U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican, represents a district 1,000 miles from the Arizona border -- a Colorado district that includes Littleton, home to Columbine High School. But last February Tancredo traveled south and embarked on a four-day tour of the Arizona border. On the first day of his trip, Tancredo visited Organ Pipe National Monument, a desert wildlife sanctuary west of Cochise County where six months prior a young park ranger named Kris Eggle was shot dead while chasing suspected Mexican drug smugglers. As Tancredo has done before in press conferences on Capitol Hill, he displayed a photo of the handsome, bespectacled Eggle while pressing his case for the deployment of U.S. Army troops along the border.

Eggle is among a handful of American victims of the border chaos whom Tancredo uses to illustrate the violence and corruption that seeps in from the south. After his speech at Organ Pipe, Tancredo met with one of his favorite victims, Roger Barnett, along with a small group of Cochise landowners, to "hear their plight," as he says. Tancredo says he "absolutely" supports Barnett's citizen's arrests of immigrants as well as the activities of Simcox and Spencer "to the extent that they bring about attention to the border and the invasion that is taking place there."

In March, just days before the invasion of Iraq, Tancredo delivered a passionate address before the House of Representatives. Pointing to a photo projection of Barnett and his brother Don, who helps with apprehensions of undocumented migrants, Tancredo lauded them as "homeland heroes fighting a war on their private property."

Neither Tancredo nor his staff notified Grijalva, the Tucson Democrat, of the pending trip, a clear breach of congressional manners. "Other than some important protocol being violated," Grijalva told Salon, "if [Tancredo] is coming in here to further increase the crisis, to fuel the fire that is simmering here, I would make sure to point out to him that if anything would happen, he would be directly responsible for creating the situation."

Grijalva calls the border "a complex problem that can only be explained with rational discussion." Tancredo, however, seems to have little patience for nuance. For example, many local officials say his plan to deploy troops on the border could have costly consequences in towns like Douglas, where economies are based largely on the assembly of parts produced in Mexico's maquiladora factories. Tancredo's response? "The economic effect is not really my concern," he says. "My sole concern is securing our national borders."

Tancredo's district would suffer no such consequences, so there would be little political fallout at home. This has given him the freedom to develop a gung-ho platform of anti-immigration legislation that energizes grassroots and white-collar activists alike. At the mention of Tancredo's name, Chris Simcox leaps from his chair and yelps: "That's my leader! I'd vote for him for president tomorrow!"

Tancredo also enjoys star status among the white-collar anti-immigrationists of Tanton's network who have courted his support, donating $5,000 to his 2002 campaign through FAIR's U.S. Immigration Reform PAC and thousands more in personal donations. Leaders in Tanton's network have long sought a foothold on Capitol Hill and, through Tancredo, it appears their hopes have been realized.

The close working relationship between the Tanton network and Tancredo is most apparent on the Web site for the congressman's Immigration Reform Caucus. When Salon interviewed Tancredo earlier this year, the Web site contained links to FAIR, NumbersUSA, CIS and virtually every other Tanton creation. It also contained a link to VDare, a white nationalist Web site run by British writer Peter Brimelow that is named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the New World. When asked about the link, Tancredo was befuddled and indignant.

"If we are connected to VDare, and I don't think we are," says Tancredo, "then I will take action ... I do not want the support of these kinds of people and I do not need their support." After the interview, the links had mysteriously moved from the Web site's front page and were buried to next an essay Tancredo wrote called "Showing Immigrants Respect."

"If he doesn't know who he's in bed with, he needs to sit up and turn the light on," says Kat Rodriguez, coordinating organizer for Derechos Humanos in Tucson. "I personally hold him accountable for giving these groups added credibility and helping to promote them."

According to Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community, an Illinois-based watchdog group that monitors hate organizations, John Tanton has lent his support to Simcox, Spencer and Barnett in part as a smokescreen to distract from nagging accusations of white nationalism stemming from his memos and involvement with the Pioneer Fund.

"The militia movement in Cochise County signals not only a success for Tanton's group in that it has changed the political climate there," Burghart says. "It has also has provided Tanton and his ilk some much needed diversion, so attention is directed on Cochise County instead of the state capitol where they are introducing all kinds of anti-immigrant legislation."

The local reaction to the controversy is clearly mixed. In many quarters, there is public apathy and official foot-dragging. "The death in Red Rock and the lack of investigation and the lack of clarity to it is what we're seeing across the board," says Jennifer Allen, co-director of the Border Action Network, a relatively new, informal watchdog group. "None of the law-enforcement agencies are stepping up."

But a number of public officials, led by Grijalva, have begun to mobilize in recent months. In his first act as a congressman, Grijalva sent letters to Ashcroft and U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton requesting an investigation into Cochise County's vigilante groups. "The number of groups involved is growing and the safety of our citizens is diminishing," he wrote to Charlton. "Investigation will establish the ties these groups have to other hate movements across the country."

Well over three months later, neither Ashcroft nor Charlton has replied. "I don't think the rise of vigilantes would be tolerated in any other part of the country," Grijalva told Salon. "Unless there is something done, one would have to surmise that there are some inherent sympathies. Sometimes the support they [the vigilantes] get is the silence people have about them."

Some local leaders in Cochise County have joined Grijalva and the Border Action Network in voicing opposition to vigilantism. The Cochise County Board of Supervisors, in concert with Tombstone Mayor Dusty Escapule and Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, passed resolutions condemning vigilantism and the creation of anti-immigrant militias.

"This town's Hispanic," says Borane, referring to Douglas. "One of the reasons my administration's working to keep them [vigilantes] out of Douglas is it would take one little teeny spark to ignite somebody who might want to take one of them on themselves and we might have an ethnic battle."

Despite the looming danger suggested by Borane and others, all sides agree that as long as the federal government remains silent and continues along the path of Operation Gatekeeper, the vigilante movement in Cochise County will not go away. With the Bush administration sharpening its domestic focus to include the "war on terror" and the economy on the brink of recession, their is power apparently growing.

And Simcox is doing what he can to mainstream the movement. He fields requests graciously, with a boyish charm and a practiced cosmopolitanism that belie the paranoid image of someone who claims to pack a pistol and wear a bulletproof vest everywhere he goes. Journalists from as far away as Germany have sought him out in Tombstone. He has barnstormed from coast to coast to speak on behalf of local anti-immigration groups and boldly challenged the federal government to try to stop him. Apparently, people are listening.

"If we're attacked again," Simcox says, invoking the memory of Sept. 11, "you are going to see citizens defend their borders in a patriotic way and you are going to see people get shot on that border."

[Salon editorial fellow Mark Follman contributed to this report.]

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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