Today the Associated Press reports that apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at the border declined for the fifth straight year, and are at the same rate we saw during the Nixon administration.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration continues to deport at a record clip.

And Republicans are moderating their hardline stance on immigration reform.  Republicans are historically  the party that enacts immigration reform. The last big reform was led by Ronald Reagan.

Newt is talking about a kinder, gentler policy. And so are pundits like  Bill O’Reilly.

The Republicans have a chance of winning this election if they can win over Latinos, who are disenchanted with what they see as the the Obama administration’s broken promises to enact reform.

This all leads me back to my book, which chronicled the vivid stories — and the stunning effects of a broken immigration policy — of undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix area during the Arizona immigration law controversy. In the book, Illegal, Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, I posited that the real problem wasn’t the right-wing frenzy over illegal immigration, because despite the heated rhetoric illegal immigration was waning significantly.

The real immigration problem centers on the unauthorized immigrants who live here  — and the  way in which our nation chooses to treat human beings.

Dominque Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who was widely viewed as a likely contender for the French presidency, faced sexual assault allegations by a chambermaid who says he attacked her in May. The maid, an immigrant from  Guinea, speaks a West African dialect called Fulani. The maid spoke Fulani to a mysterious West African friend who was incarcerated someplace in Arizona for drug charges, and the call was recorded, and this helped shatter  her credibility. (She also lied on her income tax form and her political asylum application, according to press reports.)  The reason the taped phone conversation shattered the maid’s cred,  at least in the eyes of newspaper reporters who talked to prosecutors,  is  that the maid said something to the effect of “Don’t worry I know what I am doing” and the inference was that she was going to scam DSK, who is enormously rich.

After word of the taped conversation got out, DSK, who on home arrest in cushy quarters in New York, was released. (He can’t leave the USA, though.) Prosecutors still haven’t decided whether they will pursue the case.

In other words, that phone call with the guy in Arizona was important.

I’m telling you all this so you’ll know why media outlets all over the USA were scrambling to get in touch with the mysterious West African friend, to get his side of the story. The problem, though, was that no one knew his name, or where he was incarcerated.

That is, until The Daily Beast found him. His name is Amara Tarawally, and he is an unauthorized immigrant from Sierra Leone, and in an exclusive interview with me, he claims  he’s the maid’s fiance. He was arrested in a pot bust in Chandler, Arizona, about a year ago. After serving time in jail, he was transferred to a detention center in Eloy, Arizona, pending a hearing on his immigration status.  But since his immigration case is based in New York, the case hasn’t been transferred out to Arizona yet and he’s in limbo. He told me even Sierra Leone would be better than detention because he’s been in the dark for so long, and feels cut off from the world. He also told me the phone call was taken completely out of context, that the maid is a beautiful woman who would never lie, and that he learned English from watching CNN, The Price is Right, and Deal or No Deal.

You can read the story here.

And here is an NBC interview I gave earlier today.

What do you think?

Did DSK assault the maid?

And how come just about every good news story has an Arizona connection?

ARIZONA EMPLOYER SANCTIONS LAW UPHELD BY U.S. SUPREME COURT ENFORCED AGAINST IMMIGRANTS, NOT EMPLOYERS

Last week, the United States Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s Employer Sanctions Law, which went into effect in 2008. The law was  supported by the  Federation for American Immigration Reform and sponsored by its chief Arizona ally, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce. The legislature passed the law in 2007,  and Gov. Janet Napolitano signed it, as a way to sanction employers who hired unauthorized workers. The law says any business twice caught and charged with hiring unauthorized workers could have its business license yanked.

I wrote about this law in 2007 and 2008 for Newsweek.com, taking a look at both sides.  At the time Janet Napolitano told me, “If Arizona is a laboratory for democracy, then so be it.”

And I wrote about the law again for The  Daily Beast, and included background info, the Supreme Court fight, etc. Keep in mind that this law has nothing to do with Arizona’s draconian immigration law, SB 1070, which is also being challenged in the courts.

Last week, the Supreme Court  upheld a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. In a nutshell, the court ruled that the employer sanctions  law was constitutional because it did not infringe on federal law. In fact, states are entirely within their rights to control business licenses, the courts ruled.

