Eye of the Storm

Your first checkpoint will be just north of Tombstone, on a grinding
slope where Border Patrol agents break their chitchat to give you a
bored once-over and nod you past. Folks aren’t exactly clamoring to
smuggle drugs or illegal immigrants southbound into Cochise
County these days.

Just beyond that checkpoint, as the desert hardens into flatland and
bluff, you’ll sense the land clench around you. This is not your
imagination. Over the past 20 years, U.S. Border Patrol strategies have
concentrated illegal cross-border traffic into Southern Arizona, and
Cochise County in particular.

In one sense, you could call this strategy pure genius: A few years
back, agents in the border town of Douglas detained no fewer than
25,649 illegal immigrants—just in the month of March. “That’s one
of the highest one-month records we’ve seen in Douglas ever,” Border
Patrol spokesman Rob Daniels told the Douglas Dispatch.

Unfortunately, such interceptive wizardry has also wreaked sheer
havoc on Cochise County, draining its budgets, trampling its landscape,
implanting a quasi-police state and fraying a rural social fabric that
reaches back to frontier days: If this far-flung jurisdiction’s
diversity of inhabitants—Hispanic, Anglo, Mormon, Catholic,
miner, rancher and peon—did not always love one another, at least
they generally got along.

However, where Cochise County once hosted righteous posses galloping
after horse thieves, it now boasts bitter vigilantes hunting after
Mexicans. And where a handful of sheriff’s deputies once kept tabs on
folks they mostly already knew, the desert is now overrun with federal
agents who transfer in and transfer out. Just another podunk posting,
on the way to bigger and better things.

For modern Cochise County, that translates into nearly every square
inch of desert being scrutinized by some national apparatus or another,
from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA), from the FBI to Customs and Border Protection.

All said, the sheer intensity of this place leaves little time for
pretense. It gnaws away the niceties, strips flesh from bone and
affects everyone who comes here to sift the demon from the saint.

The year was 2004, the month was July, and a drowsy rain had
migrated in from the coast. By midmorning, it had softened the desert,
muffling the squawks of huge ravens that stomped like angry old men
across rutted country roads. One of those roads, muddy and sullen,
peeled off the highway east of Douglas and aimed due south toward the
border. But it never quite reached Mexico, coming within a quarter-mile
of the border.

Instead, the road, some four car-lengths wide in spots, intersected
others in what became a wildcat patchwork of poorly conceived,
haphazardly maintained arteries. These arteries were, in turn, lined by
scruffy one-acre lots, each occupied by a manufactured home in some
state of disrepair—shingles askew here, cardboard-draped windows
there—or by trailer homes hunched over rickety wooden steps, if
they had any steps at all.

The homes petered out a half-mile later, but the road continued onto
a well-posted private ranch, where another soggy turn led to a skinny
dirt track. At the end of that track, a small motor home sat
perpendicular to the road. Next to it, a white awning sheltered lawn
chairs, a banquet table filled with chips and cheese, and a stout
percolating coffee pot.

I’d been under that awning since midmorning, and the rain never
lifted. Such inclemency had quite obviously darkened spirits at this
“Arks of the Covenant” camp, set up by a church-based group called No
More Deaths. The camp was stocked with food, water and shade for
illegal immigrants at loose ends in the desert. But it was not
well-prepared for a sense of uselessness; there had been no visitors,
no hungry travelers yearning for direction and a sandwich to chew
on.

Father Bob Carney rose from his seat and poured another cup of
coffee. On this damp morning, he seemed a bit sodden himself. He’d
already been here since yesterday. He was no spring chicken, and stiff
folding cots make for long nights.

The acrid scent of boiling coffee wafted from a percolator, and
Carney rose to pour another cup. He dug a thumb into his sore hip,
sipping and peering out at tangled plains of ocotillo and cholla
cactus, all cast in hazy blue-green by a cloud-filtered sun. It is a
beautiful land, true, but one blemished by acrimony; the rancher
graciously offering this spot has done so quietly, in private.
Humanitarian assistance is not universally applauded in these
parts.

All of these people—a few camp stalwarts like Carney and a
stream of short-timers—had driven out here day after day, and now
they were getting muggy en masse. It was not comfortable, or pleasant.
If no one saw their flag, it could even prove futile.

Sighing, Father Bob eased himself back into the chair.

