Borderland security: vigilantes are far from the fringe in Arizona. Instead, organizers say, ranchers and border agents mirror a violent border society where racial profiling abounds and prosecution of abuse is rare.

Thirteen-year-old Rosita Gonzales * heard strange noises while she and her brothers were playing in a tent they had set up in the backyard. She grabbed her backpack and ran toward the house. Behind her home in Pirtleville, AZ, a tiny desert town on the U.S.-Mexico border, the Border Patrol agents who were prowling in the brush assumed the girl to be a fleeing undocumented migrant and opened fire, shattering her kneecap. Although she survived the shooting, the incident became one of many incidents that have created and maintained an atmosphere of violence and harassment throughout towns near the southern Arizona border.

This past year, community organizers with the Border Action Network (BAN) went door to door in border towns like Douglas, Ariz., to assess how the increasingly active presence of Border Patrol agents has affected the lives of the city's 15,000 residents--an estimated 93 percent of whom are Latino. They heard stories of relentless harassment by local law enforcement and Border Patrol agents who flagrantly racially profile local residents, previously quiet neighborhoods made unsafe by Border Patrol vehicles carelessly speeding through the streets, and physical abuse and intimidation that painted a picture of what Jennifer Allen, executive director of BAN, describes as "low-intensity warfare." And in this war on migrants, the residents of towns like Douglas have been unwillingly placed on the front lines.

Hunting People Down

Local residents also expressed fear of the vigilante groups that have emerged in tandem with the rapid expansion of Border Patrol activity in this region. These groups of white ranchers and other sympathetic nativists believe that the federal government is coming up short in its efforts to crack down on undocumented migrants, and they are determined to take on the responsibility of patrolling the borders themselves. Promoting themselves as patriots protecting American jobs and defending national security, particularly in a post-9/11 context, the camouflage-clad vigilantes routinely stop groups of migrants at gunpoint, demand to know their immigration status, order them to the ground, and detain them until Border Patrol agents arrive.

Despite concerns about human rights violations by groups acting as extralegal law enforcement outfits, local authorities have failed to prosecute any of the ranchers. While mainstream media outlets and local public officials portray these groups as fringe elements, vigilantes and Border Patrol agents occupy essentially the same piece of a violent border society. "The vigilante groups emerge within a larger political climate that says it's OK to hunt people down at gunpoint," Allen explains. "The Border Patrol does the same thing regularly."

Over the past decade, the Border Patrol has implemented its Southwest Border Strategy, which has entailed the construction of longer and taller walls and fences in an attempt to seal off the major points of entry and increasing the number of agents patrolling these areas. San Diego and El Paso were the first high-traffic areas targeted by the agency through Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line. But rather than reducing the scale of migration across the Southern border, this strategy has had the effect of pushing hopeful migrants away from these cities and forcing them to cross in desert regions under life-threatening conditions of extreme heat and no access to water.

Along the border, smaller towns like Douglas, in Arizona's Cochise County, have witnessed a dramatic influx of migrants who are discouraged from entering near the larger cities. County Attorney Chris Roll says he began noticing the increase around 1998, and that by 2000, the number of migrants passing through the county every month matched the county's total population of 115,000. Roll explains that the agency's strategies "tend to simply move the problem around from one area to another." Instead of deterring migration altogether, the Border Patrol's strategy amounts to a cat and mouse game on the Southern Border that is being played with the lives of undocumented migrants and town residents.

With increased migration in Cochise County, the Border Patrol's response has been to beef up the presence of agents in towns like Douglas, which has again pushed the migrants to cross even more obscure and dangerous terrain, as evidenced by the ballooning migrant deaths along the Arizona border in recent years. In 2001, 78 migrants died along the border in Arizona, according to Border Patrol figures. The next year the number jumped to 134, and this year 139 migrants have died while attempting to cross the border.

This year, the Border Patrol opened its new subsector in Douglas with a tall watch-tower that marks the landscape and greets drivers as they reach the town on Highway 80. According to the Border Patrol, about 1,600 agents are spread across all of the Tucson Sector, which includes Douglas. The owner of a local coffee shop in Douglas observes that a few years ago "there were only about 10 guards posted here. Now, there are hundreds." And in such a short time, they have made a profound mark on the consciousness of the local community. While Border Patrol SUVs seem to pass by every 10 minutes, one longtime resident added that "half of the regular cars you see are unmarked Border Patrol, too. It's basically become a police state."

In a town where nearly all of the residents share the same skin color as the "illegals" that the agents are trained to hunt, the implications of this Border Patrol presence has been far-reaching. Douglas residents told BAN organizers about how, while driving through the town in which they were born, they are routinely pulled over and required to show their IDs. Mothers explained that they do not allow their children to play outside because Border Patrol vehicles recklessly careen through neighborhoods, and many community members described being stopped by Border Patrol agents while shopping at the local Wal-Mart that stands just five blocks from the border.

Confronting Vigilantism 

While organizers noted that many residents have come to accept the harassment from Border Patrol as a regular feature of border life, community members repeatedly mentioned their fear of the vigilante groups, which have been especially active in Cochise County. They believed that anyone with brown skin was a target and cited perpetrators such as Roger Barnett, a local rancher whose vigilante activity has been well documented by media, community groups, and the Mexican Consul stationed in Douglas.