But, as is so often the case with Arizona immigration laws, the employer sanctions law does not punish Arizona businesses.

At least, not much.

Less  than five businesses have been sanctioned in the three years since the law  has taken effect.

Employer-sanctions prosecutions have occurred in only one county — Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and most of its suburbs. That’s the headquarters of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his allies in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors  from other counties don’t take the law seriously, saying it is a flawed piece of legislation that does not allow prosecutors the necessary tools to put forth a good case.

(Photo credit: promigrant.com)

The law,  intended to go after businesses, has been used by Sheriff Joe to investigate car washes and landscaping companies and round up unauthorized immigrants in front of television news cameras. At taxpayer expense, the zip-tied immigrants are hauled off to jail, slapped with working-with-fake-papers felony charges (identity theft and forgery)  defended by public defenders, prosecuted, tried, and sent to jail for several months. (Please see wonky footnote at end of this story.)

Then after they serve their jail time, many are deported.

But many are not. If they’ve got families in Phoenix,  they will do anything to stay with their kin.

That includes mounting a fight against deportation in federal immigration court. And while immigrants pay for their lawyers, taxpayers pay for the court costs and prosecution, which drags on for years.

So in Arizona, many consider the employer-sanctions law as a thinly disguised way to get rid of Mexicans.

Not sanction employers.

***

WONKY FOOTNOTE: (Sheriff Joe’s employer-sanctions based raids result in many undocumented immigrants in his jails classified as felons.  This classification is peculiar to Sheriff Joe’s  jails. The state and federal government do not have a way of counting the number of unauthorized immigrant felons in  prisons.  Repeat, there is no way to know how many undocumented migrant felons are in American  prisons. Prisons are where the hardcore guys go, and the feds don’t filter  felon undocumented immigrants in their stats. Instead, the feds and states lump all immigrant-crooks, documented and undocumented, into one category.)

ARIZONA’S TOUGHEST SHERIFF IGNORED SEX ABUSE VICTIMS, REPORT SAYS.

The  little boys and girls told authorities about the adults who molested and raped them, only to be ignored by the office of the Toughest Sheriff in America.

This is surely what happened in at least some of the 400 sex-crime cases that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office  mishandled, according to a well-publicized investigation of the Sheriff’s Office that was reported in the Arizona Republic.

And the sheriff knew about them. In a 2008 letter printed in The Arizona Republic, the police chief of El Mirage, a Phoenix suburb that contracted with Sheriff Joe for police services, wrote that  many of the 43 sex-abuse cases turned over to the sheriff’s office for investigation involved children and teens. The names of alleged abusers were handed over to the sheriff’s office.

But the sheriff’s office failed to follow through. The police chief  wrote in his letter to Sheriff Joe that the cases had grown cold.

Families moved out of town.

Victims and their abusers vanished.

Why did the office of the Toughest Sheriff in America choose to ignore the sex crime cases?

It focused its resources and manpower instead  on:

1. Battling Sheriff Joe’s political foes via well-publicized “public corruption” investigations that cost taxpayers millions and went nowhere and resulted in additional millions of dollars of claims against the county.
2. Rounding up “illegals” in immigration sweeps of Latino neighborhoods, and ensnaring U.S. citizens in the process, spurring  millions of dollars of additional court claims and lawsuits. Again, taxpayers footed the legal bills.

The sheriff himself now faces indictment as the feds close in on him.

He’s the target of two separate Justice Department investigations. The first investigation centers on alleged human rights abuses in the sheriff’s jails and during those immigration sweeps. The second probe centers on Arpaio’s alleged abuses of power.

The buzz in Arizona now centers on why it’s taking the feds so long to act.

I mean, we’ve read exposes about  Sheriff Joe’s mismanagement of his office and of conditions in his jails for years.

And years.

Tony Ortega, my former colleague at Phoenix New Times and the current editor of the Village Voice, began writing about irregularities in the sheriff’s office and jails back in the 1990s.

The newspaper continued exposing horrors in the jails–including unexplained deaths–for years.

And years.

As a result, Sheriff Joe and his supporter, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas (now facing disbarment for alleged abuses of power),  turned their sights on  Phoenix New Times  and even arrested its owners  in 2007 for publicizing a grand jury subpoena they generated. The subpoena required New Times to turn over the IP addresses and browsing habits of their readers.

