Penny Magnotto and Gayle Nyberg stood at their post on a forbidding stretch of desert road, staring down the seven strands of barbed wire separating them from Mexico. The Southern California women had risen at dawn in their makeshift quarters at a nearly defunct Bible college to join scores of other volunteers from around the country on the first official day of a highly symbolic crusade. Their mission: to monitor the flow of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States and to do their legal best to stop it. So they stood ready — binoculars, walkie-talkie, sunblock, water — and gazed at the motionless landscape of sand and brush.Full Story