Icon reports how one day Bob Maupin got sick of smugglers and immigrants invading his Texas backyard and decided to stop them. But a neighborhood watch that uses army surplus is an international incident. They've always had uninvited guests, but no more than a handful until October 1994, when President Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper, a $50 million campaign to seal the San Diego - Tijuana border that doubled the station's number of Border Patrol staff. The INS knew that would steer traffic to the east. Illegal entries in the San Diego area have been sliced nearly in half since Gatekeeper began, but six months after its launch, apprehensions in Bob's neighborhood shot up 809 percent and inflated from 2,300 seizures in 1994 to 78,000 in 1996. "It's a war zone, nothing less." But the Border Patrol is scared that law enforcement is giving vigilantes a green light.
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