The newspaper refused to comply with the subpoena.

Charges were dismissed, which frequently happens when the Sheriff’s Office goes after its perceived foes.

A year later, in 2008, the tiny East Valley Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for a series exposing how Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office focused on costly immigration sweeps and neglected real crime solving, including the solving of sex crimes in El Mirage, that  impoverished Phoenix suburb that contracted with Sheriff Joe for police services.

The Pulitzer series was published at he height of Sheriff Joe’s terrifying immigration raids. I know. I immersed myself in one such raid and wrote about it in my book. It appeared  expensive, to say the least.  Cops in helicopters. Cops in riot gear. Cops in squad cars. Cops in unmarked cars. Cops on horses. Cops on motorcycles. Cops on foot. Cops in cars. Cops in a mobile command  unit. All of this to round up a handful of undocumented Mexicans.

Fast forward to 2011. Two of the sheriff’s trusted aides have been fired, and one is on administrative leave for conducting bogus investigations of Sheriff Joe’s enemies, and for misspending funds, and for running a weird shadow campaign organization that, among other things, wrongly smeared Sheriff Joe’s opponent in the 2008 election. You can read about this in Phoenix New Times. And The Arizona Republic.

If any of these ex-aides are charged with crimes, Sheriff Joe’s foes say,  it is likely they’ll snitch on Sheriff Joe to save their own skins.

All of this raises the unanswered question — how did Sheriff Joe get re-elected and re-elected even in the wake of so much media scrutiny?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and it is my considered opinion that folks like  Arpaio, State Senator Russell Pearce,  and a slew of  minor extremist candidates  get elected for one or all of these reasons:

1. Arizonans consume less news than average Americans, which makes them less engaged, according to the Morrison Institute of Public Policy.
2. Arizonans who do not consume news elect officials who promise to entertain them.
3. Arizonans who do not consume news tend to blow off primary elections, where extremist demagogues get their footing.

Of course these uninformed voters hurt themselves — and the state.

Arizona’s new image as a racist backwater, with its firebrand sheriff and harsh immigration laws, has damaged the very economy Arizona voters depend on for their laid-back lives.

If voters cut back on reality tv and golf and shopping and their own problems just for a few minutes — the span of time it takes to scan the newspaper or online news venues — would  they still elect Sheriff Joe?

Sheriff Joe professes his innocence. He says he knew nothing of the sleaze in his office.  If that’s true, he’s a terrible manager. But if he knew about what was going on,  then he will likely be indicted.

I spent many hours with Sheriff Joe and he takes up a chapter in my book. There’s pathos in his story.

Photo by Kathy McCraine

Honestly, he will go down blaming an imagined leftist conspiracy for bringing him down.

Sheriff Joe will fight.

He’ll get his day in court.

But many of the abused children will never get justice.

MYTHBUSTING 101- CRIMINAL ALIENS IN ARIZONA PRISONS

Flashback to 2010. During the height of the battle over SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law that makes it a state crime for unauthorized migrants to set foot in Arizona (it has been paralyzed in the courts, and is largely emasculated at this point) I spoke with John Kavanagh, one of the supporters of SB 1070. Kavanagh is a former Port Authority and New Jersey cop. He retired as a detective sergeant. And he told me that “illegal” prison inmates are costing Arizona plenty.

I remember asking him how he knew this, and he referred me to the Arizona Department of Corrections.

The department now reports about 13 percent of its prison population is made up of “criminal aliens.”

But that does not mean that  13 percent of Arizona’s prison inmates are undocumented immigrants?

No.

And there’s no way of telling how many in our prisons are undocumented immigrants.

***

The reasons lie in arcane definitions.

The definition for  “criminal aliens” is “noncitizens convicted of crimes while in this country legally or illegally,” according to the GAO.

DHS defines an “alien” as anyone in the U.S. who is not a citizen or national of the United States, according to its website. Aliens can be perfectly legal. They can be asylees. They can have work papers. They can have visas. On the  other hand, “aliens”  can be in the country illegally. Aliens who are here illegally are called “unauthorized aliens” or “illegal aliens.”

Legal and “illegal” aliens can both be  “criminal aliens.”

