Borderline (page 2 of 5)

Ordinary Joes

The Minutemen are, by and large, ordinary Joes: businessmen, electricians, draftsmen. Many are ex-military; most are over 40, dressed in jeans and cowboy hats, jackets and gloves. In the dark, they sit on lawn chairs, trying to stay warm and awake. Those who can afford it hold night-vision equipment on their laps. Almost all of them bear sidearms in holsters.

The MCDC was founded by 45-year-old Chris Simcox, a former kindergarten teacher who left Los Angeles after 9/11, fearing it would be the next terrorist target, and moved to Tombstone in southern Arizona. There, he decided that U.S. patrol agents weren't doing nearly enough to secure the Mexican border, and that it was going to be up to citizens to do the job themselves or to shame the government into taking the problem seriously.

The youthful, athletic Simcox says his issue is not so much with illegal laborers. He says he's more concerned with all the other stuff that's coming across the border: drugs, criminals and, potentially, terrorists. "If the U.S. government can't stop poor Mexican women carrying babies," Simcox says, "it doesn't give me much confidence that they can stop well-funded, resourceful terrorists."

Last year, the Border Patrol apprehended some 1.2 million undocumented migrants and confiscated more than 1.2 million pounds of drugs. And in January, agents discovered a half-mile-long tunnel, the suspected work of an organized drug-smuggling group, that connected a warehouse in Tijuana with one near San Diego.

Darryl E. Griffen, the Border Patrol's San Diego Sector chief, points out that as drug- and human-trafficking cartels become more sophisticated, the likelihood that they'd be willing to move terrorists and their weapons across the border grows. "One avenue of approach for those wishing to do harm to this country would be across that Southwest border," he says. "This is on our minds every day." The number of arrests of illegal immigrants from countries "other than Mexico" was 155,000 in the last fiscal year (649 from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen), more than quadruple the number from 2002.

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