbing three Mexican aliens in 1976. The case has divided the city of Douglas and inflamed passions on both sides of the border. Many ranchers of Anglo-Saxon descent-the "Anglos"-insist that the Hanigans are being unfairly...
...Hanigan case began on a hot August morning in 1976, when three Mexicans set out from Agua Prieta to seek work in Arizona. The trio-Manuel Garcia, Bernabe Herrera and Eleazar Ruelas-slipped across the border and soon stopped to refill their water jug on land leased by the Hanigans. A man, later identified by the Mexicans as Thomas Hanigan, drove by in a pickup truck and yelled out, "Hey, wetbacks, where are you going? Are you going to steal or rob?" Hanigan allegedly forced the Mexicans into his truck at gunpoint and then summoned his father George...
...weeks later the Hanigans were indicted on charges of kidnaping, robbery and assault. The news stunned Douglas. The Hanigans were one of the area's most prominent families. Besides his cattle ranch, George Hanigan owned a string of Dairy Queen stores throughout the state. "They were very good people, never in trouble," says Dolores Zavala, a Mexican American who runs a grocery in Douglas...
...George Hanigan never lived to stand trial; he died of a heart attack in March 1977. The Hanigan sons were tried in a county court in October 1977; the all-white jury found them not guilty. The outcome incensed Mexican Americans and Mexicans alike. "Racist, frontier justice," charged Raul Grijalva, a Tucson school district board member. In Mexico, ballads lamented the fate of the aliens, and President José López Portillo criticized the outcome. "There was a pretty hot feeling," George Patterson, a civil engineer in Douglas, told TIME Correspondent Diana Coutu. "People were afraid to cross...
...coalition of Mexican-American groups pressed the U.S. Justice Department to bring federal charges against the Hanigans. At first, Government officials refused, contending that the civil rights statutes did not protect illegal aliens. The decision so angered Antonio Bustamante, a Douglas native studying at the Antioch College of Law in Washington, D.C., that he started a campaign resulting in a federal indictment of the Hanigan brothers for violating the Hobbs Act, which prohibits interference in interstate commerce. By torturing the Mexicans, reasons the indictment, the Hanigans prevented the aliens from working in the U.S. The case marks the first time...