Bottom line, we just don’t know how many undocumented immigrants sit in  Arizona prisons.

It is wrongheaded  to label the entire “criminal alien” population in Arizona prisons as undocumented  immigrants (Kavanagh calls them “illegals”) because the population isn’t counted in a way that will give us that data.

Period.

End.

For years, this journalist has  tried to avoid what we in the j-world call “flaks” — they have a lot of other names, too. Communications specialists. Public information officers. Publicists.

We journos sneak around publicists if we think they’re trying to keep us from the truth. But there are very good publicists, too, who help us get the interviews we need.

I never thought I’d need a publicist.

But I do.

Because I can’t multitask.  I’m an author and a public speaker, but I’m above all else a journalist, and I still have to cover  intense stories that take up a lot of time.

After all, this is Arizona.

But in the meantime, journalists wanted to interview me.

I don’t want you to think I’m a raving egomaniac. I’m  not. Or at least I try not to be.

But ever since my book came out, I’ve gotten requests for interviews from journalists who want me to talk about the book, the immigrants who reside in its pages, or other newsbreaking stories in Arizona — crazy laws,  Joe Arpaio, guns, politics, murder, Shawna Forde, you name it.

And I’ve also been asked to speak on panels, at book clubs, at university gatherings.

All of this deeply honors me, and humbles me. For months I’ve been trying to schedule it on my own AND write stories.

But as I said, I can’t multitask.

So, a  terrific publicist has agreed to take on the scheduling, public speaking, media organizing for the author-public-speaking-media  side of my professional life.

Her name is Carmen Cornejo, and she owns Critical Mass Communications. This is her picture.

CARMEN CORNEJO

She’s stunningly qualified, kind, and very smart.

Here is how you reach Carmen:
(480) 324-6378
carmen@criticalmassc.com
www.criticalmassc.com

If you can’t reach Carmen, try Bob Sembiante, the senior publicist at Globe Pequot Press, which published my book. robert.sembiante@globepequot.com — 203-458-4555.

In closing, here’s a photo taken at Changing Hands bookstore after a reading. They sold out of books. They had to borrow some of mine so they would have enough to sell. YAY AND WOOT!

We were celebrating. I’m on the left. Carmen is on the right. In the middle is Bobby Boos, who designed this website and keeps it alive even when I go into its guts and screw up the code.

TERRY, BOBBY AND CARMEN AT A CHANGING HANDS READING

As I said, we have a lot of fun.

Thank God I’m in good hands.

DREAMERS, MINUTEMEN, AND TUCSON SHOOTINGS :  TERRY GREENE STERLING EXPLAINS WHY SHE QUIT BLOGGING

One night in December, just a few days before  Christmas, two groups of ASU students gathered in two very different parts of Phoenix.

The first group of kids wore college graduation gowns, and received diplomas, and were hugged by their relatives, who then bought them celebratory dinners.

Yay!

They’d finally made it through Arizona State University.

At the very time graduates were celebrating, another group of ASU  students huddled together on a sidewalk in front of the darkened office of Sen. John McCain in central Phoenix.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

It was a cold night, but the students were full of warm hope. They hoped that the next day, the Dream Act would pass in the lame duck Congress. The Dream Act, introduced every year since 2001, would allow kids who are unauthorized immigrants and have lived in the United States for most of their lives, and have graduated from high school, and  have not committed crimes, temporary legal residency so they can attend college or join the military. If they accomplished these goals, the students would be given permanent legal residency, and eventually citizenship. The students had been focusing on McCain’s office because even though he had transformed from immigration reformer to immigration hardliner, they still held hope that he’d vote for the Dream Act. After all, he once supported it.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

But McCain didn’t vote for the Dream Act the next day.

It was a bitter disappointment for these honor students, who watched the senate vote on their laptops as they sat on the sidewalk.

It wasn’t easy to learn English, or to succeed in school, or to get coveted private scholarships to pay their out-of-state tuition.  But they did. And after the Senate shot down the Dream Act, students like Chris wouldn’t give up.

This is Chris’s picture. To the right. Below.

The Senate shot down the Dream Act on Saturday.

On Sunday, Chris was in church, listening to words of hope.

