Last spring, while his Stanford Law School classmates prepared for graduation, Ray Ybarra found himself on a windswept bluff at the U.S.-Mexican border, watch-ing retired men and women with handguns and binoculars scan the desert for illegal immigrants. A group of vigilantes, called the Minuteman Project, had descend ed on southern Arizona to try to stop illegal Mexican migration. Ybarra ’05, who is on a two-year leave from the law school, was there to make sure they did not violate the rights of migrants. The desert that divides Mexico and the United States claims the lives of hundreds of immigrants every year. He didn’t want gun toting activists to add to the toll.

“Last year one girl died right by this road,” Ybarra said in April, referring to a victim of dehydration. He was look-ing down on a stretch of dust that serves as an inter-national boundary near the border town of Douglas, Arizona. The Minuteman Project had set up encampments every 50 yards or so, dressing their trucks in American flags and lay-ing out lawn chairs. Ybarra stood a stone’s throw away with a half dozen of his own volunteers, including two Stanford Law School students, Matthew Liebman ’06 and Jason Tarricone ’06.

Ybarra is intimately familiar with the border area and the plight of the migrants. His father hailed from Douglas. His mother was born a few hundred yards to the south, in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta. “We’d literally play on the border,” Ybarra said. “My brother and I had this game of running as far into Mexico as we could and then running back.”

At the age of 26, Ybarra’s efforts have catapulted him into a leading role as an advocate for migrant rights. “He really is quite a star to not only have thought of this projectbut to go to the border and make it happen,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, associate professor of law (teaching) and director of Stanford Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “The border is the location of a major civil rights struggle for immigrants right now.”

Minuteman organizer Chris Simcox has a somewhat less generous view of Ybarra’s work. “I tolerate Ray,” said Simcox. “As a father, I am always impressed with youthful idealism.” That idealism is what brought Ybarra to Stanford Law School in the first place. After his first year at Stanford, Ybarra spent the summer working in Arizona for the ACLU to raise awareness of vigilante activity against migrants. Lessthan a year later, he was awarded the ACLU’s Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship, which has allowed him to take a two-year leave of absence to work on the border.

With a small salary, Ybarra moved to his grandfather’s house in Douglas, where he set up an office in the laundry room. Within months he had helped file a federal civil law-suit against one rancher, Roger Barnett, who had allegedly held a group of 16 migrants at gunpoint. He distributed open letters to the local sheriff’s office, explaining the rights of migrants and the legal limits of citizen patrols. On behalf of the ACLU, he traveled the country lecturing legal groups on the hazards of the cur-rent border policy, and recently completed a video documentary of the role racism plays in border disputes. None of it was easy—he temporarily resigned from the ACLU after a dispute over tactics—but he has been unwavering in his commitment. “Ray is kind of a force of nature,” said Michele Landis Dauber, associate professor of law and Bernard D. Bergreen Faculty Scholar, who had him as a first-year law student at Stanford and later visited him on the border. “I think he has the potential to become as important a civil rights leader in the Latino community as Cesar Chavez.”

Simcox and other advocates of closing the border are now planning armed border patrols in Texas, New Mexico, and California, including a new patrol in California in which volunteers will carry long arms. Ybarra is hoping to help get legal observation posts set up in time. He moved in July to El Paso, Texas, to set up a legal monitoring program there.

Ybarra plans to return to Stanford in the fall of 2006 to complete his final year of law school, before he returns to the border to continue what he considers his life’s work. He will no doubt find many supporters on campus. “He is an amazing role model in the way that he lives by what he believes,” said Olivia Para ’07, who volunteered during the Minuteman protest. “I think ultimately what Ray is trying to do is to let people know what is happening.”