Volunteer Border Watchers Call It Quits

As they ended their monthlong campaign to monitor illegal immigrant activity along a 23-mile stretch of Arizona’s border, members of the Minuteman Project hailed the program as a success. They said calls to the Border Patrol by the project’s volunteers resulted in the arrests of 335 illegal immigrants.

Critics, including Border Patrol officials, have said the group was little more than a nuisance. President Bush expressed his opposition to “vigilantes,” and many people on the Mexican side of the border called the volunteers “migrant hunters.”