“Help us love even those who hate us,” one of the speakers said.

Chris just sat there on the bench. He speaks three languages.  He wants to be an architect.

“We can’t put our hope in politicians, we have to put our hope in God,” another speaker said.

Chris looked at his hands. He is the only one in his family that excelled in school. And in his family, being different isn’t  always easy.

“Dreams may be deferred but dreams won’t die,” said yet another speaker.

***

I was going to blog about that evening, but I didn’t.  I wanted to take a break from writing and reporting. The holidays. Family. I’d get back to blogging, I figured, in January. Five weeks later,  Jarold Lee Loughner allegedly went on a shooting spree in front of a Tucson Safeway.  He gunned down Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and before he was tackled by onlookers he’d killed six people, including a little girl named Christina-Taylor Green. Instead of blogging, I covered the shootings for The Daily Beast.

Here’s another shooting story. And another

***

I came home, packed fresh clothes and drove back to Tucson, where I covered the murder trial of another little girl, Brisenia Flores, who was gunned down , along with her dad, in 2009 by a man in camouflage who had painted his face black. A woman barked orders during this killing spree, which took place in a house trailer in Arivaca, Arizona.  The super comandante was a beautician. She was dressed in a military outfit too. Her name was Shawna Forde. She wanted to rob this family to fund her border surveillance activities.

I wrote four stories about Shawna Forde for The Daily Beast. I was the only reporter who talked to her.

She told me that even in jail she directed a vast militia.

Her lawyers said she suffered from narcissistic traits.  They said she was repeatedly sexually abused, abandoned and neglected.

They wanted to save her life.

But she’s on Death Row now.

***

I came home again, and made up my mind to start blogging.

Then Republicans in the Arizona Legislature, in lockstep with many of the state’s biggest businesses, voted to kill five notorious immigration bills that would have furthered the state’s  racist image. The businesses said they’d felt the sting of a national boycott, and they’d had enough of Arizona’s immigration laws. Let the feds take care of it, the businessmen said.

***

I think things are calming down in Arizona now. At least for a while. So I’ve made up my mind to start blogging again. For  updates on day-to-day events about madmen, killers, and general goings on in Arizona, please visit my Facebook page.

***

And getting back to those Dreamers, Christian is still in school.

He won’t give up.

His life is filled with hope.

TERRY GREENE STERLING ON GRATITUDE AND TALENTED FRIENDS IN ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION WAR ZONE

I’m grateful for my family, my health, my work and my friends. Sometimes, I get to work with my friends. That is a great joy. Two dear friends have come out with remarkable projects this year, and it has been a pleasure  and honor to see their excellent work take form.

Kathy McCraine, my dear  rancher friend, has spent her life documenting the vanishing cowboy culture in the American West.  She recently published a truly remarkable book that fuses culture, oral history, food, and art — honestly, you’ve never seen anything like it.  Mark Kohler illustrated the book with stunning watercolors, and Kathy added her fine reporting and photography. The book is called  Cow Country Cooking. But it’s about a lot more than food.

(Full disclosure: I spent my childhood on the O RO ranch featured in the book.)

(More full disclosure: Kathy took a lot of pics for my book, Illegal, Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone and I edited her copy for Cow Country Cooking.)

For several years, my friend Valeria Fernandez, an outstanding broadcast and print reporter based in Phoenix, has been working with Dan DeVivo on a remarkable documentary  called Two Americans. The main characters are  Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kathy Figueroa,  a little girl whose parents were arrested by Sheriff Joe’s deputies in a car-wash raid.

I’ll leave you with a link to the Two Americans website and a taste of the documentary, below.

Watch this:

A VETERAN ARIZONA CRIME REPORTER REVEALS MORE INCONSISTENCIES IN THE SHOOTING STORY OF DEPUTY LOUIE PUROLL, WHO CLAIMS HE WAS SHOT IN THE DESERT BY AK47-TOTING NARCOS…..

On these pages, I’ve written about a verbal mano-a-mano between a Pinal County sheriff deputy named Louie Puroll, and  my former colleague Paul Rubin, who works for my alma mater, Phoenix New Times. Rubin has been with the paper for decades and often covers murders, the judicial system, and other crime stuff.  He’s like a pit bull, he won’t let go of a story until he has satisfied his journalistic curiosity. You can read my earlier posts about this faceoff  here and here and here.