The year was 2009. The month was February, and Roger Barnett sat
flanked by lawyers in a downtown Tucson courtroom. This was not a
particularly novel setting for the controversial Cochise County
rancher, who has made a habit of dressing in paramilitary gear and
patrolling his 22,000-acre Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas. Along with
his brothers and sometimes his wife, Barbara, Roger Barnett claims to
have detained more than 10,000 illegal immigrants, often at
gunpoint.

Not surprisingly, others have made a habit of taking Roger Barnett
to court. He’s been sued for aiming a weapon at 16 illegal immigrants
and setting dogs upon them. Another time, he was accused of threatening
two hunters and their kids with an assault rifle, and barraging them
with racial slurs. A jury awarded those plaintiffs damages totaling
$98,750.

In February, six illegal aliens were suing Barnett on a host of
issues, from civil rights violations and assault to false imprisonment
and the infliction of emotional distress. The counts stemmed from a
March 2004 incident when Barnett confronted the group as they were
crossing his land. He allegedly unleashed the routine roster of Mexican
slurs upon them, and then unleashed his busy dog.

But in this courtroom, he just sits at a long table, five years and
a couple of hundred miles from that day. Here, he’s just another
set-jaw, aging man in a tweed, surrounded by suits.

Still, it can’t be forgotten that Roger Barnett (who did not return
phone calls for this story)enjoys many devotees outside this courtroom.
He has, after all, been the prime inspiration for Cochise County’s
rather venomous vigilante movement—a fact noted by Mark Potok, of
the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

“The Barnetts, probably more than any people in this country, are
responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists,” Potok told
The New York Times in 2006. “They were the recipients of so much
press coverage, and they kept boasting, and it was out of those boasts
that the modern vigilante movement sprang up.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Reform Party candidate Pat
Buchanan made a boisterous swing through Southeastern Arizona. For an
indignant conservative hoping to capitalize on illegal immigration,
Cochise County’s 6,219 square miles of well-traveled desert made the
perfect foil: In just the first three weeks of 2000, agents had
apprehended nearly 17,000 illegal immigrants in the Douglas area.

When Buchanan arrived in Douglas, he was sure to note all the
footprints crossing back and forth along the border fence. This was a
play to the gathered media, of course, and to Cochise County Concerned
Citizens, a group founded by a clutch of ranchers outraged by illicit
traffic on their land.

Buchanan’s audience was not disappointed. He strolled into Mexico
and then strolled back. “This wide-open border and all these tracks
show that the Clinton-Gore administration doesn’t give a hoot about
protecting our borders against a wholesale invasion of America,” he
said.

The candidate glad-handed lots of folks on that trip. But he did not
meet with Ray Borane, who was then mayor of Douglas. Not that Borane
seemed surprised by this; he was well-versed in how the game was
played, having already served as Arizona’s deputy state superintendent
of public instruction, president of the Arizona State Board of
Education, and the go-to guy for plenty of politicos seeking insight
about the border.

But Borane was also a Douglas hometown boy who remembered how his
community once shared an easy bond with neighboring Agua Prieta,
Sonora. Now this carpetbagger was coming down to fan flames, just for a
bit of political mileage. The Daily Dispatch asked Borane to
opine on Buchanan’s visit. “He’s not a policymaker or an adviser,” the
mayor said. “He’s not in a position to do anything. On immigration and
border issues, he and I are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. He’s
against almost everything we try to do in this community to nurture our
relationships with our neighbors.”

Borane’s candidness ruffled a few feathers, and it wasn’t the first
time. He’d already raised plenty of hackles in 1999 by dispatching
letters to the editor to wealthy enclaves around the country, in which
he excoriated the rich for exploiting the undocumented as cheap
domestic help. They are guilty, Borane argued, of making Douglas a
thoroughfare of illicit traffic and a hub for vigilantes.

“Those of you who congratulate yourselves on your supposed great
humanitarian compassion as you wink at the law and hire illegal
aliens,” he wrote, “please know that in the last month, five aliens
died near our border areas from exposure, as many more are destined to,
because of you.”

A decade later, those ferocious times seem to have permanently
altered the social dynamic. Some suggest that Cochise County’s poorer
Hispanics—the newly immigrated in particular—have become
more insular and less visible, to avoid suspicion. The effects have
also reached into the immigration-rights groups, which keep a
noticeably lower profile than their Pima County counterparts.

