Reuters
TOMBSTONE, Arizona, Feb 12 (Reuters) - An hour after sunrise, a small band of vigilantes walks the fence separating Arizona and Mexico, scanning the wilderness horizon for the shadows of illegal immigrants and the blanched earth for crimson soil turned up by their footfalls.
Standing by a field of head-high prairie grass, they stop to examine a depression where the hefty blades bend south to form a path that melts into the thick tangle of sacaton grass.
Reading the earth like a roadmap, they determine that a migrant used the grass as cover in the hours before dawn, after crawling through barbed wire that divides sparsely populated expanses of desert in Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.
Less than a mile (1.6 km) away a narrow ribbon of road rambles past the Huachuca Mountains to Interstate 10 -- and jobs in Phoenix, Chicago and Los Angeles.
"It's an invasion. Illegals are pouring across the border by the thousands," says Chris Simcox, founder of the Arizona-based Civil Homeland Defense.
Posted by Suzanne at February 13, 2003