In some Latin American countries,  “notarios” are well-respected and have a reputation for honesty. In Arizona and other parts of the United States, like Minnesota, self-described “notarios” sometimes prey on the most vulnerable immigrants,  as Minnesota reporter Gregory Pratt explains in this  Ciity  Pages story.

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.

SB 1070 SPONSOR RUSSELL PEARCE FACES TIGHT RECALL ELECTION, THANKS IN PART TO ARIZONA UNDOCUMENTED KIDS

Arizona state senator Russell Pearce capitalized on the  (still unsolved) death of an Arizona borderlands rancher (Pearce blamed an “illegal alien” for the killing) in the spring of 2010. Pearce rode a wave of fear to push through Arizona’s controversial immigration law and was subsequently elected president of the Arizona Senate.

Now Pearce, a Republican and Mormon who just last year was  the most powerful politico in Arizona, faces a super-tight recall election in his heavily Mormon, heavily conservative district in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix.

Pearce’s opponent, Jerry Lewis is a charter school company guy who is inexperienced politically. He’s a Mormon, just like Pearce. He’s a Republican, too. Pearce got more money.  And yet, Lewis is enjoying a slight lead, according to an ABC News-Arizona Capitol Times poll released last week.

Political observers said Pearce was so entrenched in the district no one could defeat him.

But a new breed of Arizona activists proved them wrong. They are young, energetic and tirelessly optimistic. Some are white. Some are brown.  Some are citizens.  Others are unauthorized immigrants.

***

On a recent afternoon, I followed two of these young activists as they walked on the sidewalks of east Mesa, canvassing.

 Zack  is 21, an ASU student  majoring in urban planning and minoring in Chicano and Latino studies.

Lily is 25, and was brought to the United States by her Mexican parents when she was 10. The family came to the country legally, with visas. But the visas expired. And Lilian is an unauthorized immigrant.

The two knocked on doors, asked people if they were registered to vote, and if they had their early ballots.

LILY AND ZACK

“I don’t like anything Pearce has done,” said Zack, an American citizen who has canvassed “a lot.” He told me this after he had canvassed the entire neighborhood that day.

And Lily chimed in that even though she couldn’t vote, she wanted to help. (I took their picture while they canvassed.)

 I’ll get back to Lily and Zack in a bit, but first  some background.

***

Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, makes it a  state crime for unauthorized immigrants to set foot in Arizona and turns all law enforcement officers in Arizona into immigration enforcers.

The law was crafted in large part by Kris Kobach, now the Kansas secretary of state, who wrote the law while working for the legal branch of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The  controversial non-profit was founded by alleged white nationalist John Tanton, who still sits on its board. (FAIR’s sister non-profits are Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. If you visits their websites, you’ll see they are cut from the same cloth.)

Pearce did not write the law, as he sometimes suggests. He did sponsor the law in Arizona.

But after a brief period in which Pearce enjoyed tremendous popularity, the tables turned on him.

Arizona business leaders,  stung by boycotts and employment problems that resulted from SB 1070, paired with moderate Republicans in Arizona’s senate and legislature. They  managed to kill Pearce’s immigration measures in 2011. Those measures included a bill denying Arizona birth certificates to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

In another blow to Pearce, the Mormon Church headquarters in Utah voiced its approval of  the Utah Compact, which says among other things that  immigration is a federal, not a state  problem. And privately, some Mormons in Arizona expressed deep concerns about Pearce.

What’s more, data showed that illegal immigration was simply not the problem Pearce said it was. The  most reliable measure for illegal immigration — apprehensions at the border — slipped down to a low not seen since the 1970s, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington.

And just a few days ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced a 40 percent decrease in the already declining numbers of unauthorized migrants  apprehended at the Arizona border.

It became clear that Pearce’s fear mongering was more political than real.

***

 I talked to a couple of Latina voters in Mesa who had already sent in their ballots. They told me that incredible as it may seem, some Hispanic voters still want to vote for Olivia Cortes, a sham candidate put up by Pearce supporters to deflect votes away from Lewis and give Pearce the edge.

Cortes is no longer running, but her name is on the ballot.

The women also told me that some Latinos don’t know Pearce is affiliated with SB 1070.

And some didn’t even know what SB 1070 was.

Could this be possible?

Yes, the two women  told me. People watch TV, but they don’t watch the news.

They don’t read. They don’t get things straight.   They don’t do their own research.

Yes, some will vote for Cortes.

***

This really is a neck-in-neck race.

After we got back to the canvassing headquarters, I asked Lily how she’d react if Pearce won.

She said she’ll just keep on. She understands what it takes to overcome obstacles.

Photo by Farmer Dodds from Flickr

Almost three years ago, on a cold night in November, two Border Patrol agents allegedly came across four “Mexican National” pot smugglers in the Arizona desert. The agents, Dario Castillo and Ramon Zuniga, forced the smugglers to take off their shoes, socks and jackets (just like drop house kidnappers) and burned them. They forced the smugglers to eat pot. Then they sent them hightailing into the desert. Now the two agents have been indicted for human rights violations by a federal grand jury in Tucson. Again, this is all alleged.  It’s too early for the BP agents to respond. But you  can read the DOJ press release below.
Border Patrol 2011-170(Castillo et al)

Braceros.