To the Rev. Robin Hoover, that’s a mistake. Hoover is pastor of
Tucson’s First Christian Church and founder of Humane Borders, which
places rescue water barrels in the desert.

“People there have always worked under the radar,” he says of
Cochise County activists. “They don’t want to be out in the open and so
forth. I think they shoot themselves in the foot that way. … It’s
just a very different environment than Pima County. Here, we made the
decision from day one that we’re out here to change the system.”

But to Tommy Bassett, there’s more than one way to prod the status
quo. Bassett lives in Douglas, where he works with the Frontera de
Cristo humanitarian group and as a prime mover behind the Just Coffee
fair-trade organization. He says the humanitarian approach is
deliberately different in Cochise County—by necessity. “We’ve had
our own little vigilantes down here before the Minutemen started, and
we’re also in a community with people who have really divergent views
on migration.”

But that’s just on the civil side. “There’s also a good dose of
paranoia,” he says. “Look at all the cop agencies here. We have the
(Arizona) Department of Public Safety. We have the Border Patrol. We
have Customs. Certainly, the DEA has their little building out here on
the highway. There’s an awful lot of law enforcement around.”

Others believe that any old-fashioned civility on this stretch of
the border has already been wrenched, almost beyond recognition. Among
them is Ginny Jordan, tourism coordinator at the Douglas Visitor
Center. Inside the center’s lobby, Ginny Jordan shows me an aerial
photograph that spans the communities of Douglas and Agua Prieta. In
the 1997 image, taken before the latest and most militant border fence
was installed, it’s hard to tell where one city stops and another
begins.

The photo’s continuous, binational community is lost to time. But
that’s not the only difference, says Jordan, who had a Tucson
social-services career before returning to her native Douglas. “When I
came back, I worked for the Chamber of Commerce for a short period of
time. Visitors would come in, and they’d ask, ‘Is it safe here?’ It was
kind of a strange question for me, because I grew up on the border, and
it has always felt safe. You had friends on both sides; you grew up on
both sides; your families were on both sides. Your
history—everything—was shared.”

She says that began to shift in the 1990s. “All of a sudden, you
started to see this really slight change, so subtle that sometimes, you
didn’t even notice it.”

But any pretense of subtlety was dropped after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“All of the ugliness came to the forefront. It was an awful thing that
happened, but it almost gave people permission to have their really
true feelings come out about living on a border. Then it became ‘those
people’ over there. Where we once looked at each other as brothers and
sisters, all of a sudden, we were looking at each other
suspiciously.”

Before the mid-1990s, illegal immigration was channeled largely
through border towns such as Douglas or Nogales. But around that time,
the U.S. Border Patrol began concentrating enforcement in those
communities, thereby pushing illegal traffic further into the rugged
countryside.

The government assumption seems to be that fewer immigrants would
attempt the treacherous desert crossings, and those who did would be
easier to snare. This brutish calculation proved dead wrong: Rather
than slowing immigration, the tactic triggered a surge of exposure
deaths as it funneled huge numbers of border-crossers through the
outback.

Suddenly, rural residents were flooded with illicit traffic.
Livestock gates were left open; garbage clogged sandy washes; and
threatening footfalls haunted the nights. Tensions were thick by April
1999, when 20 Southeastern Arizona ranchers gathered to issue a
proclamation: If the federal government didn’t clamp down, they
declared, “friction between invader and property owners in this area
may increase to the point of blood being shed.”

It was two weeks later, early on a Sunday morning, when the U.S.
Border Patrol received a call from one of those ranchers. Roger Barnett
phoned to report that he and two brothers were holding 27 illegal
aliens on their sprawling property near the Mexican line; when agents
arrived, they found the Barnetts bedecked in camouflage jackets and
toting holstered pistols.

This incident caught attention far beyond just the neighbors and
federal cops. Across the nation, groups already furious about illegal
immigration were instantly obsessed with this brewing standoff. Before
long, a hard-core Texas outfit called Ranch Rescue was setting up camp
on Barnett property, and Ranch Rescue’s actions—weapon-heavy
night patrols, occasional alien captures—garnered enough
headlines to become almost commonplace. Its surly presence did spark
unease, however, even among residents adamantly opposed to immigration.
Those anxieties mushroomed when the militia established a compound
within eyeshot of the Douglas Border Patrol Station.

