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SEPTEMBER 2 - 8, 2005
The American Character


Eyes Wide Shut
Glenn Spencer, frightened by what he saw in L.A., moved to Arizona to keep watch over the border
by BEN EHRENREICH


Glenn Spencer was late. I had been waiting for 30 minutes outside the Jumping Jack gas station in Palominas, Arizona, when his green minivan rattled up beside me. A ruddy-faced man of 67 with a dusty Army cap pulled over his white hair and a small bruise beneath one eye, Spencer rolled down a window, barked an apology and zoomed back onto the highway. His German shepherd, Star, panted on the seat beside him. I followed, and did my best to keep up as Spencer sped down a series of increasingly rutted dirt roads carved through the mesquite scrub. He weaved in long, sudden arcs to avoid the larger potholes, kicking up a blinding cloud of dust behind him.

Pulling at last into a barbed-wire enclosure decorated with a multitude of private-property signs, Spencer stopped in front of his home: a lonely triple-wide hunched beneath a Border Patrol radio tower. He leapt out of the van, light on his feet for a man of his age and girth. Tongue lolling, the dog followed. Spencer pointed to a ridge line a few miles to the west. “My guys are on the way to the mountain,� he announced. “You can’t go with them. Nobody can go with them.�

He swiveled to aim his index finger at one of the antennas bristling from the roof of his home. “See that flat antenna up there? That’s motorized, and I’ll be pointing that at them.� Then he jogged off to the edge of the dirt drive and, chin tucked into his barrel chest, began trudging tight, delicate figure eights in the hard desert soil. “I’ll show you something here,� he said without looking up or pausing from his strange, lumbering dance. “We’ll just walk around, then we’ll go back in the house.�

Inside, Spencer’s home looked like an Ethan Allen showroom: plush new carpets, miniblinds, lots of polished oak. A telescope on a tripod pointed out the bay window toward the Sonoran Desert stretching beyond. Spencer led me through his bedroom, past a sleigh bed, a heavy oak dresser and matching armoire. In the far corner, the suburban furnishings abruptly ended and Spencer’s “work area� began. Three tables had been pushed together and piled with computers, monitors, keyboards, speakers, telephones, coiled USB cables, audio mixers, VCRs, CB receivers, external hard drives, machines I couldn’t identify, all of it jumbled and heaped like a NORAD control room on a getaway drunk. The floor was covered with surge strips, pistachio shells, what appeared to be red-wine stains, more tangles of cables.

Spencer directed my attention to one of the monitors. It was flashing red. The ground sensors buried around the perimeter of the property had detected five intruders in the spot where he had been stomping and twirling outside the house. “It also has the capability of dialing up a pager,� Spencer said, beaming, and offered me a Diet Coke.


Glenn Spencer’s home is 1,100 feet from the Mexican border, and it is the proximity of that imaginary line that brought him from Sherman Oaks to Cochise County, Arizona, two years ago. For a decade, Spencer’s had been one of the loudest, brashest voices in the California anti-immigration movement. The organization he founded in the early 1990s, Voice of Citizens Together (VCT, originally Valley Citizens Together, but later changed for a more cosmopolitan appeal), was one of the main backers of Proposition 187, and in those days Spencer was rarely far from the cameras. He took the issue further than many of his fellow travelers, raging over an “illegal invasion� that he saw as no mere accident of global economics but as a sly conspiracy aimed at the “reconquista� of American territories once held by Mexico. He has called for all undocumented immigrants (and their American-born children) to be rounded up and deported, for the banning of all foreign-language TV and radio broadcasts, for the military to be deployed to guard the border, for migrants caught crossing to be held in tent cities in the desert. His rhetorical and ideological excesses were constant enough and bold enough to get VCT labeled a “hate group� by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Spencer came to Cochise County for the first time in 2000, attracted by the reputation of Roger Barnett, a local rancher notorious for hunting and detaining Mexican migrants on and near his land and, at times, allegedly, assaulting them. (Criminal charges have never been filed against Barnett, though he is the target of several civil suits.) In one case, a migrant named José Rodrigo Quiroz Acosta alleged that Roger Barnett sicced two German shepherds on him and beat him with his fists while the dogs were biting him.

Barnett’s adventures inspired Spencer to found American Border Patrol, a high-tech precursor to the Minuteman Project that sought to embarrass the federal government into further militarizing the border by documenting illegal immigration: Spencer’s “guys� head up into the mountains on ATVs, set up a sophisticated and extremely expensive infrared video camera and a transmitter, and “wait for somebody to show up.� If any migrants are unlucky enough to cross their path, the guys radio the U.S. Border Patrol and Spencer uploads the footage to the Web.

He has also spent much of the last few years working on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the “Border Hawk,� a remote-control airplane equipped with a camera, but when I met him in Arizona, he didn’t have all the kinks worked out just yet. “The Border Hawk is very complicated,� Spencer frowned. (The Department of Homeland Security has since purchased two “Predator� UAVs, Spencer recently told me over the phone. “With that we feel we have achieved our objective. We are now going to a different phase. We’ve decided to go into a fixed-wing platform.�)

According to Spencer, he moved permanently to Arizona in 2002 only after a long meditation. “What is the highest and best use of your time?� he asked himself. “Going and making an issue of the border itself.� It likely didn’t hurt that VCT was facing a tax-fraud investigation in California. Spencer rented a large house in a subdivision in Sierra Vista, about 20 minutes northwest of Palominas. He moved his wife of over 40 years out and set up shop. (Spencer refused to answer questions about his family, but when I met him, he was living alone and did not wear a ring.) He was forced out of that house last fall, after the local homeowners’ group won his eviction in court. Technically, he was kicked out for running a business out of his home, but, Spencer insisted, “It was political.�

He may have been right, but other factors may also have been involved. The previous summer, Spencer had been arrested after firing a rifle into his neighbors’ yards. “He was in his home when he heard noises in his back yard,� the Sierra Vista Herald reported. “During that evening, he had consumed three beers.� Spencer initially faced seven felony charges, but ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of endangerment and was sentenced to a year’s probation. “I thought I was acting in self-defense,� he said at the time, an alibi that might apply equally to the last decade of his political life.

Spencer grew up in Los Angeles. His roots are wound deep in the myth-rich soil of the white California dream. His family migrated west from Missouri during the Depression: One uncle was a founding member of the Sons of the Pioneers, the cowboy singing group that spawned Roy Rogers, and his father was the songwriter who wrote the theme for Gunsmoke. One of Spencer’s brothers is a minister. Another is a retired LAPD commander. “I have another brother who was an engineer,� Spencer told me proudly, “brilliant man, helped design the smart bomb.�

When I asked him about the L.A. of his childhood, Spencer’s eyes brightened. As we spoke, he swiveled in his chair from one machine to another. With a few keystrokes he drew up footage of old news broadcasts on one of the monitors, infrared video of frightened-looking migrants stumbling through the mountains on another. He answered the ever-ringing phone â€â€