The Fence Junkies

Slate
May 6, 2013
by David Weigel

HEREFORD, Ariz. – Glenn Spencer wakes every day in pitch dark, at 3 a.m., a habit he picked up in the last couple of years. “I do my best thinking in the morning,” he explains. The early morning is also when he usually gets an audio tape intercepting chatter between U.S. border patrol agents, which he edits for public consumption. He always uses this information to plot a map of border crossings. Spencer’s group, American Border Patrol, will release all of this online.

I wake up at 4 a.m. in the “Coronado house” that Spencer opens for visitors to his 104-acre property on the U.S.-Mexico border. The property abuts a border fence that sinks 6 feet into the ground and shoots up 18 feet above it. I got there at sundown the day before, which meant turning off Arizona State Route 92, past a wary border patrol agent, and driving five miles of dirt roads past dozens of ranches.* All of them sport sturdy fences around the dirt and brush. Many of them are for sale.
 

Years ago Spencer bought this compound from one of those sellers, a retired colonel who couldn’t put up with the drug cartel shootouts. Four years after the construction of that fence, there aren’t any shootouts. It’s a “gated community,” a “little Shangri-La,” says Spencer. The rehabbed guesthouse sits in front of a landscaped pond, and Spencer keeps a sound system and laptop outside, piping jazzy covers of pop-rock hits. At night the only light comes from the stars, the Mexican mining town of Cananea, and from a border patrol floodlight so intense you could sit on your porch and read by the glow.

But this isn’t what wakes me up. Spencer owns seven German Shepherds, and some of them have started howling for attention. At 7 a.m. sharp, Spencer drives from his place to the guesthouse on an ATV. Seventy-five years old, with the cheerful look and vocal rasp of Santa Claus in some Rankin/Bass animation, he speculates that the dogs staying with him were disagreeing with the dog staying with me. The dog that spent the night in my quarters is covered in black-and-white spots and named Migra—as in la migra, immigration police.

“She doesn’t get along with the others,” says Spencer.
 

Spencer, who has devoted the last 20 years of his life to the immigration wars, kicks his doors wide open for the media. When the Southern Poverty Law Center designates you “anti-immigrant” and a “vitriolic Mexican-basher,” what choice do you have? He’s showed up to legislative hearings in Phoenix and Democrats have walked out. He’s been in touch with the office of his congressman, Democratic Rep. Ron Barber, but apart from that he’s “persona non grata.”
 

So he talks to the press—and, he says, to defense contractors. Spencer initially invited me to the border to watch a trial run of a new gyroscopic surveillance drone designed by his team. The nucleus of the Spencer operation is actually Border Technology, Inc., headquartered a short walk from the guesthouse (just past a horse stable), and made famous in 2003 and 2004 when it started running homemade Border Hawk planes on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico fence. Two years ago, Spencer buried seismic sensors, the kind that he used to find oil deposits in his private sector days, to test whether they could trace border movements.
 

“I was a good systems engineering thinker,” he says. “That’s what I’m applying right now. Here I am trying to present technology trying to solve the border problem, and the whole thing is about what a hateful guy I am! What the hell is happening in this country?”
 

What Spencer thinks is happening is that waves of illegal immigrants from Mexico have weakened America, and could weaken it further. This is specifically why he bothers the Southern Poverty Law Center. In the 1990s, while living in his native California, Spencer worked to pass Proposition 187 (which denied state benefits to the undocumented), and recoiled in horror when it was stymied by politicians and the courts. He started warning of a “Mexican takeover of the southwestern United States,” and in 2001 he delivered a homemade video about this, Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union, to every member of Congress.* DVDs of Spencer’s videos about “Aztlan” sit around Border Technology’s workrooms, right next to the CubeX 3-D printer the company just bought, to make plastic components for the new drones.

