I worked for over a year on what seemed to be a never-ending project,  the book about undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix area.

I reported like crazy. This picture  shows me reporting. Yep, you got it. The grey-haired woman with the notebook. I took a lot of notes. I translated from Spanish to English as I took notes. Then, at night, I went over all my reporting and then I closed my eyes and listened to Tibetan gong sounds on my iPhone.

Then the next day, I’d write. This picture below shows me writing. Or, at least, thinking about writing.

And this picture below shows me relaxing with my husband after I finished the book for real.

I relaxed for two weeks. You didn’t see me on these pages. You would have seen me in the Sonoran Desert, though, hiking around, looking for Mexican poppies and lupine.

It was my first real vacation in over a year.

The book won’t come out until August, so now  it’s time to write again. I’m working on a post about Minutemen. Stay tuned. I will be back really, really soon. Just as soon as I get a couple of documents.

And down the road, as we near publication dates, I will  redesign the website, too, so you will be able to meet the real-life characters in the book via video and podcasts. And, also, I really want to take polls. I want to see what you think about, say, Minutemen.

Would you like to read about them and their connections to highly placed politicos in Arizona?

I hope so, because that is the topic of my  next post.

Until I finish in the next ten days or so,  I won’t be able to write much here.

The object below is a toilet paper rose.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

If  you can guess, via the comments section below, who generally makes these roses, and where, and why,  you are a very smart person. I dare you!

But if he and his advisors gambled that rounding up hotel maids and landscapers would gain him more voter approval, they gambled wrong.

In part due to his “hard-nosed and sometimes perceived heavy handed tactics against illegal aliens” as well as an ongoing federal grand jury inquiry over alleged abuses of power, Sheriff Joe’s  support is tanking in the Phoenix metro area, according to a recent poll of Maricopa County voters.

The details: Well-respected local pollster Earl de Berge, who has taken the pulse of Phoenix for many years,  found that only 39 percent of registered voters now  approve of Sheriff Joe. That’s down from an astonishing 64 percent approval rating in 2007.  According to the poll, Sheriff Joe’s still got most of the county’s GOP voters in his camp, but he’s lost the support of those free-thinking Independents. And in a state where one-third of the voters are Republicans, one-third of the voters are Democrats (they never cottoned to Joe) and one-third of the voters are Independents, Joe might well lose his next election.

Which might explain why Sheriff Joe sent out a  fund-raising letter to voters who live outside of Maricopa County. A friend of mine who lives in heavily conservative Yavapai County forwarded me  a copy of Sheriff Joe’s fundraising letter. It references a January 16 human rights march in Phoenix that I happened to cover for my book, which comes out in August and is called ILLEGAL: Life and Death in the Undocumented Underground.

Before I get into the letter, here’s a picture of the march  by  photographer Kathy McCraine. (I’m the female journalist in jeans covering the march.) Do you see nasty signs? Do you see masked marchers? Do you see hooligans?

Photo by Kathy McCraine

See, the reason I ask all these questions is because Sheriff Joe, in a fundraising letter that he sent to  those conservative prospective donors in Yavapai County, writes this about the march documented in the picture above:

“On January 16, 2010, more than 10,000 protestors marched on my jails to oppose my enforcement of state and federal immigration laws.

Protestors brawled with and assaulted police. Demonstrators dressed in all black and wearing hoods to conceal their identity threw bottles filled with rocks and attacked officers including a mounted officer and her horse. The mob then surrounded her and hit the horse with sticks.

The masked protestors screamed profanities and called for my assassination carrying signs that read “Assassinate Arpaio” and other violent messages some so profane, I won’t bother repeating them here.”

Sheriff Joe says in the letter to send money fast, so he can continue to enforce the law even in the face of mounting attacks from the Leftist media, the Leftist presidency, the Leftist U.S. Attorney’s Office, and now, from this most recent demonstration he infers  a mob of 10,000 masked izquierdistas  threw bottles and beat horses with sticks.

Here’s the truth: Of 10,000 marchers, 9,997 were peaceful.

That’s according to public documents.

