Crossing the Line

Back in Phoenix, the cameras are ready, but antagonism and drama are in short supply. Most of the day laborers, who had gathered near the normally busy hiring site, hurried away upon seeing Simcox and the other Minutemen. That has left only a dozen or so quiet workers and maybe twice as many Minutemen, as well as some drive-by hecklers, who howl epithets in two languages. "You're a racist," an Anglo man shouts from a big Chevy, tacking on an obscenity and roaring away, tires squealing, before Simcox can deliver his standard retort.

"I always tell those kind of people that my biracial son -- half white and half African American -- wouldn't be pleased to hear that," he says.

"Are he and your wife here?" someone asks.

"I'm not with his mother now."

"Your son around?"

"No." His eyes scan the crowd. "He's with his mother . . . That's fine. A custody thing. After our divorce."

She was his second wife; the divorce is a sore subject for him. Not much about that period of his life, when he lived in Los Angeles, led to much personal satisfaction. He dabbled at making it as an actor. He was a public elementary school teacher, annoyed with, among other things, the many Spanish-speaking kids who entered school not knowing English, he says.

He was in Los Angeles when the terrorists struck New York and Washington. In late October of that year, Kim Dunbar, divorced by then from Simcox for six years, went to court and asked for full custody of their then-teenage son. In documents filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Dunbar charged that, shortly after 9/11, Simcox left a series of troubling voice-mail messages in which he predicted an imminent nuclear attack on Los Angeles, vowed to teach his son to use a gun and announced his intention to leave Southern California in order to protect the U.S. border with Mexico.

Simcox says he made those calls from Arizona, where he was vacationing near the border and had seen numerous illegal aliens who had just made the crossing. "After that I knew what I was going to do," he says. He would settle in the legendary town of Tombstone, about 30 miles north of the border in eastern Arizona. There, he washed dishes at a restaurant and briefly had a part-time acting gig, playing a gunslinger in Wild West re-creations. He patrolled the border at night, passing on information about illegal crossings to the Border Patrol, which had deemed him too old when he tried to get a job there as an agent. In May 2002, determined to find a medium for promoting his fight against illegal immigration, he says, he used his retirement savings to buy the Tombstone Tumbleweed, a weekly newspaper.

Articles in the Tumbleweed attracted supporters, and a movement was born. "Things happened very quickly," he says. "I was doing patrols with people, and, as word got out about [last April's] rally, we had a lot of people calling. I think this cause was always just waiting to happen. People were quietly angry but didn't know what to do. It just took a few people to say it needed to be done."

The Minutemen say their members have reported more than 6,000 undocumented migrants to the Border Patrol, which says it has no way of verifying that claim. But even this figure, Simcox knows, amounts to a minuscule fraction of the 8,000 to 10,000 migrants a day estimated to be crossing illegally. "We need troops on the border," Simcox declares. "Some people are afraid of having our Army there, but that's what it's going to take . . . And if it takes building a wall, then build that, too."

In 2004, Arizonians did erect a wall of sorts, passing into law Proposition 200, which effectively prohibits the undocumented from receiving public benefits.