“I moved here because it was clear that California was just gone,” says Spencer. His old state went socialist, thanks to immigrants who grab at benefits, hospital care, and food stamps that we pay for. “Here’s a question. Why are 50 percent of the students at UCLA from Asia? Why are they not 70 percent Latinos? That’s because of a different attitude [toward] education. Instead of being launched into a brave new world of science and technology, we’re going backward. We keep this up, we’re going to be a Third-World country—the only one with nuclear weapons. Nobody’s ever thought of that? Us, turning into a third world country?”

This is rhetorical: Plenty of people have thought about that. That’s why the grand project of closing down the border with technology is such a risk. The senators currently trying to legalize millions of immigrants are in on the plan—not Spencer’s plan, exactly, but an impressive-sounding matrix that borrows from what we’ve learned in foreign wars. If they get their way, we’ll have a secure border and a growing immigrant population.
 

So Spencer and his team keep the discussion to two main topics: The reality of the border and the technology that could close it. The American Border Patrol’s compound is a short walk from the border itself, separated by rough red desert, bushes, and tufts of brown grass.
 

They estimate that the Identiseis project, the burying-sensors-in-the-ground plan, would cost $100,000 per mile. Sensors could be buried up to 6-feet deep, run on solar power—a massive green jobs initiative that tracks the footsteps of people trying to walk from Mexico into Texas or Arizona. The total price tag—maybe $200,000,000 to secure the entire border—sounds ludicrous, and apart from the defense contractor that Spencer can’t name (“one of the big five”), no one could verify it, but it’s roughly 5 percent of the cost of the border fence, and less than Boeing was going to ask for its own scheme—known as the Secure Border Initiative—had it actually worked before a disappointed Department of Homeland Security scrapped it in 2011.

Standing on the porch as Migra trots around the yard, I get the full spiel from Mike White, Spencer’s business partner and designer for 10 years, an athletic guy sporting a soul patch and wearing a polo shirt from his side job as a paramedic.

“For what we gave Boeing for that SBI disaster,” says White, “you could run this along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. And the Canada border. And you could take the rest of the money and retire. I don’t know why they’re not banging our doors down.”
 

“If the people who wanted legalization were thinking straight,” says Spencer, “they’d drive up to American Border Patrol and they’d bring out signs and start chanting. ‘We want this! We need this!’ They’d do that if they wanted to stop the drug trade? Right? Wouldn’t they?”

White laughs. “You wonder if they really want this secured. They land things on Mars, you know? How can they not secure our border?”

“They can find life on Mars, but they can’t find life on our border,” says Spencer.
 

“If people with water bottles and a backpack with no training can walk into this country without being detected,” White continues, “what would stop people with guns and bombs from doing that?”
 

Once, to prove how bad the security truly was, American Border Patrol staged a “terrorist” border crossing. White created a faux suitcase nuke, put it in a backpack with a prominent nuclear symbol, and snuck across the border. Twice. Spencer gives me an ATV tour of the area they were able to sneak past, which has changed plenty. He cuts a path between two 18-wheeler-sized plywood signs:
 

SAVE THE UNITED STATES
SECURE THE BORDER
 

The words are spelled out by miniature American flags. Attached to each flag is a message from one of the group’s donors—“Thank you for what you do” or a quote from some patriotic text. Twenty thousand of these flags are arrayed between the full text of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase. “When we get another 20,000 of these from American citizens, we need to think of a new sign,” he says. “Maybe: Good fences make good neighbors.”
 

We drive on and park at the fence. Spencer happily takes credit for it: He started filming the action on the border in 2003, and by 2009, presto, contractors were putting up the rust-colored barrier. “You can still see the flags we put on the old barbed wire fence,” says Spencer. The new fence curves west to a low mountain range where Spencer and other watchers used to spot migrants, clambering up old mining paths on ATVs. Going east the fence tapers off, replaced by a “Normandy fence.” It’s a run of X-shaped metal girders, about five feet high, hard but not that hard to clamber over. Grazing cows meander on the other side of the barrier. More of them stroll along the shallow river where the fence stops. A border patrol agent keeps his eye on the river. He waves at us as we take some photos.

