They’ve promised to sponsor ice cream socials, plan happy hours, organize hayrides, and break up day laborer sites around the region. Yes, the Minuteman Project has arrived in Virginia.

NBC 4 is reporting that members of the organization — the same folks that put together the controversial civil defense groups along the U.S.-Mexico border — are setting up shop in the region, and they look to identify illegal immigrants and the contractors that hire them.

In a testy introductory meeting in Herndon yesterday, Minuteman organizers announced their not-too-unexpected opposition to the many sites where day laborers — primarily Hispanic men, many in the country illegally — gather to find work on construction or landscaping crews. In August the Herndon Town Council endorsed the construction of a $175,000 site where day laborers could gather, but the plans have been hampered but legal challenges and controversy. Neighborhood activists in Gaithersburg, Maryland, recently derailed plans for a similar day-labor center that had been proposed by Montgomery County officials. Day laborer centers already exist in Silver Spring and in Wheaton. The Minuteman Project plans on focusing its efforts on Herndon.

The issue of day laborer centers has set of furious debates between those who oppose using tax funds to benefit illegal immigrants seeking work and those who see the sites as a way to move the laborers away from their informal gathering sites in front of local businesses, primarily 7-Eleven’s.

There are roughly 103,000 illegal immigrants in Virginia and 126,000 in Maryland, the majority of those coming from Latin America.