Flash back to the Arizona desert earlier this spring, at the height of the fervor over the passage of Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, when Puroll claimed  he’d been ambushed — and shot — in the desert by narcotraficantes with Sinaloan accents toting  backpacks of drugs and AK47s.

LP’s alleged AK47 wound was not serious, the guy wasn’t even hospitalized over night. The narcos were never found. Niether were their AK47s. Or their bags of drugs. Rubin wrote several stories that questioned Puroll’s veracity. In one story, Rubin quoted forensic experts who said the deputy’s shirt would have gunpowder residue  on it if he’d been shot at close range. (Meaning, if the deputy had shot himself.)  So the Pinal County Sheriff’s office asked DPS to check the shirt, and when no gunpowder was found, the Pinal County sheriff’s office announced Puroll had been cleared.

Not in Paul Rubin’s eyes.

In his latest inquiry, Rubin visits the alleged crime site with Puroll and uses the scene to point to inconsistencies in the deputy’s story.

He points again to the paucity of shell casings (Puroll said he was facing a firestorm), a mysterious break in the t-shirt custody chain, and contradictory reports from the deputy. The story ends creepily, with Puroll pulling out a gun and telling Rubin he won’t miss next time he has to shoot someone.

My fearless prediction: We haven’t heard the end of this story.

UPDATE: DECEMBER 2, 2010. I WAS RIGHT! Today Puroll was put on administrative leave for the things he said in the Rubin story.  You can read the update here.

ARIZONA JOURNALISTS RAISE EVEN MORE TROUBLING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ADMINISTRATIONS OF MARICOPA COUNTY SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO AND HIS NEIGHBOR AND ALLY, PINAL COUNTY SHERIFF PAUL BABEU, AND A SUSPICIOUS DEPUTY SHOOTING THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A HOAX

Two close political allies who’ve made names for themselves as lawmen protecting Arizonans from perceived misdeeds of “illegal aliens” are now facing increased scrutiny from reporters and public officials.

This week, the Maricopa County Board of  Supervisors, which oversees funding for the office of Sheriff Joe Arpaio,  learned that an internal audit of the sheriff’s office indicates that the sheriff may have misspent up to $80 million in the past five years. According to The Arizona Republic, the  auditors allege that the sheriff’s administration kept two sets of books, which allowed it to secretly take  money from one untouchable fund and funnel it into those well-publicized immigration enforcement activities. (Read, raids.)  Of course, the board, which has felt the wrath of Sheriff Joe, turned its findings over to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is conducting two ongoing investigations of the sheriff’s administration that may lead to the indictment of Sheriff Joe himself.

Sheriff Joe isn’t the only guy who’s being scrutinized.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, the former boarding school principal turned anti-migrant lawman, first grew famous by walking along the “dang fence” in John McCain’s primary-campaign television ad. Then Babeu (he likes to call himself “Sheriff Paul” just as Arpaio is known as Sheriff Joe guested on a white-supremacy show and a conspiracy theory show. ) Sheriff Paul blamed his appearances on the radio shows on a bumbling aide, and the McCain camp did not pull either the dang fence ad or Sheriff Paul’s endorsement.

For months, Sheriff Paul has stood behind his deputy, who claimed he was shot by AK-47 toting Sinaloan narcos.  Despite a massive search, the narcos were never found. Nor was the massive load of pot they were supposed to be carrying. And the deputy who claimed he was shot by the narcos suffered a grazing wound that experts now say was shot at close range. You can thank Paul Rubin, of the Phoenix New Times, for having the fine good sense to send a picture of the deputy’s wound to forensic experts.

In short, lawmen, forensic experts and newspaper reporters have all questioned whether the deputy’s shooting was a hoax.

Was it intended to further terrify Arizonans already terrified by false reports that an Arizona rancher was definatively shot by an “illegal alien?”

That rancher murder, which spurred the passage of SB 1070, is actually unsolved.

Babeu’s office said the deputy’s shooting was not a hoax. It was the real deal, Babeu said.

Now Sheriff Paul,  incredibly, is investigating the alleged crimes at Sheriff  Joe’s office.