When we’re done, Spencer and White set up the dry run of the seismic test. The drone test won’t happen, because they flew it yesterday, and after a few minutes the helicopter banked too hard and plummeted to the ground. The designers speculate that a flawed battery placement brought it down, something that can be easily fixed once they get more material for the 3-D printer.

So we wait for the seismic test, as a stiff wind whips the high desert. “Normally the sensor would work within 600 feet,” says Spencer, “but this might cut to 400. If it’s raining, you’d see it get cut to 300.” Three of Spencer’s some-time employees, including the guy who landscaped the lovely guesthouse pond, stroll out to the border fence past markers denoting every 200 feet. They wait for the signal.
 

“Go now,” says White.
 

They walk at a normal pace and barely hit the 600-foot marker before the foghorn sensor goes off.
“That’s great, that’s better than I thought,” says Spencer. “Isn’t that amazing? That seismograph was buried for two years. The manufacturer says it can work for 10 years without maintenance. I’m telling you, when we have this thing ready, in another 30 days, this sensor will work and the chopper will pop up, fly, and take pictures. We will do that. We will do that.”
 

It’s time to check out of the guesthouse. I add my name to a rundown of foreign journalists, state senators, and Tea Party activists who’d stayed in the house since the renovation, and I drive to the suburbs of Tucson two hours up the road. Sen. John McCain is holding the second of two town halls in mostly-hostile territory. One high schooler asks him why we should let border-crossers become citizens “when one in five has a criminal record.” (McCain points out that this isn’t true.) But he disarms the critics.
 

“In Iraq, we developed incredible technology, Gen. Petraeus did, because of the IED problem,” says McCain. “They developed a radar which not only surveils the types of people doing things, but believe it or not, this radar tracks them back to where they came from. We need to have this radar all across our border, and the sensors and the drones, so we can assure the people of this country, the people of Arizona, that we have effective control of our border.”
 

McCain keeps coming back to that point. Mike Wilson, an activist with the Tohono O’odham nation near Tucson, listens politely. He’s “wearing his tribal hat” today, he tells me, but he works with the Border Action Network, one of several groups that tries to assist immigrants crossing from Mexico by leaving supplies for them in the desert. He is about as far away from Glenn Spencer’s worldview as anyone can get. He supports what McCain’s doing—“we need to get the immigration train out of the station.” And although he’s not convinced that the militarization of the border is the answer, his nation is convinced.
 

“They live in fear of drugs coming across,” says Wilson. “I have to acknowledge that. I have to honor those fears. When I go down there and try to talk to human rights violations, they tell me: You don’t live here. You live comfortably. You don’t have to worry about your kid getting off at a bus stop in the desert and walking half a mile as drug cartels are moving past them.” They don’t have any problem with border drones or militarization? “They want it,” says Wilson.
 

Spencer wants it, too. He wouldn’t mind if his technology becomes the backbone for the barrier, and he scores a contract. (“You want to know how to make a small fortune on the border?” he says. “Start with a large fortune.”) But he’s most interested in getting illegal border crossings below 20,000 per year, down from the high six figures that try crossing now. There are supporters of pure open borders, sure, but in politics there’s no real disagreement anymore about locking down the border with whatever technology it takes. Either the restrictionists win, and the solution stops there, or the legalizers win, and the immigrants who’ve made it to Spencer’s side of the border get to stay there.
 

*Correction, May 6, 2013: This article misstated the name of the Arizona highway David Weigel turned off to get to Glenn Spencer's property on the U.S.-Mexico border. It is Arizona Route 92. It also misstated the name of the homemade video Spencer delivered to members of Congress. It is called Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union, not Bonds of Our Nation.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/05/glenn_spencer_s_american_border_patrol_is_waging_a_high_tech_campaign_to.html

Romney calls Arizona immigration law a model for the nation

Los Angeles Times
February 22, 2012
By Michael A. Memoli

Mitt Romney called the controversial Arizona illegal immigration law a model for
the country, and blasted the Obama administration for challenging it in court."I will drop those lawsuits on Day One," Romney said in response to a question on illegal immigration during a GOP candidate debate in Mesa, Ariz. Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the bill, was in the audience.