On a Sunday afternoon in January 2003, for example, Barnett confronted a Mexican migrant who was walking alongside Highway 80. Rodrigo Acosta was overcome with thirst and had decided to turn himself in to the Border Patrol, according to Mexican Consulate reports. After being stopped by the rancher, Acosta was punched, kicked, and hit in the head with a battery lamp. When he tried to run away, he was chased and bitten by dogs before Barnett caught him. Since 1999, the Mexican Consul has documented 31 incidents involving Barnett in which he has detained 484 migrants; Barnett claims to have captured more than 5,000.

After sensing that local residents were too afraid to raise their voices against the vigilante groups, BAN produced and released its report Hate or Heroism, "to voice the silent opposition and also to demand a higher level of accountability from state officials," according to the group's director.

While the report received much media attention as the first major unified community opposition to vigilantism, the organizers received a cold response form state officials. Despite demands from community members to prosecute vigilante groups for violating state statutes prohibiting the formation of militias, kidnapping, conducting illegal civilian arrests, and violating state land permits, state officials have not filed any charges. "Every time we pressure officials to prosecute the vigilante groups, we are told that because the abused migrants are not there to testify, a case cannot be filed," explains BAN director Allen who adds that an "old boys network" between local and county officials and the ranchers themselves protects the vigilantes from prosecution.

By contrast, Allen says, the prosecution of border smugglers (coyotes) and the state's complicity in allowing vigilante activity to continue. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix, which has jurisdiction in prosecuting coyotes, the migrants who are smuggled in can be held as material witnesses and forced to testify against the individuals who led them into the U.S. Being held as a material witness, the Attorney's Office explains, entails being arrested and held in detention until the migrants give their testimony at the hearing.

Community members charge that this practice flies in the face of officials' unwillingness to prosecute vigilante groups. Miguel Escobar Valdez, the Mexican Consul posted in Douglas, adds, "When they want to charge the coyotes, they are able to get testimony from migrants. But they say they cannot prosecute the vigilantes because there's no one to testify against them."

Since the Border Action Network understands that "the Attorney General clearly is not going to do anything unless they have a concrete case," the group has unveiled efforts to track down victims of vigilante abuse south of the border. They have created radio spots that air three times a day in targeted Mexican cities, posted billboards, and put up posters across Mexico calling for migrants who have confronted vigilante groups along the Arizona border to come forth.

Sanctioned Violence

Far from acting as fringe elements in the border society, vigilantism in Arizona is more accurately described as a logical outgrowth of the Border Patrol's Southwest Border Strategy. Heightening the militarization at urban areas along the border fails to address any of the underlying economic and geopolitical inequalities that define the reality of migration at the Southern Border. In areas of Cochise County, nativist ranchers are influenced by anti-immigrant federal policy and react violently to migrants passing over their property on the way to opportunities that might allow the migrants to sustain themselves and their families. As one Cochise County resident explained, "You are looking at people who were barely making it in ranching and rural industries when the federal border policy pushed them over the limit."

In terms of their tactics, the vigilante groups seem to be following the lead of Border Patrol agents who routinely stop individuals on the basis of skin color, round people up at gun point, and physically intimidate and abuse migrants. Despite the high publicity of vigilante activity and extensive documentation of the incidents by advocacy groups and the Mexican government, very few cases have ever been prosecuted against vigilante incidents across Arizona. "The government has refused to act because these guys are simply acting out what our federal immigration policy says," explains Isabel Garcia of Derechos Humanos, an immigrant advocacy group in Arizona.

Critics also point to the dehumanization of migrants that underpins federal border policy. The portrayal of migrants as involved in the drug trade contributes to the space immigrants occupy in the public imagination, as do the Border Patrol guidelines that warn local residents not to provide medical aid to stranded migrants because providing transportation to a hospital is considered "illegal and can result in prosecution."

"They cease to be human and their lives and families are confined to three letters--UDA [undocumented alien]," says BAN director Allen.

A spokesperson for the Border Patrol in Tucson explains that the agency recognizes "the right of the [vigilante] groups to exist." She goes on to offer a seemingly contradictory message by stating that the "Border Patrol discourages people from taking matters into their own hands," while they "encourage people to call us if they come across someone they suspect is undocumented." This ambivalence contributes to the notion that private citizens can and should function to uphold federal immigration policy.

Post-9/1 1 at the Border

A large sign at the corner of a ranch along a stretch of Highway 80 just outside Douglas reads: "Terrorists Love Open Borders." While Arizona might seem like an unlikely site to measure post-9/11 fallout, it does occupy a space at the forefront with two immigration detention centers in the small town of Florence, another in Eloy, and an immigration detention center for children located in Phoenix. Nearly one out of 10 detained immigrants in the United States is held in these Arizona facilities.

Arizona is also home to active organizing from groups such as the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Humane Borders, Derechos Humanos, and the Border Action Network. Republican congressmen from this state are proposing shifts to immigration policy through a controversial guest-worker bill that does little to protect or improve the lives or migrants themselves and focuses instead on their role as producers in the U.S. economy.

As the federal government uses the cover of "homeland security" to round up, detain and deport immigrants across the country, private ranchers in Arizona use the justification of national security to round up and detain people themselves.

While President Bush has explicitly legitimated the use of racial profiling in the interest of national security, border towns provide a look into communities where the lives of local residents have been defined by racial profiling and harassment for years. Allen explains, "People in these border towns come to accept these practices as normal. That's just border life.

* Name has been changed.

Anmol Chaddha is a research associate at the Applied Research Center.