Despite the growing controversy about illegal aliens nationwide, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office remains the only Arizona law enforcement agency willing to enforce a new state anti-smuggling law.

"There are so many illegals trying to make it into the county that it's overwhelming my deputies, so I have called on members of my 3000 member volunteer posse to assist," says Sheriff Arpaio. "It's not only illegals we find and arrest out there, we've also made some recent huge drug seizures involving illegal aliens including nearly 100 pounds of methamphetamine and approximately three pounds of heroin."

Posse member Andrew Ramsammy, who was part of Tuesday's arrest team, says that he believes he represents many of his peers when he says that the posse is anxious to be a part of the Sheriff's solution to the immigration problem.

"As a group of law abiding people, we are fed up with the number of people who come into this county illegally. We're tired of the drugs that some of them bring to sell to our young people and we're ready and willing to assist the Sheriff's deputies in the fight against illegal immigration," says Ramsammy.

Sheriff Arpaio says Tuesday's arrests include two coyotes, one of whom may be charged with a far more serious offense - endangerment.

Virgilio Parra Sabori may face a class 6 felony charge if it is determined that he recklessly left one of his customers to die in the desert.

That customer, who may have paid as much as $1100 to gain entrance into the country, was a 24-year-old Mexican male found near death by deputies who combed the desert earlier Tuesday after being told by other people in the vehicle that one man was left behind. That young man was found lying in the sun on the desert floor and is currently in serious condition in a west valley hospital.

Arpaio says his deputies so far have made seven anti-smuggling cases in the last few weeks alone and that 120 illegals have been arrested and jailed.

Arpaio houses 10,000 prisoners in his jails, including almost 2000 in a tent city he erected in 1993. Tent City is being expanded to hold an anticipated increase in of inmates being incarcerated in the Maricopa County jails.

The group hopes to counter the impact made by the more than 1 million illegal immigrants and their supporters who took to the nation's streets earlier this week. Project officials acknowledged, however, that they would have a hard time mustering the same kind of numbers for a rally of their own. Demonstrations by the Minuteman Project on Monday were scattered and small, often numbering fewer than 100 people per city.

"Our power is not putting a million people on the street, our power is putting 10 million people at the voting box," said Stephen Eichler, the group's executive director. "Their voice is accompanied by a lot of bodies, but our voice is accompanied by even more bodies who aren't going to go out in the street."

The caravan is scheduled to leave from Los Angeles and arrive on Capitol Hill for a May 12 rally as senators rush to pass an immigration reform bill before a Memorial Day deadline set by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Federal lawmakers must then reconcile the Senate bill - which will likely include a guest worker program and a potential path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants - with a House bill that would criminalize them.

The caravan will include about 100 staff members and supporters, said Eichler. It will stop in President Bush's vacation haven of Crawford, Texas, as well as in Phoenix, Ariz.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Abilene, Texas; Little Rock, Ark.; Memphis and Nashville, Tenn.; Montgomery, Ala.; Atlanta; and Richmond, Va.

One supporter, Penny Magnotto of Upland, Calif., said she and a friend were planning to follow the caravan in their RV and visit seven additional states on their return to recruit more members.

"If one in 100 people that we meet up with kind of get it and see that we're nice family people I will be thrilled," said Magnotto, founder of the Minuteman spin-off Minutewomen on the Road.

Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960's were American citizens and had endured centuries of enslavement, rapes, lynchings and discrimination before they started marching.

Others worry about the plight of low-skilled black workers, who sometimes compete with immigrants for entry-level jobs.

And some fear the unfinished business of the civil rights movement will fall to the wayside as America turns its attention to a newly energized Hispanic minority with growing political and economic clout.

"All of this has made me start thinking, 'What's going to happen to African-Americans?' " said Brendon L. Laster, 32, a black fund-raiser at Howard University here, who has been watching the marches. "What's going to happen to our unfinished agenda?"

Mr. Laster is dapper and cosmopolitan, a part-time professor and Democratic activist who drinks and dines with a wide circle of black, white and Hispanic friends. He said he marveled at first as the images of cheering, flag-waving immigrants flickered across his television screen. But as some demonstrators proclaimed a new civil rights movement, he grew uncomfortable.

He says that immigrant protesters who claim the legacy of Dr. King and Rosa Parks are going too far. And he has begun to worry about the impact that the emerging immigrant activism will have on black Americans, many of whom still face poverty, high rates of unemployment and discrimination in the workplace.

"I think what they were able to do, the level of organization they were able to pull off, that was phenomenal," said Mr. Laster, who is also a part-time sociology professor at a community college in Baltimore. "But I do think their struggle is, in fundamental ways, very different from ours. We didn't chose to come here; we came here as slaves. And we were denied, even though we were legal citizens, our basic rights."

"There are a still lot of unresolved issues from the civil rights era," he said. "Perhaps we're going to be pushed to the back burner."