"I'll also complete the fence, I'll make sure we have enough Border Patrol agents to
secure the fence, and I will make sure we have an E-Verify system and require employers to check the documents of workers," he added.

Rick Santorum praised Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for a tough stance on illegal immigration, and said he would support local law enforcement efforts to tackle the challenges it posed. Newt Gingrich defended his past support for a comprehensive approach to illegal immigration, and said if elected he would "go one step at a time" -- starting with securing the border.

Gingrich otherwise declined to respond directly to concerns by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and others that Republicans have risked harming the party among Latinos with their hard-line stances.

Ron Paul joked in his answer about the need to "forget about the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan and deal with our border."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-gop-debate-illegal-immigration-20120222,0,7736719.story

Illegal immigration is flash point for Republican White House hopefuls

Washington Post
September 1, 2011
By Philip Rucker and and Amy Gardner


KEENE, N.H. — Mitt Romney opened his town hall meeting here talking about the economy — his thoughts on growing business, getting government out of the way — just as he does nearly every other campaign event. But when he opened last week’s forum for questions, the first voter he called on didn’t seem concerned about any of that. He wanted to know the Republican presidential candidate’s stance on border security.

A similar scene played out in South Carolina a few days later, when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) attended a town hall meeting she assumed would center on the economy, jobs and the federal deficit — only to see the assembled voters react most passionately to her comments on illegal immigration.

Polls may not suggest it, and the candidates may not be catering to it, but immigration is an issue that voters won’t let the GOP White House hopefuls escape.

Republican primary voters keep bringing immigration up as the candidates campaign in back yards, opera houses and recreation halls across Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. To a sizable chunk of those who will pick the GOP’s presidential nominee, immigration is an urgent issue, even a litmus test.

“Immigration is not even close to the top issue for most Republicans today, but it is an issue that is heavy with symbolic importance to Republican voters,” said GOP pollster Jon Lerner, who advised Tim Pawlenty until he dropped out of the race last month. “If a candidate is squishy on immigration, that symbolically suggests that he’s probably unreliable on a whole host of other conservative issues.”

The view in the Republican Party on immigration has shifted dramatically to the right since 2006, when President George W. Bush proposed an overhaul that would have combined a legalization plan with tighter border security.

The issue is likely to take on even greater significance in the race for the Republican nomination with the recent entrance of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who oversees the nation’s biggest border state and who has a longer and more complicated record on immigration than his opponents.

Since entering the race, Perry has taken a tough stance on the issue.

“Once we secure the border, we can have a conversation about immigration reform in this country, but not until,” Perry told reporters after a campaign stop last month in South Carolina. “You must have the federal government putting the resources, the boots on the ground, the aviation assets in the air, and secure that border so that we know that the border is secure before we have a conversation about any immigration reform.”

Perry’s history with the border is more nuanced than that. He has long advocated a more seamless border between his state and Mexico, and he has traveled there to drum up business for his state. In 2007, he called the proposed construction of a fence between the United States and Mexico “idiocy,” saying “it absolutely would not work.”

Ray Sullivan, Perry’s communications director, said that remains Perry’s position.

“Fencing a 2,000-mile border is not practical,” Sullivan said. “The governor does and has always supported what he calls ‘strategic fencing’ in urban and high-trafficked areas.”

During Perry’s first year in office, he signed a law allowing any student who has lived in Texas for three years and graduates from a Texas high school to pay in-state tuition at state colleges, regardless of their citizenship status.

The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support but now is criticized by some Republicans as a precursor to the federal DREAM Act, a Democratic proposal to create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants brought into the country as children.

On immigration, Romney’s position is to secure the border before considering comprehensive reform. At the town hall in Keene, he said that means to “turn off the magnet.”

“Employers in the U.S. who knowingly hire people who are here illegally — that’s the magnet,” he said. “So we have to crack down on employers that hire illegals, make it easy for them to determine who’s here legally and who’s not, and then crack down on those who hire illegals.”

