Renee Downing ("Border Out of Conrrol," Insight section, May 8) is a fraud who romanticizes the useless by belittling the responsible.

Her pejorative, dismissive reference to "a few vigilantes" of the Minuteman Project's volunteers is revealing. Total in-the-field selfless patriotic men and women volunteers serving on the month-long Arizona border watch numbered 856, not counting the many thousands who wanted to serve but who could not be accommodated.

Downing rightly decries the "suffering, death [and] destruction" that is one of the most uncivilized, chaotic, lawless border regions in the world. But while Downing and her inert fellow hand wringers were ordering lunch in, the 23-mile border section successfully monitored by Minuteman Project volunteers stopped those nightmares cold for the month of April.

It's all too telling that Downing ridicules that miracle in this desert while she lauds President Bush's "not-an-amnesty" mega amnesty proposal. The month immediately following the announcement of that proposal (that polls show nobody wants) saw a 30-percent spike in illegal crossings over the previous year's month, with an understood corresponding spike in the nightmares.

Minuteman-like civilian border patrols were carried out during World War II. My father, uncles and grandfather, then citizen residents of the border town of Bisbee, Ariz., were patrol members. There was no continental invasion then, but there is now, with millions from all over the world pouring across the border, including convicted murders, rapists, child predators, people from terror-sponsoring countries, heavily armed international drug traffickers, along with kidnapped women and children smuggled in and headed for sex-slave dens in the United States.

In striking contrast to the responsible good volunteers of the Minuteman Project she disparages, Downing lists herself among the hypocritical, useless existential brooders who "just want the whole mess to go away."

Re: "Mayor defends foreigner policy," May 19 news story.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper finally emerged from his bunker of silence, apparently after consulting only with others who deny the city has a sanctuary policy. We can only conclude that he will not then be consulting with his citizen constituents (as we respectfully demanded he do in our letter to him on May 16) on this public policy issue of such profound importance, public interest and implications.

And like his predecessor, Wellington Webb, Hickenlooper seems intent on governing by fiat. With a wave of his imperious hand, he forces onto the citizens of Denver the continuation of sanctuary policies and practices that put those citizens in jeopardy and hold them to a higher legal standard than illegal aliens are held to.

We are told Hickenlooper has political ambitions that go far beyond his being just a one-term Denver mayor. To that we say, "Remember Sanctuarygate!" And do expect to see that slogan on car bumpers, billboards and letters to the editor in the future.