Then came Sept. 11. Days later, border chatter was increasingly
peppered with wild rumors of terrorist cells just inside Mexico. They
described illegals of mysterious origin who were quietly whisked away
by FBI agents. Ranchers reported finding Muslim prayer rugs in their
back ranges; engines idling in the night took on even more ominous
tones.

Into this mix strode Chris Simcox, a onetime school teacher from
California. Being a rather edgy fellow to start with, Simcox had
subsequently been propelled by the terrorist attacks into a two-month
solo pilgrimage along the border. At one point, trekking through vast
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, he shadowed a smuggling operation
for several days. Finally emerging from this desert odyssey, he
announced to anyone who’d listen that he was itching to fight back. And
he’d start that fight in ornery Tombstone.

The vigilante contingent got even bigger in 2003, when another
Californian named Glenn Spencer alighted in Southern Arizona. With
longtime ties to anti-immigrant groups in his home state, Spencer was
eager to establish himself at the immigration war’s ground zero. Soon,
his American Border Patrol was up and running, on the scrubby outskirts
of sprawling Sierra Vista. “A good general picks his battlefields,”
Spencer explained to me. “We had lost the war in California.” The
open-borders crowd “had the media; they had all of the elected
officials. We had no chance.”

Where Simcox’s corps was about putting boots on the ground, the ABP
was more of a psych-ops campaign, targeted at the American public;
Spencer’s specialty was aiming high-tech surveillance equipment at the
border, and then streaming the resulting, eerie images on the
Internet.

And so, in a period of four years, one parched pocket of
Southeastern Arizona had become a vigilante’s Xanadu. Although each of
these groups was different in tone and technique, they shared a kindred
purpose: sparking public outrage over illegal immigration and chaos at
the border.

Simcox has since decamped to Phoenix, and he recently announced he’d
make a run for John McCain’s U.S. Senate seat. Spencer has moved his
base out of Sierra Vista, after he was cited for emptying his gun into
a neighbor’s garage.

Now, his ABP operates from a 104-acre ranch on the border near
Hereford, and Spencer focuses his attention upon prodding the feds to
finish their border fence. That barrier, slated to traverse more than
600 miles, isn’t yet done.

But the stretch alongside Spencer’s ranch has been
finished—and not a moment too soon, he says. “Last June, one of
the guys who worked for me was almost killed by a drug smuggler, and
because of the fence, that’s not possible anymore.” Smugglers “were
driving through the ranch, and stopping within 100 feet of my front
door. They were all over the place—it was dangerous, and you were
afraid to go out for a walk.”

According to Spencer, that’s why ingrates who label Cochise County
as a walled-off police state are so off base. “I would say there’s
actually less militarization of the border here, because the fence is
so good,” he says. “We actually have less law enforcement now.”

That doesn’t seem so obvious a few miles north of Douglas, however,
where you’ll find the nation’s largest Border Patrol station, a
53,000-square-foot behemoth sprawling across 29 dusty acres. The
Douglas Station is home to roughly 500 agents and easily that many
vehicles, ranging from K-9 carriers to quads. Closer to town, the
station also boasts its own horse stable.

Not surprisingly, all that manpower—and accompanying
horsepower—adds up to a good revenue stream for Cochise
County.

But what the government gives, it also takes away. Researchers at
the UA found that Arizona’s four border counties spend more than $25
million annually on immigration-related costs. Those myriad
expenditures range from mandated public defenders for illegal
immigrants to unpaid medical bills at local hospitals for the treatment
of noncitizens. It doesn’t help that the U.S. Border Patrol often plays
a nifty little game by refusing to take migrants with obvious medical
conditions into custody. As a result, costs for their care are passed
to area hospitals.

This all adds up to a tidy sum—particularly when you consider
that Border Patrol strategies are largely to blame. “I think what
you’ve got here is the government focusing on channeling the illegal
aliens through this area,” says Richard Searle, Cochise County’s
District 3 supervisor. “If you look at what they’ve done between Yuma
and Nogales, and what they’ve done east of here in New Mexico, it seems
like they’ve said, ‘OK, let them come through here, and this is where
we’ll focus our people.'”

But an increasingly defiant county is refusing to ante up. “The
amount that Cochise County is spending on border issues is less than it
was 10 years ago,” Searle says. “And I think that’s a conscious
decision of letting the feds be responsible for their own issues. We
don’t have enough to take care of our own issues, let alone the federal
issues.”

