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.)

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.

I’m sitting just a few feet away from a very tall child killer.

Jason Bush photo by Dean Knuth -- Arizona Daily Star

He’s wearing a light blue green shirt and gray slacks without a belt. His skin is sallow, and he’s got a five o’clock shadow.  He’s lost a lot of weight since he was arrested about two years ago. His black second-hand shoes are too big and flop off his heels when he walks. He’s got really big brown eyes  and a straight nose. Thin lips. He’s pulled his shoulder-length dark hair into a pony tail. He has a receding hairline.

Killers look just like anyone else. They don’t stand out in a crowd.

He appears completely calm as a clerk in a Tucson courtroom reads the jury’s guilty verdict.

He has no expression on his face. But I look carefully, and I think he’s breathing faster than normal as the verdicts are read.  Guilty of two counts of murder. One count of attempted murder. Various home invasion crimes.  Burglary. Robbery.

He puts on his glasses. He takes off his glasses. He closes his eyes.

***

Back in 2009,  Jason Bush was a drifter and ex-con who pretended to be a decorated Army sniper involved in covert operations.

He had fake certificates that he showed to Shawna Forde, a beautician from Everett Washington who wanted to rob a family of money and drugs. She believed his sniper story. Shawna enlisted Jason for her little Minuteman group.

One day in May 2009, Jason painted his face black, just like in the movies.  He and  Shawna barged into a trailer in Arivaca, Arizona, just a few miles north of the border. They wore camouflage and uniforms and pretended to be officers in search of fugitives. A few minutes later, Jason killed a little girl and her father. He shot the mother, but she played dead.

After Jason and Shawna left the trailer, (disappointed that they hadn’t found drugs or money to fund Shawna’s border vigilante activities) the mother called 911.

The child was still dying,  convulsing and vomiting blood. The mother begged the 911 operator for help.

Then Shawna came back into the trailer.

Shawna  saw the mom calling 911, and yelled to Jason to come back in the trailer. There was a witness still alive, Shawna shouted, and someone had to finish the job.

The wounded mother got herself into the kitchen area, found her husband’s loaded gun.

When Jason came back in the trailer,  the mother  shot him in the leg.

He ran away.

***

That was two years ago, and Jason almost immediately confessed to the murders. Later, he  pleaded innocence.

The evidence against him is overwhelming. The mother’s testimony. The DNA on the guns and on the floor of the trailer. His lawyers didn’t even mount a defense.

They just want to spare him from the death penalty.  They plan on introducing evidence of his grim young life. His parents put him in a mental institution when he was 11. He was raped there. Then he was raped in foster homes.

The lawyers don’t want to include allegations and charges leveled by law enforcement authorities that Jason knifed a Mexican to death and then executed a “race traitor” in Washington. That was way back in 1997.

***

In Arizona, a jury, not a judge, will decide whether Jason should be executed by lethal injection.

You’re getting a real time report. Right now, as Jason puts on his glasses one more time, then takes them off,  the jury exits to a room where it will decide whether Jason’s crimes merit consideration for the death penalty. If it decides, in the next hour or so, that the crimes do merit the death penalty, Jason’s lawyers will present evidence in the next couple of weeks indicating he is a broken soul who should live.

Jason swings in his chair. Jason watches a young girl who just walked into the courtroom.

Now the guards take Jason away. He shuffles in his leg chains. Those white socks. Those floppy black shoes.

A few minutes later, he hobbles  back in the room.  It took about 15 minutes for the jury to decide that Jason’s crimes were horrific and cruel, and merit consideration for the death penalty.

Jason just sits.

***

Shawna Forde was sentenced to death for masterminding the murders. In the next weeks, we will learn if  Jason Bush will face the same fate.

***

UPDATE: Jason Bush was sentenced to death by lethal injection. As I wrote in my verdict story in The Daily Beast, he is a suspected serial killer.

After he was sentenced to death, he looked down at his lawyer and appeared to say: “This sucks.”

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:

ON ELECTION DAY, SOME YOUNG LATINOS IN ARIZONA VOICED THEIR OPPOSITION TO ARIZONA’S NEW IMMIGRATION LAW, SB 1070, BY TRYING TO GET OUT THE VOTE.  HERE’S MY TAKE FOR AZCENTRAL LAST NIGHT. AZCENTRAL IS THE ONLINE SITE FOR THE BIG PHOENIX DAILY, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC.

CELSO.

Read the rest of the post about this DREAMER here.

And here’s another post, about Fidel, a young American citizen canvassing neighborhoods.

Latino activists are still crunching the Arizona numbers.  For sure, Arizona’s immigration law helped elect positively impacted those candidates  who supported it. But this law, which aims to kick all undocumented people out of Arizona, has affected many Latino citizens personally. And I’m convinced a lot of Arizona voters don’t even understand the law.

Let me explain. In a nutshell, SB 1070 aims to boot all unauthorized immigrants out of Arizona. But a fascinating Arizona Republic poll released in July indicates that while 55 percent of Arizonans supported SB 1070, an incredible 62 percent wanted employed unauthorized immigrants without criminal records to stay in Arizona.

How can you want to kick out the very people you say you want to stay?

Long story short, über confusion rules the Arizona electorate when it comes to SB 1070.

What’s even more confusing to voters is that a federal judge in Phoenix temporarily enjoined parts of the law, so it’s not being enforced to its full extent right now. It may never pass judicial muster. But no matter. It’s already had its impact. The law propelled Jan Brewer and her Republican allies in Arizona to victory.

More important, the passage of SB 1070 deeply wounded and insulted many young Hispanic voters in Arizona. They’re the ones who are likely to get stopped and hassled. They’re the ones with undocumented grandparents and parents and siblings.

And honestly, this election is just a blip to them. They know their numbers are growing. And they will not forget SB 1070.

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.