This is all you need to know.

Thank you, Eugene and Los Cenzontles.

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.

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.

SHERIFF SAYS STATE LAB CLEARS DEPUTY OF POST-ARIZONA-IMMIGRATION-LAW-SELF-SHOOTING HOAX; REPORTER REMAINS SKEPTICAL

In the wake of the passage of SB 1070, a Pinal County Sheriff deputy named Louie Puroll said he was shot in a gun battle with Mexican narcos with Sinaloan accents. Almost immediately, reporters began quoting other police officers and forensic experts who alleged the shooting was a hoax —  because the bullet only grazed Puroll’s back;  because an extensive ground and air search could find no Mexican narcos toting pot and AK 47s;  because there weren’t any casings in the shooting area; because the shirt Puroll wore that day appeared to have been shot at close range; not from afar, as Puroll had said. The true investigative reporting came from veteran crimes reporter Paul Rubin at Phoenix New Times.

Bucking to pressure after Rubin quoted experts questioning Puroll’s account, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu ordered the deputy’s previously unexamined shirt to be examined by a state crime lab. The lab came out with three sentences last week that claimed the deputy’s shirt   had no residue powder.

Case closed, announced Babeu.

Not  so fast, countered a still skeptical Paul Rubin. He confronted Puroll at a press conference. Puroll said he fished for humans in the desert, and Rubin fished for stories.

Unfortunately for Puroll, Rubin’s still on the case. I’ve known him for close to three decades, and I can tell you when he latches onto a story, he will stay with it until he thinks there’s nothing left to tell.

He’s not there yet.

In the meantime, take a look at Puroll’s post-shirt-exam video, in which he says he hadn’t even heard of Arizona’s famous immigration law,  SB 1070,  at the time he was “shot.”   Here’s the video:

SUE KRENTZ, WIFE OF SLAIN BORDER RANCHER ROBERT KRENTZ, WHOSE UNSOLVED MURDER SPARKED PASSAGE OF SB 1070, ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION LAW, WAS SERIOUSLY INJURED SATURDAY ALLEGEDLY BY A DRUNK DRIVER

Robert Krentz, a well-known borderlands rancher, was gunned down by a mysterious assailant on his ranch in late March. Although his murder has not been solved,  it was widely blamed by locals and national conservative groups on narco-smugglers in the country illegally. The murder sent a shock wave through Arizona’s legislature, and moderate Republicans who were set to vote against SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, voted instead for its approval. Arizonans were concerned about border security in the wake of the Krentz killing, and many did not understand that not a word of SB 1070 relates to border security.  Sue Krentz, by all accounts, became a reluctant but brave spokeswoman for conservative causes, and  recently was honored with a front-row seat at the Glenn Beck rally in Washington, according to the Tucson Weekly.

She is a Catholic, and while crossing the street from the Catholic Church in Douglas on Saturday, she was hit by an allegedly drunk driver, a local named Ramon Parra Saucedo. According  to court records I looked up, he  is 69 years old. He’s had many traffic violations, including a previous DUI and a hit and run of a vehicle, the records say. He’s facing aggravated assault and DUI charges in connection with the Krentz hit-and-run.

He is an American citizen, according to press reports.

Sue Krentz was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Tucson.  Leo Banks, a personal friend of Sue Krentz, writes in the Tucson Weekly that Sue Krentz was “thrown thirty feet and suffered a broken pelvis, head and facial injuries and internal bleeding.” Banks reports that Krentz underwent  blood transfusions “and is conscious and in stable condition. “

The unsolved murder of Sue Krentz’s husband has fueled speculation on both sides. Here’s what I wrote for The Daily Beast in July.

Former State Sen. Alfredo Gutierrez says the unsolved murder probe is a case of “purposeful ignorance” and an “attempt to cover up the truth” in a prime drug- and human-smuggling corridor. Politicians talk about securing the border, he said, but they do not address the possibility that the business of Cochise County “ain’t cows, ain’t hay; it’s smuggling drugs and people.”

“Everybody knows what’s going on but nobody knows what’s going on,” said Gutierrez, one of the state’s leading Hispanic leaders.

Such a suggestion is just plain wrong, said Cochise County’s embattled sheriff, Larry Dever.

“He’s suggesting I am dirty and people I know are dirty, and if anyone can establish that, I’d invite them to give it a try,” Dever said.

Born and raised in Cochise County, the 57-year-old sheriff was a friend of Krentz’s. He said he has heard the allegations that U.S. citizens living in the area are involved in criminal activities linked with the Krentz killing, but he dismissed those claims as purely political.

Instead, Dever said, he has a suspect in Mexico and is “very, very close” to solving the case, though he said he cannot put a time frame on it.

The Krentz killing was the result of “a dog protecting his master and the master protecting dog…I think the encounter was accidental,” the sheriff theorized. “Rob was checking out his ranch. The smuggler was smuggling. They came across each other’s paths with a very good man being killed with no reason whatsoever.”

In either case, the Krentz  family has had more than its share of unexplained tragedy.

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.