Glenn Spencer was living in California's San Fernando Valley when he founded his for-profit anti-immigration group Voices of Citizens Together. Starting in 2000, Spencer was making fact-finding trips to southern Arizona, where he met in Sierra Vista with disgruntled local residents and explained his plan to launch a militia called American Border Patrol.

But it was only last year, during a California tax-fraud investigation focused on the Voices group, that Spencer decided on a move to Sierra Vista, a town 20 minutes east of Tombstone that is an outpost of conservatism in mostly Latino Cochise County. Barnett, as the anchor in the county's growing vigilante movement, served as a liaison to help Spencer acquaint himself with the local scene and get his border militia concept off the ground.

Today, Spencer tells people he lives at a secret location where he develops content for his three Web sites and broadcasts his syndicated AM radio show. A reporter, invited to the home on the condition that its location remain confidential, finds a prefabricated Spanish colonial model nestled in a luxury housing development. He works in a study surrounded by monitors, VCRs and computer gear; his bookshelves are filled with titles ranging from "Bordering on Chaos," Andres Oppenheimer's journalistic meditation on Mexico, to "The Bell Curve," a controversial book that concluded that blacks and Latinos historically have lower IQs than whites and Asians.

A portly, silver-haired man of 65 who could blend in at a bingo tournament, Spencer fancies his group more sophisticated than the gun-toting members of Simcox's upstart group. His American Border Patrol is guided by his pet conspiracy theory, "la Reconquista," or "the re-conquest." According to Spencer, the chief actors of la Reconquista include the Mexican government, the Roman Catholic Church, the Ford Foundation and "corporate globalists." Their goal, he claims, is to exploit the freedoms of liberal democracy in order to seize control over the United States, sending waves of Mexicans to break into the country and "recolonialize" land that Mexico lost in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War.

"This gang is here to subvert our immigration laws," Spencer booms. "They are a fifth column."

To prove his point, he swivels around to his computer and with the click of a mouse, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo appears on the screen speaking before the National Council of La Raza in 1997. "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and the Mexican migrant is an important part of that," Zedillo says in halting English. To a sober viewer, Zedillo's statement could be taken as a demonstration of his government's solidarity with Mexicans working in the United States. For Spencer, Zedillo's tacit advocacy for dual citizenship for Mexican-Americans is a declaration of war on American culture with a potentially apocalyptic ending.

"If we lose the United States to that cesspool of a culture," Spencer roars, "how would you like to give 15,000 nuclear weapons to Mexico? It will be the death of this country when hot-blooded, Latin-American macho people bomb the crap out of China or whomever gets in their way -- Grijalva [southern Arizona's outspoken vigilante critic in Congress] back in there with his finger on the nuclear weapon screaming, Let's get those cucarachas!"

In contrast to his bellicose rhetoric and pronounced hostility to anything remotely to do with Mexico, Spencer maintains that his new American Border Patrol is an apolitical nonprofit group -- totally separate from his American Patrol -- that will make the border a safer place by monitoring illegal traffic into the United States and by "broadcasting the invasion live on the internet."

To underscore the group's credibility, Spencer points to the support of local law enforcement officials like his assistant director, Ron Sanders, the former Tucson sector chief for the U.S. Border Patrol. Another member of the militia's board of directors, Bill King, is also a former U.S. Border Patrol chief for the Tucson sector. Board member Iris Lynch is the wife of a judge in Douglas. According to Barnett, federal border agents share intelligence with Spencer's militia, but that's a sensitive issue. Border Patrol officials in Tucson declined to comment on whether they cooperate with the local militias. Spencer, however, says Barnett's not quite right.

"It's not intelligence we're sharing -- it's experience," he explains. "As a member of our board of directors, Ron Sanders provides us with overall comments and guidance, based on his experience, as to the general direction of American Border Patrol. For example, he might say, 'You really need more people along the less-populated areas, not just around the major population centers' -- that kind of thing."

Spencer has announced ambitious plans to develop unmanned aircraft and special ground sensors that will "solve this border problem once and for all." To do this, Spencer claims to need all of $30 million. Whether he can raise the money is unclear, but Spencer does say he has solicited John Tanton, who sits on American Patrol's advisory board, as well as "various foundations."

Spencer's characterization of American Border Patrol as a viable solution to the border crisis is all the more unlikely after a look at his history, which demonstrates that wherever he goes, he has more success causing problems than solving them. In 1998, one man was arrested for burning a Mexican flag after Spencer gave a speech in Alabama before the avowedly white nationalist group Council of Conservative Citizens. In 2000, a member of the hard-line anti-immigrant group Sachem Quality of Life in Farmingville, N.Y., was arrested for threatening a local Latino family after Spencer gave a speech there.

And in December 2001, Spencer and a group from the California Coalition for Immigration Reform demonstrated in front of city hall in Anaheim, Calif., against the Anaheim Police Department's newly adopted policy of accepting Mexican government-issued identification cards as proper I.D. for illegal immigrants. According to an eyewitness account in the Orange County Weekly, Spencer's crowd was met by counter-protesters from the Communist Party and a group of Latino students who largely stayed out of the fray. Members of Spencer's group began shouting racial epithets at the counter-protesters and ripped down a red Communist Party flag, provoking a bloody, full-scale brawl.

Recently Spencer has curtailed his speaking engagements to focus on the American Border Patrol, but he apparently still finds time to deliver his trademark brand of anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican vitriol on American Patrol's Web site. There, he has tailored a section specifically to target liberal Latino politicians and activists. One of his favorite targets is Pima County legal defender and Derechos Humanos co-director Isabel Garcia, whom he has dubbed the "Reconquista Communista."

When Garcia was scheduled to speak at a solidarity rally in Tucson for migrants who had died in the desert, Spencer posted directions to the rally on the American Patrol site along with an "X" to mark where Garcia was to stand during her speech. Garcia says she was notified by FBI agents that day of impending threats to her safety and attended the rally with police escort.

Asked if she fears for her life, Garcia said: "I'm not too scared. I'm scared for the unknown Juan and Juana in the desert that aren't U.S. citizens like I am, that aren't protected like I am. That's who I'm scared for."

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