This painful debate is bubbling up in church halls and classrooms, on call-in radio programs and across dining room tables. Some blacks prefer to discuss the issue privately for fear of alienating their Hispanic allies. But others are publicly airing their misgivings, saying they are too worried to stay silent.

"We will have no power, no clout," warned Linda Carter-Lewis, 62, a human resources manager and the branch president of the N.A.A.C.P. in Des Moines. "That's where I see this immigrant movement going. Even though so many thousands and thousands of them have no legal status and no right to vote right now, that day is coming."

Immigrant leaders defend their use of civil rights language, saying strong parallels exist between the two struggles. And they argue that their movement will ultimately become a powerful vehicle to fight for the rights of all American workers, regardless of national origin.

"African-Americans during the civil rights movement were in search of the American dream and that's what our movement is trying to achieve for our community," said Jaime Contreras, president of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, which organized the April 10 demonstration that drew tens of thousands of people to Washington.

"We face the same issues even if we speak different languages," said Mr. Contreras, who is from El Salvador and listens to Dr. King's speeches for inspiration.

Mr. Jackson, who addressed the immigrant rally on Monday in New York, echoed those views. He noted that Dr. King, at the end of his life, focused on improving economic conditions for all Americans, regardless of race. And he said the similarities between African-Americans and illegal immigrants were too powerful to ignore.

"We too were denied citizenship," Mr. Jackson said. "We too were undocumented workers working without wages, without benefits, without the vote. "We should feel honored that other people are using tactics and strategies from our struggle. We shouldn't say they're stealing from us. They're learning from us."

Mr. Jackson said corporate employers were fueling the tensions between blacks and immigrants by refusing to pay a living wage to all workers. John Campbell, a black steel worker and labor activist from Iowa, agreed.

"This is a class issue," said Mr. Campbell, who has been disheartened by black critics of the immigrant marches. "We need to join forces. We can't improve our lot in life as African-Americans by suppressing the rights of anyone else."

But blacks and immigrants have long had a history of uneasy relations in the United States.

W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and other prominent black leaders worried that immigrants would displace blacks in the workplace. Ronald Walters, director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, said blacks cheered when the government restricted Asian immigration to the United States after World War I. And many Europeans who came to this country discriminated against blacks.

Blacks and Hispanics have also been allies. In the 1960's, Dr. King and Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American farm labor leader, corresponded with each other. And when Mr. Chavez was jailed, Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, visited him in jail, Mr. Walters said. In recent years, blacks and Hispanics have been influential partners in the Democratic Party.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center captured the ambivalence among blacks over immigration. Nearly 80 percent said immigrants from Latin American work very hard and have strong family values.

But nearly twice as many blacks as whites said that they or a family member had lost a job, or not gotten a job, because an employer hired an immigrant worker. Blacks were also more likely than whites to feel that immigrants take jobs away from American citizens.

Mr. Walters said he understood those conflicting emotions, saying he feels torn himself because of his concerns about the competition between immigrants and low-skilled black men for jobs. In 2004, 72 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.

"I applaud them moving out of the shadows and into the light because of the human rights issues involved," Mr. Walters said of illegal immigrants. "I've given my entire life to issues of social justice as an activist and an academic. In that sense, I'm with them.

"But they also represent a powerful ingredient to the perpetuation of our struggle," he said. "We have a problem where half of black males are unemployed in several cities. I can't ignore that and simply be my old progressive self and say it's not an issue. It is an issue."

Amnesty condemns discrimination by the authorities and a failure to properly record or investigate racist crimes.

Attacks that stain Russia

The Amnesty report, entitled "Russian Federation: Violent racism out of control", includes examples of police and prosecutors routinely classifying murders and serious assaults by skinhead extremists as lesser crimes of "hooliganism".

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said racist killings and violent attacks against foreigners, visible ethnic minorities and anti-racist campaigners in Russia were out of control.

"Some Russian authorities are turning a blind eye," she said. "Instead of seeing only 'hooliganism' in vicious organised attacks on students from African, south-east Asian countries and non-Slavic Russians from Chechnya, Russia's police and prosecutors need to tackle head-on the growing scourge of violent racism in Russia."

She said President Vladimir Putin's government should adopt a comprehensive "plan of action" to combat racism and anti-Semitism.

Protests

Cases highlighted in the Amnesty report include the killing of nine-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultonov.

She was attacked with other members of her family in St Petersburg in February 2004 by a gang. Khursheda was stabbed nine times in the chest, stomach and arms and died at the scene.

Another victim was Vu Anh Tuan, a 20-year-old Vietnamese student, stabbed to death in October 2004 by a gang of 18 skinheads near a metro station in St Petersburg.

Dmitri Krayukhin, head of anti-racist organisation United Europe, told Amnesty he had received threats to "cut off your head".

He has repeatedly been denied protection from the authorities in Orel, western Russia.

The report also heard from members of the Roma community who have stopped travelling into St Petersburg city centre, having been the victims of attacks.

Russian citizens and foreigners living in the big cities have led demonstrations against the attacks and the authorities' failure to tackle the problem.