Crossing the Line

Nods around him.

"Oh, look at that guy, the guy behind the wheel," he snaps, pointing at a van that is stopping to pick up two workers in the alley. In that moment, in his fury, Taplin makes clear why, even amid his wife's worries about privacy and his concerns about his superiors' reactions at work, he feels he must be out here. "This is why we must stop this. See that guy? He's a contractor; he was around here last week hiring. A repeat offender. I want to get his picture." But before he can raise his camera, the guy has driven off. Taplin, scowling, makes a note of the license plate. "That's okay, I recognize him . . . I'll get him next time."

His brigade is 10 strong today. "You know what? He was a white guy. Latino contractors are way down since we started coming. What does that tell you? What does that tell you? The number of day laborers is down some, but, if we keep this up, I think the Latino contractors are going to dry up completely. You know why?"

He touches his walkie-talkie, plays with the button. Crackle-crackle. "Because their culture is built around staying below the radar and staying away from authority. They don't want the threat of being exposed, because they're illegal themselves a lot of the time, and their [businesses] are unlicensed" with Herndon and the state of Virginia.

Taplin's interest in the Minutemen's cause was ignited last year, he says, when he heard that a drunken Hispanic man had talked crudely and sexually to elementary school children at a bus stop. But, if that moment served as the spark, the dry tinder had been building in his mind for a while. "I started looking at the mess that this 7-Eleven was becoming, the eyesore," he recalls. "People hanging out when there weren't jobs or after they were done looking for work that day. It comes back to their culture. I spent some time in Rio when I was in the Navy. They didn't respect the land in Rio. They urinated on streets, they threw trash, bottles . . . When you come here, you're going to do what you did in your culture. You're going to do what you know."

Last summer, he called the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps' president, Chris Simcox, who lives in Arizona and has come to be regarded by the membership as the organization's seminal force, a hero to admirers who have compared him to George Washington. Simcox granted Taplin a Minuteman chapter. Taplin, who once dreamt of running for Congress, now would lead people, play the role of the chapter's spokesman, appear on radio and television.

Minuteman chapters were forming in every region of the country by then -- from California to Connecticut, with many men like George Taplin eager to take the helm. By November, Simcox had phoned Taplin to express delight with the new chapter's effort. "I mean, it was Chris Simcox," Taplin says, sounding amazed.

IN HIS WHITE T-SHIRT AND BLACK LEATHER JACKET, Chris Simcox is dressed as the Fonz might dress, if the Fonz were wearing a bulletproof vest under his T-shirt. He stands on a sidewalk in his familiar pose. He's slightly hunched and furtive, his eyes scanning the surroundings as he answers the questions of milling strangers.

On this December morning, he has shown up to lead a protest at a day laborer site at East Thomas Road and North 36th Street in Phoenix. It is an event that was well-publicized in advance, which guaranteed that media, his admirers and foes, including an ACLU monitoring team, would be flocking there. Among the attendees are several Arizona television crews, a French documentary team and a German reporter, all ready to report on any fracas and hoping to get a few minutes with Simcox. Lean-faced with a salt-and-pepper beard and blue-gray eyes, telegenic enough to be a regular on the conservative talk-show circuit, the 45-year-old Simcox has reached that level of quirky celebrity where gushing strangers rush up and ask to have their picture taken with him.

His life changed forever last April, when he led, according to most estimates, about 100 people at a time, some of whom stayed for as long as 30 days, in taking up positions along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, near Naco, Ariz., their mission to spot undocumented migrants and report them to the U.S. Border Patrol. Many of the Latino day laborers who live in Herndon know Arizona well, having crossed various parts of it. Simcox had come to regard the state in general, and Naco in particular, as a sieve, and he was determined to stop border crossers there.

Disproportionately middle-aged or elderly, his volunteers parked their vehicles near stretches of barbed-wire fence and took up positions in lawn chairs, spaced in groups at 300-yard intervals. President Bush has characterized groups like the Minutemen as "vigilantes." The Border Patrol declared that the group's activities were of no benefit to the Patrol's operations. Minutemen opponents, including prominent Latino rights organizations, dispatched representatives to the border to protest against Simcox's group.

By then, Simcox had begun traveling with a bodyguard and packing a gun, explaining that he had been the target of anonymous death threats. He and his followers had tapped into something raw and angry in like-minded American psyches far from Arizona -- never mind that Border Patrol spokesmen would dryly comment later that most of the volunteers had not been back to the border since. Invoking the specter of a national crisis imperiling U.S. security, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) praised the Minutemen. The issue of illegal immigration was giving birth to political candidacies. In a six-candidate field vying for a California congressional seat during a December special election, James Gilchrist, a staunch ally of the Minutemen, finished third, with a respectable 25 percent of the vote. Simcox says assuredly, "We're the future when it comes to immigration policy, and that's what scares the politicians."