Scrimmage on the Border

Tancredo turned illegal immigration into a national-security issue. He spread word that Islamic prayer rugs and a diary written in Arabic had been found in the border scrubland. "Can anybody explain to me why we shouldn’t be paranoid?" he asked a reporter for Fox News. He began appearing regularly on conservative talk radio, and with Lou Dobbs on CNN. He complained about open borders to the Washington Times editorial board, and said that "the blood of the people killed" by a second terrorist attack would be on the hands of President Bush and Congress. That prompted a phone call from Bush adviser Karl Rove, one so rife with vulgarity and vitriol that Tancredo, who was driving to work at the time, had to pull his car to the side of the road. Rove called him a "traitor to the president" and told him never to "darken the doorstep of this White House." Unbowed, Tancredo went on to raise money last year to defeat several House Republicans he considered soft on immigration, earning the ire of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. "I will never be a chairman of any committee around here," Tancredo said, cracking a smile. "I will never be in the ‘in’ crowd."

But Tancredo did not come to Washington to climb the rungs of power. He came to draw the battle lines in a clash of cultures. "You have to understand there is a bigger issue here," he told me, finding his rhetorical rhythm. "Who are we? Do we have an understanding of what it means to be an American, even if we are Hispanic or Italian or Jewish or black or white or Hungarian by ancestry? Is there something we can all hang on to? Are there things that will bind us together as Americans?" He continued into a monologue about the identity crisis in America, the "cult of multiculturalism," schoolkids ashamed to love their country, and textbooks that say Christopher Columbus "destroyed paradise." Tancredo believes that many immigrants today, unlike his grandparents, who came over from Italy, no longer feel the need to assimilate. "You have, at least, divided loyalties," he said.

Republican leaders strictly forbade such sentiments during last year’s presidential campaign, when both candidates spoke Spanish on the stump to appeal to Latino voters. There was a "bite-your-lip caucus" when it came to immigration, Tancredo said. "As of November 2, it dissolved." Just weeks after the polls closed, he led a coterie of insurgent Republicans in a revolt against the White House. They delayed passage of the intelligence reform bill because it failed to include a provision called Real ID, which would make it far more difficult for illegal immigrants to get state driver’s licenses. In February, nearly two-thirds of the House, including 42 Democrats, voted for the Real ID measure, which was later endorsed by the Senate and signed by the president. This is only the beginning of what Tancredo hopes will be a series of legislative victories this year. He plans to derail a bipartisan effort, supported by the president, that would allow illegal immigrants to find legal employment in the U.S. He’s reintroducing a bill that would suspend legal work visas, increase fines for employers who hire illegal immigrants, and deploy the military to protect the borders. He is also helping groups in seven states push new initiatives or laws that would deny government services to illegal immigrants. Last fall Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a ballot initiative nicknamed "Protect Arizona Now," which requires government workers to report undocumented residents who seek out government aid. The law garnered 56 percent of the vote, including, according to one exit poll, more than 40 percent of the state’s Latino voters.

Riding the elevator back up to his office, Espinosa talked about the popular support for Tancredo’s views. Like his boss, he cast the nation’s current political leaders as the only thing standing in the way of a historically unprecedented crackdown on immigration. "Now you have a lame duck," Espinosa said, referring to President Bush. "Rove is probably going to go the way of any strategist. He will host a TV show."

THE MINUTEMEN set up their operational headquarters in the run-down dormitories of the Miracle Valley Bible College, a faded compound near Hereford built in the late 1950s by the Reverend Asa Alonzo Allen, a faith healer famous for exorcising demons before tent crowds of 20,000 until he died of alcoholism at the age of 59. At the front gate, an armed guard screened cars. Inside was a communications center, equipped with ham radios and topographic maps of well-known immigration trails. For security, all registered Minutemen wore orange badges. The men slept four to a room. A surplus of American flags festooned the front lawn.

Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant, seemed thrilled by the layout and its trappings. He’d served as a Marine outside of Khe Sanh during Vietnam, and took easily to the role of commanding general, always talking up the enemy and warning of possible ambushes. He leaked rumors to the conservative press, claiming that a Latin American gang called Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, was planning to attack his volunteers. During a desert patrol one day, he received a tip from an informant he would not identify suggesting an imminent armed assault from across the wire. "Do whatever you want with that," he told a skeptical Los Angeles Times reporter between drags of a cigarette. "I didn’t personally gather this info. It was couriered to us, and that means it’s like top priority." He wore a bright floral shirt, a crumpled straw cowboy hat, and what appeared to be a brand-new military equipment belt, to which he affixed his cellular phone and water bottles. When volunteers came to him with concerns that their walkie-talkies were being intentionally jammed by human smugglers across the border, he announced, with some elation, "This has been like a real war."

Like many Minuteman volunteers, Gilchrist hails from Southern California, a land adrift in a demographic sea change. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of Latino residents there is set to increase by nearly two-thirds, and the number of Asian residents will increase by 40 percent. Once-lily-white suburbs in Orange County, where Gilchrist lives, will soon count whites as a minority. He says he doesn’t mind the diversity of races, but he cannot tolerate the diversity of cultures. "I saw the country change literally overnight into a foreign country," he told me over a hamburger at the Trading Post Diner on Route 92. "The Fourth of July was not being celebrated, but Cinco de Mayo was. All the billboards would be in foreign languages. It’s not just Spanish. It’s Korean. I saw the nation being segregated."

