I have been writing pretty regularly about Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070,  for The Daily Beast, and updating the galleys for my book, ILLEGAL, LIfe and Death in the Undocumented Underground, which is slated to be published in June. I regret that I have neglected this web site.

This new law is less than a week old, and already two lawsuits have been filed against Arizona over civil rights issues in the law. The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department might launch a legal protest as well. The Mayor of Phoenix promised to sue, but his city council didn’t back him up.

I want to post a series of photos really fast, just so you take a trip with me through the events of the last month.

The first picture was taken outside the funeral of rancher Robert Krentz. No one knows who killed him, but the highly politicized murder has been widely blamed on a faceless Mexican drug trafficker who crossed the border illegally. This caused an uproar for more secure borders, to which Janet Napolitano has repeatedly replied that yea, more can be done, but immigration is down at the border.

The second photo is of ranchers calling for border enforcement on the day SB 1070 sailed through the Arizona House of Representatives. The ranchers are flanked by Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and J.D. Hayworth, who is running in the Senate primary against John McCain and supports the new law, which criminalizes about 460,000 undocumented immigrants for setting foot in Arizona and requires all law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. If they don’t enforce the laws, the cities and counties that employ them can be sued by Arizona residents.

Pearce is the fellow on the left, and Hayworth is on the right.

The rest of the pictures I shot were of various protestors. Some for the law, some against it. They were all demonstrating on  the grounds of the Arizona state capitol complex.

The photo below is of  people who support SB 1070 being interviewed by a reporter.

Here’s a placard I saw lying on the ground.

That’s all for today. More soon.

An Arizona rancher was mysteriously gunned down twenty miles north of the border on March 27. His name was Robert Krentz, and his unsolved murder quickly became a rallying cry for tea-partiers-and-or-seal-the-border proponents,   including Sen. John McCain’s primary rival, J.D. Hayworth, who assumed the unknown killer was what they call an “illegal alien.”

Krentz’s ranch was near Douglas, Arizona, and its famous smuggling corridors. The Krentz ranch  was frequently traversed by drug traffickers (mostly transporting  pot grown in Mexico to distributors who would sell it to  middle-class professional folks, and college students, and truck drivers, and debutantes, and cowboys, and all the other Americans who have made the United States the largest consumer of Mexican marijuana in the world)  and human smugglers, called coyotes, who lead groups of migrants into the United States.

The Cochise County Sheriff Department reported shortly after the killing that trackers had followed a lone set of prints from the murder scene twenty miles back to Mexico.

So just about everybody is linking this unsolved murder to a drug-cartel loon or an undocumented immigrant. That includes ranchers who knew Robert Krentz, the murder victim.   Some theorized Krentz might have been ambushed by someone who was angry at Krentz. Like a drug dealer or a human smuggler. After all, he always called the Border Patrol.

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat who is running for governor and favors comprehensive immigration reform, concluded yesterday that the killer was probably a drug-cartel scout.

In the years I’ve covered the border, I’ve traipsed through the  smuggling country around Douglas with ranchers, and  with the Border Patrol, and I’ve seen the high places where drug-cartel scouts position themselves to ensure that drug smugglers have safe passage, free from ICE or the DEA or the Border Patrol. (Shameless self promotion= you’ll read about all this in my upcoming book, ILLEGAL: Life and Death in the Undocumented Underground.)

It seems so silly now,  but once when I was in the backcountry I even waved up at this hideout  on a hill where I guessed  a cartel scout was glassing me.

God,  times have changed.

Goddard theorized  Krentz probably surprised a drug cartel scout, who shot him. This was likely not an ambush and not a setup. Any smart druglord knows you don’t go shooting an American because it only draws attention to you.

And that’s the last thing you want, if you’re a smuggler trying to get pot into America’s living rooms.

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!

The store had closed. I was disappointed, because I  had wanted to write about people who eat chapulines for my book. Grasshoppers are eaten by indigenous Mexicans, and they’re a great source of protein.

I swear I’m not making this up,  but the very next day I met a source for an interview. As he walked in the room, he carried a little plastic tub full of fried, salted chapulines.  His dad had brought them up to Arizona from the Mexican state of Guerrero.  Here is a picture I took of the tub of grasshoppers.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

The man told me that female grasshoppers taste  better than male grasshoppers because female grasshoppers are fattier. This is a picture of a male and female grasshopper he picked out of the tub.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

“Eat one,” the man told me,  ”but first pull off the legs because they are like splinters and get caught in the throat.”

“OK,” I said.

I chose the guy grasshopper.

It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got the little fellow  in my mouth.

I forced myself to chew. The chapulín tasted clean, salty and crispy.

God, I love writing this book.

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?

It’s a happy plate.

The young woman was not happy. She and her husband, who had a fatal disease, were about to make a life-and-death gamble.

They were going to deport themselves to Mexico to maybe save his life.

Emphasis on the word “maybe.”

They didn’t have room in their baggage for the plate, one of their most prized possessions.

They wanted me to have it.

“I’ll keep it for you until you return,” I chirped.

Of course, we both knew we might not ever see each other again.

I can’t tell you more about the woman right now, because she and her husband take up an entire chapter in  my nonfiction book, ILLEGAL, which will be published later this year by Lyons Press, which is a division of Globe Pequot Press.  I can’t tell you a lot about the real-life characters in the book until the book comes out.  What I can tell you is that most of my book characters are undocumented immigrants.  I’ve recorded some of their stories on video and in photos and I’ll post all that when the book debuts.

Until then, I’ll blog about the  news events that impact the lives of undocumented immigrants.

Or I’ll blog about leavings, treasures, artifacts, recuerdos of the year I’ve spent getting to know the people in the shadows.

Like  the happy dolphin plate.  It couldn’t have cost more than a few bucks.

To the immigrant family that owned it, though, it was a treasure.

As the temporary steward of this recuerdo, I  put it on my office shelf.

Every now and then I pick it up and stare at it. Cavorting dolphins notwithstanding, it reminds me of the sorrows and struggles of undocumented immigrants toughing it out in Ground Zero for the Immigration Debate–Phoenix–in 2010.

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.

Why do they come?

Why do they stay?

Here is one reason, from Mercedes Sosa, the late Argentine cantora, and Puerto Ricans Calle 13.

I don’t need to say anything else, except you may need a Kleenex.