Only three marchers were singled out by county prosecutors for causing trouble at the January 16 march. That’s right. Three people. The first, nineteen-year-old Jeremiah Matthew Henry, allegedly used a wooden stick to whack a mounted Phoenix police officer  who was “working crowd control.” Twenty-seven-year-old Issa Emadi is accused of throwing one water bottle at the cops.  And twenty-four-year-old Sarah Grace Daniels is accused of striking a cop with the handle of a banner she had been carrying in the march.

I’m not saying Henry, Emadi and  Daniels were in the right if they did what they are accused of doing. They face serious criminal charges for their actions, and if they’re guilty, they’ll pay.

But isn’t it also a sin to scare donors into sending you money by  painting  an entire group of peaceful marchers (mostly Latino families) as radicals?

I have covered several of these marches against the Sheriff’s alleged violations of human rights, and I can tell you I have never seen any violence. I didn’t see violence on January 16.

However, a mom, dad and their two children  saw part of the melee that allegedly involved Henry, Daniels and Emadi. The parents told me they saw a female mounted cop ride into the crowd and squirt  people with pepper spray. Of course, the cop was probably trying to subdue the three protestors.

Unfortunately, the Phoenix mountie also sprayed this immigrant couple’s  five-year-old son.

The child was treated at a hospital emergency room for breathing difficulties.

I took this picture of him a week later. I slanted  my iPhone camera in order to take advantage of the natural light. 

You can see the child is  physically okay now, and he doesn’t like to talk about the pepper spray. Scroll back up and take a look at his eyes. You’ve  got to wonder what goes on inside his five-year-old heart whenever he sees a uniformed cop or a horse.

Ask yourself: Who is the true victim?

The boy?

Or the sheriff?

I’ll tell you why.

First, though,  full disclosure.

I am the writer-in-residence at the Cronkite school. I am writing a book about the undocumented underground in Arizona. The professors who grilled Arpaio in the aborted  Meet-the-Press-style forum are my colleagues. This blog, however, is not affiliated with ASU. It is my personal blog. No one tells me what to write. Hey, I  even follow the writing rules of the Chicago Manual of Style, which is more writerly  than  Associated Press style, which journalism schools tend to use.

Okay. Back to the story.

In  August, when I spoke with Sheriff Joe,  he appeared to relish the idea of facing off against the Cronkite journalism profs in a Meet-the-Press-ish forum. “They’re gonna slam me,” he told me. You’ve got to understand that in  Joe Arpaio’s lexicon, the words “slam me” don’t  necessarily have a negative connotation. I mean, the sheriff  doesn’t just sit there and answer questions.  Instead, he shoots back with polished sound bites that signal to his conservative base that he’s on the job, sparring with  those  journos.

On Monday, the  usual cast of Sheriff Joe’s supporters began showing up in front of the Cronkite building in downtown Phoenix at about 6 p.m. Here’s a picture of one supporter. 

The  guy held two signs. One said: We love you Sheriff Joe! The other said: ASU students can’t read this sign. I’d say  maybe thirty  similarly minded supporters showed up. Some carried signs that said: Illegals Must Go.  The protesters were mostly old Anglos who didn’t like illegal immigration. Or Mexicans. Some packed guns. (Although non-felons are allowed to carry guns in Arizona, they can’t pack on ASU campuses.) The  cops asked the pro-Joe demonstrators to get rid of their sidearms.  The demonstrators disappeared  for a few minutes, then returned unarmed. Or so they said.

About three times as many anti-Arpaioists, non-students and college students of every race, carried signs with messages ranging from opposition to the sheriff’s alleged human-rights abuses of undocumented immigrants to suggestions that sheriff was a card-carrying member of the  KKK.

Photo by Janessa Hilliard

A couple of these anti-Arpaioists  also had guns.

One anti-Arpaioist  packed a pistol and a World War II-era Russian rifle with a bayonet. The cops made him stand on the other side of Central Avenue.

The evening was progressing predictably.  Just as they always do, the  anti-Arpaioists waved aromatic  sage smoke through the air  to purify the place from bad pro-Joe vibes. They beat drums and pots. They chanted: Joe must go. A few of them wore black hoodies and bandannas around their faces so you could only see their eyes. These people understood street theater.

