President Barack Obama got an unexpected present today — thousands of Latino votes –  from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who just endorsed Mitt Romney.

Before he became Kansas SOS, Kobach helped draft SB 1070, with funding from the Immigration Reform Law  Institute, which is the legal arm of the Washington non-profit Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. Like its founder, Jon Tanton, FAIR wants a moratorium on all immigration into the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled a  creepy dossier on FAIR.

If you want to get a sense of Kris Kobach, take a look at this video. Kobach was apparently under contract with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, and in the video he talks about what constitutes “reasonable suspicion.”

Time travel from video circa 2010 forward to now.  January, 2012.

Kobach is quoted on  Romney’s s website:

“We need a president who will finally put a stop to a problem that has plagued our country for a generation: millions of illegal aliens coming into the country and taking jobs from United States citizens and legal aliens, while consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in public benefits at taxpayer expense,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. “Illegal immigration is a nightmare for America’s economy and America’s national security. Mitt Romney is the candidate who will finally secure the borders and put a stop to the magnets, like in-state tuition, that encourage illegal aliens to remain in our country unlawfully. He is also the candidate who will stand shoulder to shoulder with the states that are fighting to restore the rule of law. I am pleased to stand with this true conservative.”

Millions of illegal aliens taking jobs from US citizens? Consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in public benefits?

Reality check: Unauthorized immigrants don’t qualify for  many public benefits, except for free k-12 public education, which economists call an asset, not an expense.

And illegal  immigration is hardly a “nightmare” these days; it is at the  lowest its been for decades, which explains why the economy trumps illegal immigration as a voter issue — except, of course, with Latinos who have seen what happened when Kris Kobach helps write immigration laws for  Alabama and Arizona.

Romney, who also said he’d veto the DREAM Act, is angling for extremist voters who tend to vote in primaries in the South.  He likely figures once he gets the nomination he’ll take a more moderate stance to attract moderate voters in the general election.

But a Kobach endorsement is something that many Americans of Latino descent, and their friends, aren’t likely to forget in the general elections.

Or forgive.

Too much has happened in Arizona. And now Alabama.

Long story short — the  Kobach endorsement  delivered many a Latino vote to Barack Obama.

And Obama, who has been working hard to mend fences with Latinos following a lackluster,  failed effort to pass the  DREAM Act and  immigration reform, needs to write a thank-you note.

To Kris Kobach.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office is charged with bungling sex crime investigtions, talked to me via cell phone on the day before the Justice Department handed down its scathing investigation.

I first wrote about the sheriff’s  sex crime investigation scandal on this blog.

Then, I wrote about it in more detail for The Daily Beast.Talked to Sheriff Joe on his cell phone.

He told me the department had “corrected” the sex crime investigation scandal.

Go figure.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-described toughest sheriff in America, is now in the national spotlight because his office allegedly did not investigate sex crimes in 2005. This is old news in Arizona. In 2008, a Mesa newspaper won a Pulitzer for exposing irregularities in the sheriff’s office — and the apparent siphoning of resources into well-publicized immigration raids instead of community policing — including the investigation of sex crimes in El Mirage.

Here’s a quick geography lesson for those of you who don’t live in Arizona. Maricopa County, which elects the sheriff, is the  most populous county in Arizona. The sheriff is allowed to police every community in Maricopa County, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler , Tempe, Guadalupe and El Mirage.

The sheriff has long been under fire for failing to police while diverting resources to immigration, as I said before. The sheriff’s department has cost the county millions in lawsuits filed by relatives of dead inmates alleged to have died wrongfully, or judges and other county officials who alleged the sheriff’s baseless but well publicised investigations of them were meant to harass them and ruined their careers. Sheriff Joe’s  office has been under scrutiny for misspending and abuse of power, and the U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating alleged civil rights abuses for three years. His chief deputy and several officials were dismissed or resigned amid allegations of abuse of power and yet, the sheriff goes on, bolstered by out-of-state campaign donations that almost guarantee he will be elected in 2012.

But things may change — the same group that managed to recall Russell Pearce, the once powerful senator who sponsored Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, now wants to recall Arpaio. And locals are predictably calling for his ouster in the national media frenzy over the old Arizona news of botched sex crime investigations.

If you want to see a video of me and Sheriff Joe, go to my  main page, and click on “videos and excerpts,” you can see a video of me and the sheriff.