Bachmann, too, wants to crack down on those who are in the United States illegally. On a recent five-day campaign swing, she was asked about immigration at virtually every stop. At one, a town hall meeting in North Charleston, S.C., she elicited the most passionate response of the evening when she took a question on immigration.

Bachmann promised to build a fence along “every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch” of the nation’s southern border, to “have the back” of enforcement agents, and to put an end to the provision of federal benefits to illegal immigrants.

But she really got her audience going with a series of lamentations about the border that places her to the right of her opponents.

“On the southern border, we are dealing with a narco-terrorist state today in Mexico,” Bachmann said. “Because 70 percent of narcotics are coming to the United States are coming from Mexico. Mexico is in a very different place right now. We are seeing criminals, felons, drugs, we’re seeing contagious diseases coming into our country. What is wrong with our government that it isn’t stopping this from coming into the nation?”

The applause was loud, yet the man who asked the question, Rich Wiedenhoft, left unsatisfied.

“The very town I live in is a sanctuary city, and I’m very ashamed of that,” Wiedenhoft, 63, an Air Force retiree, said later in an interview. “I served in the military for 20 years defending the flag. And I resent people coming in here and taking advantage of us. I consider them invaders.”

So which candidate might appeal more than Bachmann?

“That,” he said, “is what I keep going to these meetings to find out.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/illegal-immigration-is-flash-point-for-republican-white-house-hopefuls/2011/09/01/gIQAUb0LvJ_story.html

Bachmann's swing through SC brings swipe at billionaire Buffett, calls for Mexico border wall

Associated Press
August 16, 2011
by Jim Davenport



GREENVILLE, S.C. — Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann on Tuesday called for a wall on the border with Mexico and suggested that billionaire Warren Buffett should write a big check to the government if he's eager for higher taxes on the wealthy.

The Minnesota Republican began a three-day swing through this early GOP primary state fresh off winning a narrow straw poll victory last week in Iowa over Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

Bachmann said lax enforcement of immigration laws was a threat to the nation's security. She agreed with a town hall questioner at a Greenville stop that U.S. troops should be redeployed from South Korea to south Texas.

"How do you solve it? You build a barrier, a fence, a wall — whatever you want to call it. You build it," Bachmann said. "As president of the United States, every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch will be covered on that southern border."

The "problem is not our laws on immigration," Bachmann said. "The problem has been in our unwillingness to enforce the laws that are on the books." South Carolina legislators this year passed one of the nation's toughest illegal immigration laws. It goes into effect in December.

Bachmann's first stop was at a popular burger joint in nearby Spartanburg where she was surrounded by a crowd of about 300 people baking in a black top parking lot.

Bachmann criticized President Barack Obama's call for the wealthy to pay higher taxes and Buffett's support of the idea.

"We do believe, unlike Warren Buffett, that taxes are high enough already," she said. "I have a suggestion: Mr. Buffett, write a big check today."

In a state where candidates are rarely heckled, Bachmann got an earful. A man in a black suit called out repeatedly: "Are you anti-gay marriage." During an interview Sunday, Bachmann was asked about her faith, same-sex marriage and whether she would appoint someone who was openly gay.

Bachmann noted the heckler and the interview questions. "I am not ashamed to say that I believe in God. We were founded on religious liberty and we are going to stand on religious liberty," Bachmann said. "And we believe in marriage between one man and one woman."

Bachmann was sharply critical of Obama's fiscal policies and job policies in a state with 10.5 percent unemployment — the highest among the nation's early primary states.

She called Obama "an anti-job president."

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/d6f6cc77419143e38d0b6dedab5e1a8a/US--Bachmann-2012/

Channel 3/AZ Family's Whitewash of Extremist Nativist Glenn Spencer

Phoenix New Times
May 18, 2009
by Stephen Lemons

I've been so busy chasing Sand Land neo-Nazis that I haven't had a chance to blog about this April 30 piece on the border fence by Channel 3 reporter Carey Pena. The segment would've been a rather pedestrian report on the 700 miles of border fencing being built because of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, had it not been for Channel 3 using Glenn Spencer of the American Border Patrol as the segment's main talking head.