At the pizza store near the journalism school, I saw a sign on the door.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

It read: Arpaio Supporters Not Welcome. The assistant manager said he put the sign up because he didn’t “appreciate Aryan Brotherhood people” coming into his store.

By then, probably three  hundred people had gathered outside of the Cronkite school. Maybe a fourth  of the crowd consisted of  cops and journalists.

Only  students, professors and journalists were allowed inside the Cronkite building to hear the journalism professors question the sheriff.  Those not affiliated with ASU could watch the hour-long forum on a giant screen outside, on the mall.

Inside, I couldn’t find a seat. Students crowded around the railings on the third floor. They perched on the stairs. Many were  students I didn’t recognize. They weren’t journalism students.

At first,  Sheriff Joe responded to questions with his usual sound bites. Stuff like “I answer only to the people of Maricopa County who have elected me.” But I heard an edge creep into his voice as he fielded  well-researched questions about things that really matter–like the Sheriff’s alleged stonewalling of  public records requests.

The students, our future journalists,  were learning from seasoned professionals how to ask big-time politicos tough questions, persistently. Public  records may sound boring, but journalists  rely on  them to figure out what’s going on in taxpayer-funded projects. Like the Iraq War.  Or  Sheriff Joe’s jails.

Public records are key to keeping government honest.  As Americans, we have a right to see how our elected officials are spending taxpayer money and running taxpayer-funded projects. Of course, public officials  don’t always want to hand over public records because if they do journalists will learn the truth and convey the truth to voters. Or maybe get them indicted.

So long story short, the Cronkite students were getting one heck of an education as they listened to their profs  put Sheriff Joe’s feet to the fire about public records requests and other  journalism-related questions.

My own feet were hurting, I couldn’t see the panel, so I wandered downstairs to see if I could catch the forum on the outside screen. Suddenly, dozens  of  protesters crowded into the lobby,  blasting the journalism school for having the forum in the first place. It  was all very Cal-Berkeley in the 1960′s.

Only this time, it was stupid.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

What was the matter with the protesters, anyway? Couldn’t they see that the school was training future journalists? Didn’t they understand that  students were learning how to interview powerful public figures who were rarely held accountable for their alleged abuses of power?

I walked over to the outside screen, where about a hundred people had gathered to watch the forum inside. To my surprise,  Rick Rodriguez, a Cronkite prof who once ran The Sacramento Bee, was  making the sheriff visibly uncomfortable as he asked persistent questions about why the sheriff refused to cooperate with the U.S. Justice Department, which is investigating the sheriff’s alleged retaliatory abuses of power against judges and mayors and politicians and cops who dared criticize him.

Then suddenly, the forum fell apart.

Non-journalism student protesters in the audience, those  students I didn’t recognize who had crowded around the rails, began an organized demonstration that involved high-decibel  singing and chanting and yelling.  They wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t shut up. They went on and on, preventing  Rodriguez from getting key answers from the sheriff about why he would not  cooperate with the agency  investigating him for tormenting his enemies.

This was great for Sheriff Joe.

The demonstrators  gave him an excuse to quit the forum just as it was getting very very awkward for him.

The sheriff left  the building.

Scowling, of course.

I wondered if he was secretly relieved.  Did  the sheriff sense the truth–that  Rodriguez would have pursued him  into the gates of hell to learn why he wouldn’t cooperate with the Justice Department?

I think so.

And I don’t think the sheriff wanted to answer Professor Rodriguez’s  questions.

For obvious reasons.

After the sheriff’s exit, the demonstrators were jubilant. They played music. They sang. They hugged each other. They climbed on a shelf and hung out a banner. Hey, they’d  broken up the forum. They’d run the sheriff off the stage.

They were just kids. They didn’t understand that they had rescued Sheriff Joe.

They didn’t understand that thanks to them, Arizona’s most controversial public official avoided answering questions that mattered.

To  all of us.