Gilchrist’s co-organizer, Chris Simcox, worked as an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles until 2001, when he moved to Tombstone and founded an armed border patrol called Civil Homeland Defense. "Where are all these gangs coming from, who don’t speak English?" he remembered thinking after he took a job teaching in South Central in the late 1990s. "We have people that came to this country saying, Your laws mean nothing, your citizenship means nothing." Around the same time, former Southern California resident Glenn Spencer, a former radio talk show host, founded American Border Patrol at the base of the Huachuca Mountains, where he launched regular patrols, some of which he broadcast in infrared video on the Internet. Another Los Angeles native, Casey Nethercott, recently bought a ranch that abuts the border and founded the Arizona Guard, a militia that he says is prepared to fight the Mexican army if the U.S. government is not.

They came to Arizona because it has all the action. In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration focused its border resources around El Paso and San Diego. The efforts succeeded in pushing migrants to the less populated Arizona desert. In 1993, about 93,000 Border Patrol detentions occurred south of Tucson. Last year, agents caught nearly 500,000 people there. "We’ve always had people crossing the borders illegally," says Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever. "But we didn’t see these kind of numbers."

Many locals take the torrent in stride. They sleep with their screen doors locked and their front doors open, and if someone comes knocking late at night, searching for food, water, or a telephone, they try to help out. "I got to the point where I was buying extra bread and peanut butter for those people," said Eric Nelson, who was rolling his own cigarettes at the Trading Post. Crime against locals is extremely rare, though in January 2004, three illegals attacked Hereford resident Sandy Graham as she warmed up her Chevy Suburban to drive her 14-year-old daughter to school. The men, who had been hiding in the mesquite, stabbed Sandy with a pen, kicked her daughter, and sped away in the car. They were promptly caught and arrested, but at least one resident, Cindy Kolb, began strapping a .38 to her ankle before driving her seven-year-old to the bus stop.

Local newspaper columnist Jim Dwyer calls the anti-immigrant activists "crusading carpetbaggers," and the governments of Douglas, Tombstone, and Cochise County have passed resolutions condemning civilian patrols. Undaunted, Simcox worked without sleep for much of the first week of the Minuteman Project, cautioning his volunteers to act responsibly on the border, to phone Border Patrol, and to not engage the migrants. He wore a bulletproof vest and kept an armed guard at his side. Because he was on probation for carrying a pistol into a nearby national park, he can no longer pack his own weapon. "My family is very concerned with me taking on a multimillion-dollar crime syndicate," Simcox said after finishing breakfast one morning in a computer repair shop next to the Trading Post, a building that housed a post office until 1985, when someone placed a stick of dynamite in the outgoing mailbox. "It’s the government of Mexico in bed with the government of the United States that has created a subculture of human smuggling and drug smuggling and gangsters, and it’s a mess. This border is worth a billion dollars of business at least." Since he began his work, he said, his group has alerted Border Patrol to nearly 5,000 illegal migrants in the desert, and rescued 158 people in need of food or water. Later that day, he had an interview scheduled on The O’Reilly Factor, which would be broadcast from a relay truck parked on the border.

Locals like Herb Linn would just as soon Simcox had stayed in Los Angeles. At Johnny Ringo’s, a biker bar in Tombstone named after the gunfighter who shot a man in 1879 for refusing a shot of whiskey, Linn stopped pouring drinks when I mentioned Simcox. "He’s a self-serving son of a bitch who wants his 15 minutes of fame," said the barkeep, a former city councilor. "If the Minutemen succeed in sealing the border, are they going to spend as much time picking the crops? I don’t want to pay five bucks for a can of string beans."

JAMES "BUTCH" PERI, owner of one of the largest onion farms in Nevada, knows all about the costs and benefits of migrant labor. He pays legal immigrants around $8 an hour to stoop and shovel onions into 90-pound burlap bags, a job for which he says there are no U.S.-born applicants. At a recent meeting of Tancredo’s Immigration Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill, Peri stood before a half-dozen congressional staffers making the case that U.S. agriculture depends on Mexico. Americans, he said, have become spoiled. "It belittles them to pull weeds in a lawn. Kids don’t wash cars anymore. They don’t mow lawns."

Peri, an amiable salesman with slicked-back hair, has been coming to Capitol Hill since the mid-1980s to make the case for temporary migrant-worker programs. He’s not alone. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 257 companies, employing more than 1,000 lobbyists, worked on immigration issues in 2003. As the owner of Nevada High Desert Onions, Peri estimates that he has spent $280,000 coming to Capitol Hill. The Immigration Reform Caucus was just another stop on his rounds. No one, not even the White House, now ignores the group.

"As a Republican, I think there is room in this party for some disagreement," said Jacob Monty, a Texas supporter of President Bush who said he had been sent to speak with the caucus as an informal White House envoy. "The problem is there. It’s a homeland-security problem. It’s an economic problem."