See, Spencer is an extremist nativist, whose Sierra Vista-based ABP has been denounced as an anti-immigrant hate organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report. Similarly, ABP has been labeled a "virulently anti-Hispanic group" by the Anti-Defamation League in a 2003 analysis entitled, Border Disputes: Armed Vigilantes in Arizona.

SPLC's Intelligence Report notes that Spencer was "one of the first well-known anti-immigration activists to more or less openly court white supremacists and anti-Semites." Spencer's spoken before conferences of American Renaissance magazine, which promotes,"a clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites," according to AR's editor Jared Taylor. Spencer also promoted a book on his site by Taylor called The Color of Crime, which posits the false theory that African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to break the law.

The ADL's report on vigilantes is hardly more flattering when it comes to Spencer. It quotes a 1996 letter to the Los Angeles Times from Spencer that states, "the Mexican culture is based on deceit." ADL notes Spencer's fixation on the ludicrous reconquista conspiracy theory, which holds that the Mexican government is using illegal immigration to take over the American southwest. And ADL describes Spencer's alliance with controversial Cochise County rancher Roger Barnett.

Barnett is notorious in southern Arizona for detaining illegal immigrants at gunpoint. Earlier this year, he was found liable in by a federal civil jury for assault and emotional distress, and ordered to pay $77,804 in damages. This is on top of a nearly $100,000 award against Barnett from 2007 in another incident where members of a hunting party sued him for allegedly terrorizing them with an assault rifle.

Spencer's also had his run-ins with the law, as has been detailed at length by area daily The Sierra Vista Herald. The paper reports that in 2003 Spencer was arrested by the Cochise County Sheriff's Department after reports of gun shots coming from Spencer's property. One of Spencer's bullets passed through the walls of a neighbor's garage, damaging a baby crib kept there. Spencer ultimately pleaded guilty to endangerment. He received a year's probation and had to pay a $2,500 fine.

Stranger still, in 2008, Spencer's Cessna 206 was buzzed by two U.S. Air Force F-16s as he apparently crossed into Mexican airspace illegally, according to a Herald report. The incident is highly ironic given Spencer's views on illegal border crossers going in the opposite direction.

But none of these accounts of Spencer's dubious statements and activities were mentioned in Channel 3's report. Instead, Spencer was treated as an authority on the border fence, instead of the fringe nativist that he is.

"Spencer is the founder of the watchdog group American Border Patrol," said Carey Pena in the segment. "He lives near Sierra Vista and spends much of his time in the air flying the border to see how much of the fence is really being built."

Pena even gave Spencer a plug at the end of the report, telling viewers that "for more information on Glenn Spencer's group, you can go to our Web site azfamily.com, just click on the `3 on Your Side' link."

I called up Pena, and asked her about her use of Spencer in the segment. She admitted that she did not know the specifics of Spencer's criminal history, his anti-Mexican statements, or links to white supremacist groups. However, she defended the piece, pointing out that she's Hispanic, and that Channel 3 was committed to presenting different points of view. I encouraged her to contact the ADL and ask its people about Spencer's reputation.

There's nothing wrong with having Spencer be part of a piece on border issues, or allowing him to express his opinion even. But to present him as the member of a "watchdog group," while ignoring Spencer's past, his criminal history, his ties to white supremacists like Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and Spencer's own bigoted statements and extremist rhetoric, is irresponsible.

Essentially, in this instance, Pena and Channel 3 whitewashed an extremist, and helped promote his cause.

After speaking with Pena, I called her back and left a message asking her to inform me if Channel 3 did any sort of follow-up discussing Spencer's past. I've yet to receive a return call, and I cannot find any evidence that Channel 3 has corrected itself on the Spencer matter.

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2009/05/channel_3az_familys_whitewash.php