Photo by Kathy McCraine

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office said October 19 that it snagged thirty “suspected”undocumented immigrants and thirty-six others in its two-day “crime suppression operation” in the western burbs of Phoenix. You can read the actual press release here. We don’t know what, exactly, happened to the thirty-six folks whose immigration status was not in question. The people with papers do not concern the sheriff as much as the people without papers.

The raids aren’t about people with papers. The raids, instead, are intended  to assure Sheriff Joe’s conservative base, through the evening news, that he’s on the job and sending the Mexicans back home.

But is he?

I attended the first day of the raid, on Friday October 16,  and live-tweeted it.

It was easy to tweet this event.

Nothing happened.

I walked around town  looking for freaked out people, like the ones in the Guadalupe Raid months ago. I didn’t find any.  Instead, I  met a lot of undocumented people who were laying low. They were cautious. But they weren’t afraid. This  was Sheriff Joe’s twelfth raid. These  expensive  displays of shock and awe, with all the guys in storm trooper outfits driving in black sedans and SUV’s with tinted windows,  had lost their punch. Most  undocumented people I talked to understood the raids were  publicity stunts. After all,  less than three hundred people had been apprehended for being in the country illegally during the previous eleven raids. You can read about that here.

During the well-attended press conference on October 16, Sheriff Joe admitted not a single immigrant had been caught in the “Crime Suppression Operation” at that point.

But the night was young, he said.

The next day, the deputies et.al. raided the On Your Way Car Wash and Quick Lube in Peoria, a Phoenix suburb. The sheriff’s office announced that nine suspected undocumented people had been arrested for “identity theft,” which means they used fake IDs in order to work in a state that does not allow them to work. Nabbing people for “identity theft” falls under the state Employer Sanctions Act, which I wrote about here. What’s key here is that this is a state law, which the sheriff can use to catch undocumented people regardless of what the feds tell him to do.

Sheriff Joe’s deputies took these nine suspected undocumented ID-thieves,  plus two more, to the slammer.

In other words, it took two hundred sheriff officials forty-eight hours to jail a total of eleven suspected undocumented migrants.

The other nineteen suspected undocumented immigrants were turned over to ICE, because the  agency recently reined in the sheriff and told him he couldn’t pick up law-abiding folks just because they were undocumented.

To repeat: Of thirty alleged undocumented immigrants caught in the two-day raid by two hundred officials,  eleven went to jail. That’s eleven people out of an estimated five hundred thousand undocumented immigrants thought to live in Arizona, with the heaviest population in the Phoenix area.

No wonder I didn’t have  much to tweet.

Still, as I tapped all those boring tweets on my iPhone, I sensed I was witnessing an important shift: undocumented immigrants  in Arizona have been through so much they just aren’t afraid any more.

And when undocumented people lose their fear,  Sheriff Joe loses his power.

Isn’t that the way it works?

According to Arpaio’s interpretation of Title 8, it’s okay to  stop folks for the way they dress or speak or behave.

Several bloggers, including The Arizona Captiol Times Policy Wonk, noted that the law as cited by Arpaio–sounded awfully fishy.

In fact,the pundits pointed out, such a law didn’t exist.

Someone–a staffer? an anti-undocumented immigrant advocate?–had evidently given the sheriff this distinctly unconstitutional interpretation of Title 8, and Sheriff Joe insisted it was the real law.

Whoops.

Who’s laughing now, Sheriff Joe?

Photo by Kathy McCraine

How could  Sheriff Joe make such a mistake? And what does this say about his staff?

The   sheriff ‘s office just sent out a press release acknowledging the gaffe.  Here is what the press release says:

Last week during a news conference discussing the Sheriff’s agreement with ICE and the 287g agreement, Sheriff Arpaio made reference to and distributed a document that is an interpretation of Title 8 of the U.S. Code regarding federal immigration laws and the authority to enforce those laws.

Over recent weeks, Sheriff’s Office staff has been conducting research on the issue of federal immigration laws and how the Sheriff’s Office will be affected by the loss of the law enforcement portion of the 287g program.

During that research, the Sheriff’s Office has referred to title 8 of the U.S. code as well as a multitude of interpretations of federal law. This form containing an interpretation was inadvertently given to the Sheriff with an incorrect citation of a certain section of federal law as an example of how to pursue the federal law.

