RURAL RESIDENTS, BORDER PATROL DO BATTLE

IMMIGRATION: Many say they are being harassed.

TIERRA DEL SOL-When Cole Dotson left home to join the Army, he left behind a
sleepy backwater of ranches and rural hideaways along the U.S.-Mexico
border, a place where his family and neighbors lived peacefully.

Three years later, he returned to a war zone.

Border Patrol agents sped down dirt roads at night with searchlights
blazing. They trampled over fences to capture illegal immigrants hiding in
the brush. Lifelong residents were stopped daily at checkpoints on outgoing
roads, questioned about where they were going and why.

"It was night and day," said Dotson, 25. "There were so many Border Patrol
agents and sheriff's deputies and illegals. It was like a totally different
world."

The agents were requested by residents to stem the tide of illegal
immigrants crossing their property. They've since become the enemy,
resulting in lawsuits, criminal charges and letter after letter to
newspapers and politicians.

"They're a bunch of unsupervised people running wild," said Robert Harris,
80. He said agents once ordered him out of his pickup and frisked him as he
was driving along a dirt road near the ranch where he's lived his entire
life.

Dotson's mother, Donna Tisdale, said border agents were needed after the
federal immigration crackdown Operation Gatekeeper began in 1994 at the San
Diego-Tijuana border, pushing migration into the eastern mountains and
desert.

Now that the border is under control, Tisdale said, young agents eager to
prove themselves are harassing many of the 6,500 residents living in this
unincorporated region known as the Mountain Empire.

Some see the conflict, which is occurring in Southwestern towns all along
the border, as the result of an influx of law enforcement officers into
communities where residents came to escape the pressures of society.

"Small towns like these have been turned into military zones and these
people feel embattled," said Michael Huspek, a professor at California State
University, San Marcos, who is writing a book about Operation Gatekeeper.

Border Patrol officials say the agency tries to work harmoniously with the
residents, but they also note that the Mountain Empire is prime territory
for drug and immigrant smuggling.

In the past four years, 46 area residents have been arrested for trafficking
drugs; at least eight people this year for migrant smuggling," said Chuck
Dierkop, who is in charge of the Border Patrol's local operations.

"We have an awful lot of people out here who have a historical connection to
smugglers," Dierkop said.

The number of agents at his Campo station has grown since 1995 from 49 to
322, guarding 25 miles of border and arresting 331,362 illegal immigrants,
he said.

Dotson, who grew up on a ranch within sight of the border, remembers when
arrests were a fraction of current totals - a time when Mexican laborers
would cross onto their property to work for the day and return home when
finished.

Dotson, who returned in 1995, initially resented the changes and sometimes
wouldn't open his trunk for agents or answer their questions. Now he's
resigned to living with the scrutiny.

"It sort of scares me," he said. "It's like we've given away our rights
because we live by the border."