David Aguilar was head of the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector before
being named the agency’s chief. In a previous interview, he outlined
for me the federal strategy that impacts Cochise and other border
counties. Aguilar noted how smugglers “take advantage of the
infrastructure available to them, beginning in Mexico.” That
infrastructure “translates into highways from the interior of Mexico to
the border.”

In turn, those highways lead to areas that can accommodate
gatherings of large groups for mass crossings, like border towns, with
plenty of cheap flophouses and quick transportation routes. At the same
time, Aguilar said that smugglers need similar staging areas on the
U.S. side, thereby “drawing them into our communities.”

But “once we take that (infrastructure) away as we have done in San
Diego, as we have done in El Paso, as we have done in Nogales and even
in Douglas, the smuggler then continues to push for areas where he can
continue his efforts.” Ergo the deserts, where the smuggler’s clients
trample ranchland, suffer the elements and rack up huge government
bills.

No matter whose issue or why, Cochise County is truly saturated with
feds. At this very moment, for instance, a crew of Navy Seabees is busy
expanding a ditch just a few feet north of the border at Douglas.
Here’s the concept: If border-jumpers manage to scale the towering
fence, they’ll still find themselves facing a nice 12-to-15-feet-deep
concrete canyon.

Taking a smoke break in the shade of a huge earthmover, one Seabee
tells me this is a pretty interesting assignment. “It’s crazy,” he
says. “We saw a guy jump over the fence the other day, and Border
Patrol got him just like that.”

The sailor nods toward a Border Patrol SUV perched high atop a
distant dirt pile. “Better than watching the sports on TV.”

The night it happened, Ray Borane was still Mayor Borane. It was
August 1997, and a summer tempest had unleashed floodwaters through the
storm drains of Douglas. Soon, his phone rang. It was the police. “They
called me down there and said that they had found a body in the water,
and they hadn’t gotten it out yet, because the water was too high,” he
recalls. “So I immediately went down there. That was late at night,
about 10:30, 11 o’clock. I was there when they found that first lady.
When the waters subsided, she was laying there right by the port of
entry, against a grate that kept the debris and everything from going
under the port. She had a backpack.

“I saw them fish that gal off of that grate, and I stayed up most of
the night,” he says. “And the next morning, I went down there. That’s
when the water went completely down, and I saw them digging the bodies
out of the muck and the mire at the bottom of the canal.

“That had quite an impact upon me, to be honest with you, just
realizing what those poor people went through.”

For Father Bob Carney, that night-when eight people died-changed his
life for the second time. The first time was decades ago, when he
kicked booze and found God. But as those waters roared beneath Douglas,
God spoke again. Father Bob was then the low-key pastor of the Douglas
St. Luke’s Catholic Church, and the tragedy radicalized him. “I began
to talk more and more about it from the pulpit,” he says. “It seemed
that people here were going on about their business as if nothing
happened.”

Some left Father Bob’s parish because of his growing outspokenness.
A few years later, he had a series of strokes and retired from parish
duties himself. These days, his time is spent organizing immigrant
assistance. He doesn’t get to Cochise County as much as before. But he
remembers how the county clenched up, like a fist.

“When I first got there, people moved back and forth across the line
very fluidly. Family members would gather to celebrate life,” he
remembers. “But suddenly, with the increased presence of Border Patrol,
I think there was just a pall of fear that came over the border. There
was a lot of suspicion.”

People also started appearing at his parsonage door in the middle of
the night. “I didn’t even think about it,” he says. “It wasn’t about
legal or illegal. I looked at the fear in their eyes, and almost
despair.

“But the bottom line was the racism. I think the property owners,
the Barnetts, they also took fear, and they ran with it, and they fed
it to others—to the outlying ranches and ranchers who had been
there for generations. And on top of that, things were happening on the
ranches; gates were left open, and water lines were broken. So the
vigilantes were able to get a pretty good foothold on things.

“Just prior to that, it was a pretty easygoing place,” says Father
Bob. “People got along, and we enjoyed each other. There were fiestas
and celebrations of life and weddings and quinceñeras. Then it
seemed like all that just popped. It was terribly sad.”

On Feb. 17, 2009, a federal jury awarded $77,800 in damages to the
migrants who had crossed Roger Barnett’s ranch on that day in 2004,
when he held them at gunpoint. But the jury then acquitted him of
violating their civil rights.

Victory was claimed by both sides in the matter.

This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.