NINTH CIRCUIT ALLOWS PHOENIX NEWSPAPER TO SUE LAWYER WHO COOKED UP BOGUS SUBPOENAS

One night in 2007,  deputies in riot gear arrested my middle-aged former bosses at Phoenix New Times, zip-tied their wrists, and hauled them off to jail in unmarked cars.

The reason: Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin had refused to comply with a “grand jury subpoena” issued by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office that sought the browsing habits and internet addresses of New Times online readers. Instead of complying with the subpoena, Lacey and Larkin published it. That led to the arrests. The county attorney’s office said it was illegal to publish the contents of a grand jury subpoena.

Now, four years later, we know there was no grand jury.

The subpoenas were bogus.

They were cooked up by Dennis Wilenchik, the former boss of Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, whom Thomas hired to go after New Times.  Thomas hired Wilenchik to go after Lacey and Larkin and Phoenix New Times because the newspaper had for years written stories about Thomas’s political ally — Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. What kind of stories? You can read them here. New Times reported on alleged mismanagement and ethical violations in the sheriff’s office, and odd deaths in the sheriff’s jails.

New Times sued Thomas (he now faces disbarment for ethical violations and is no longer in office) and Arpaio and Wilenchik for  the wrongful arrest and malicious prosecutions of Lacey and Larkin.

Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that neither Arpaio nor former county attorney Thomas could be sued by New Times.

But Wilenchik, the mastermind behind the “grand jury subpoenas” could be sued, the court ruled.

Wilenchik’s boss, Thomas, was immune from the lawsuit. But he faces his own demons. Specifically, he may be disbarred.

And as for Arpaio, the feds have been investigating him for years. He may be indicted for abuse of power allegations.  Three of his top aides have left the office in disgrace.

And Phoenix New Times columnists are relentlessly pushing the feds to take action.

Which isn’t surprising.

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.

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:

Friends, I’ve spent about a month and a half working on an immigration story for Phoenix New Times, the mother ship of Village Voice Media.

Normally, these pages are reserved for some of my observations on Arizona politicking and immigration, but I’m imposing a gag rule on myself because I don’t want to spill the beans for the New Times Story.

It’s running in early December, and then I will wax eloquent once again. In the meantime, here’s a story I wrote on Sheriff Arpaio for The Daily Beast.

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.

AMERICA’S TOUGHEST SHERIFF HAS MOUNTING LEGAL BATTLES WITH US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, CHIEF DEPUTY HENDERSHOTT INVESTIGATED BY DOJ

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s mounting legal troubles with the feds in a story for  The Daily Beast. In a nutshell, two Department of Justice probes are moving fast — the first involves alleged civil rights abuses stemming from Sheriff Joe’s raids of Latino neighborhoods and workplaces; the second involves alleged retaliation against those who speak out against the sheriff, including journalists, judges and politicians. I quoted reputable attorneys who have battled the sheriff and  maintain the sheriff might get indicted.  To get the other side, I e-mailed the sheriff’s office several times. The sheriff’s official spokesman would not comment, but referred me to an attorney for the sheriff who did not return my call.
Now The Arizona Republic reveals that someone else was allegedly in the sheriff’s cross hairs — a deputy who dared contribute campaign money to a guy who was running against the sheriff. He was reportedly  Tased by another deputy while at a cemetery. No charges were filed in the internal investigation.
The Republic’s report, released today, indicates what many insiders have repeatedly told me. David Hendershott, Arpaio’s chief deputy, is allegedly behind much of the retribution and alleged abuse of power, like dead-end criminal investigations launched after the sheriff is criticized. A highranking member of Arpaio’s staff seeks an investigation of Hendershott for alleged abuse of power.
Here’s a video from the NBC affiliate Channel 12′s Kent Dana, a good reporter, on that allegation.

The sheriff, in the meantime, tooled off to New Hampshire, reportedly to polish his brand and get more campaign funds for his 2012 sheriff’s race. He had to dip into that treasure chest to bankroll TV commercials that blasted his arch-enemy County Attorney Rick Romley, who subsequently lost in the primary elections. And like  Sarah Palin, Arpaio  is a populist who’s more popular outside home state.

“To survive,” he’s fond of saying, “you’ve got to keep all your ducks in order, because everyone is after me.”