Although the citation and language does not appear in the U.S. code, title 8 does exist and the Sheriff’s Office believes that it still has the authority under federal law to detain illegal aliens during the course of their duties.

Sheriff Joe plans a raid tomorrow, October 16. I will try to tweet from the streets of Phoenix. It will be a spectacle.  It will be terrifying.

But he won’t catch a lot of undocumented people.

Why?

Because these raids aren’t really designed to catch undocumented people. Because these raids are Sheriff Joe’s way of communicating with his conservative base, telling them through the TV cameras that he’s on the job. Here’s the truth: Sheriff Joe never catches a lot of undocumented people in these raids.

They are publicity stunts.

See you tomorrow, October 16,  on Twitter.

Photo by Kathy McCraine

Sheriff Joe  Arpaio just brokered a new deal with ICE.  It allows him to continue to check immigration status in his jails, where about 10,000 souls reside. But the new deal squelches the Sheriff’s world-famous sweeps of the streets of Phoenix.

Sort of.

Of course, Sheriff Joe knew this deal was coming down weeks ago. You can’t convince me there wasn’t a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating.

You see that I started this column with  a picture of me and Sheriff Joe talking about the deal six weeks ago.

Does he look worried?

The Sheriff signed his first  agreement, called 287 (g), with ICE several years ago. The old agreement  allowed the Sheriff’s ICE-trained deputies to raid the streets looking for undocumented immigrants. Sure, there had to be a “reason,” like a cracked windshield, but we all knew the score here in Maricopa County.

Sheriff Joe was on the prowl for  undocumented immigrants.

And most people in Arizona supported that. I am ashamed to say that many  in the Grand Canyon State  fear and sometimes hate Mexicans.

So while  raiding the streets of Phoenix netted few immigrants, it brought a lot of free  PR for a sheriff who wanted to please his conservative base.

We journos were voyeuristic enablers. We covered each and every raid, and Sheriff Joe loved that because the televised raids showed  his supporters that he was on the job.

The old agreement the Sheriff signed with ICE a few years ago also allowed Sheriff Joe’s employees to check immigration status in the vast Maricopa County jail system. This is where Sheriff Joe got most stats of “illegals” he nabbed and sent to ICE for deportation. At this writing, he’s turned over more than 28,781 undocumented immigrants to ICE just because of the  jail checks. The raids, by contrast, have netted less than 300 undocumented immigrants, according to The  Arizona Republic.

The new agreement handed down from ICE allows the Sheriff to keep his jail stats. As for the PR, my guess is he’ll continue his raids using Arizona immigration laws, which are the harshest in the nation. Incredibly, if you’re an undocumented person, you can go to prison for smuggling yourself through Arizona. And things aren’t going to get better soon. The latest buzz is that state lawmakers might try to pass a law that failed last year. It  slams undocumented immigrants for “trespassing” in Arizona.

So given the climate in Arizona, and the laws that exist and the laws that might exist, I don’t see why anyone would think the Sheriff lost a great deal with his new ICE agreement.  He still has plenty of state law that will enable televised “sweeps” and he’s  got the power to enforce laws anywhere he wants to in Maricopa County. He might huff and puff about  his new ICE agreement, but little has actually changed.

I bet he’s not going to lose any sleep over it.

Not a wink.

What you won’t read about is the little lady with the straw hat. She stood outside the church, part of a very small (less than a dozen) gaggle of supporters showing their approval of  Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The little lady wore a pink shirt and baggy slacks and multi-toned (brown, grey, black, white?) walking shoes. She looked like a grandmother a la Ozzie and Harriet.

She told me she helped support a “colony of cats” in her neighborhood. She said the thirty-four or so cats had been trapped and neutered and released back into her neighborhood.  She explained  that if she were to insert  another bunch of cats into  the established  colony of neutered cats, there would be “chaos.”

And that hypothetical cat-chaos scenario  is emblematic of  what happens in the USA when unauthorized immigrants enter the country, she confided. 

“Write that down,” she said.

So I did.