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Margarito Blanco trains his camcorder on the officer approaching a Chevy pickup, while his friend Andrew Sanchez furiously scribbles notes on a pad.

They are not working for the police. They're watching them.

It's about 8:10 p.m. on a recent Thursday and the turquoise S-10 is pulled over at a Circle K gas station in Phoenix.

Anywhere else in the United States, this might appear to be nothing more than a routine traffic stop. But Phoenix is ground zero in the battle over illegal immigration, and to Blanco and Sanchez the stop represents a potential opportunity to catch a member of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in the act of racial profiling.

CNN accompanied the pair as they cruised around Phoenix looking for traffic stops to document on the Thursday after Gov. Jan Brewer signed what's being called the nation's toughest anti-immigration enforcement law, SB 1070.

Although critics nationwide say Arizona's law allows police in the state to detain people based on race, grass-roots activists like Sanchez and other self-styled "cop-watchers" say racial profiling is nothing new here. They say SB 1070 stands to make matters worse.

"The Maricopa Sheriff's Office has been doing it for years, but this new law gives them the legal authority to stop people with even less reason for doing so," Sanchez told CNN.

The law, which takes effect in August, requires immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and allows police to question people if there is reason to suspect they are in the United States illegally. The new law also makes it a state crime to live in or travel through Arizona illegally, targeting those who hire undocumented day laborers or knowingly transport them.

In response to concerns that the law encourages police to racially profile, Brewer and the legislature amended it to specify that police can stop suspected illegal immigrants only while enforcing another law or ordinance.

Sanchez, an American-born community activist from the Arizona town of Guadalupe, began engaging in reverse police surveillance a year ago.

"Most of the time, we expect law enforcement to do their jobs properly," he said. "But we want to be there to monitor and observe in case they stop someone based on the color of their skin, because who else is going to do it?"

The traffic stops are among the most public aspects of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's hard line approach to what he calls "crime suppression and illegal immigration enforcement."

Arpaio's approach has drawn both criticism and praise, with supporters crediting the department with enforcing immigration laws already on the books. The passage of SB 1070 has thrust the media-friendly "Sheriff Joe" back into the spotlight as an ardent defender of the legislation, and he vows to uphold it.

Sanchez, who has himself been arrested in what he says was a case of racial profiling, has garnered his fair share of publicity in Arizona as a community activist and cop-watcher. His family's claim that the sheriff's department has retaliated against them for their activism was the subject of a 2009 cover story in the alternative newspaper Phoenix New Times.

Sanchez carries a binder containing copies of arrest reports, affidavits, lawsuits and tickets documenting his family's history of legal travails, some of which are ongoing. His experiences, along with stories he has heard from members of the community, encouraged him to take his community activism a step further by participating in cop watches.

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