“The fact that the deaths continue at such high numbers despite widespread indications that fewer people are crossing the border has led many experts to conclude that illegal border crossers face a deadlier trek than ever across Arizona’s desert,” McCombs writes.

It is hot in the desert.

Migrants who can’t keep up with groups are left to die.

If you haven’t seen the newspaper’s database on migrant crossing deaths, it is a worthwhile resource.

In Phoenix, with upcoming hearings on whether SB1070 should be enjoined, and heated primaries focused on illegal immigration, the “deadlier trek” is sometimes forgotten. Or the global forces that drive illegal immigration, which I write about in one chapter in my book.

On these pages, I’ve been honored to introduce you to the work of some of the top journalists in Arizona. Brady McCombs, a reporter for The Arizona Daily Star, is one such journalist. He’s been writing about immigration in Arizona for years, and he has a nose for lies and  half truths.

McCombs recently questioned Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who claims that crimes committed by undocumented immigrants are “off the charts.Babeu  appeared in the recent \”dang fence\” ad for John McCain, who’s fighting a tough mano-a-mano in the Republican senate primary against J.D. Hayworth.

Babeu is an ally of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the boss of the Pinal County deputy who allegedly got grazed with the bullets of  an Ak-47-type weapon by faceless Mexican drug traffickers with Sinaloan accents. Paul Rubin, another fine reporter, has called this shooting into question, as I noted in this post and this post.  As you can see, Pinal County borders Maricopa County, which is the most populous county because it encompasses the Phoenix metro area.

Was the Pinal County shooting a hoax?

And are Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s numbers backing up the violence committed by “illegals” exaggerated?

Once again, you be the judge, after reading Brady McComb’s fine reportage.

At the very least you’ve got to wonder: What was John McCain thinking?

UPDATE: MCCOMBS POSTED AN UPDATE ON MAY 27.

The revised stats from the Pinal County Sheriff’s office appear to have changed.

By Terry Greene Sterling

I have been covering the immigration battles in Arizona for the last year and a half. This book was written after many, many hours in the trenches. This is the cover.

The book comes out in June, but you can buy it now here.

Please join me on this intimate journey. The people in the shadows want you to know their stories.

At Los Cenzontles, he and his staff have encouraged kids to work hard, practice, take joy, dance, make wonderful music and art. Musicians at the center have  collaborated musically with The Chieftans, Taj Mahal, and Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished singers and musicians.

Eugene Rodriguez has dark skin and black hair, and like many Mexican-Americans, he was taught to assimilate.

And there was a reason for this.

Self-preservation.

“Mexican Americans have a strategy,” he tells me,  ”Blend in and don’t make waves.”

He says: There’s been an undercurrent in the United States that Mexicans are less than human.

So very few Mexican Americans made waves.

Now all that has changed, because Arizona has passed a new immigration law. It requires all policemen in the state who “reasonably suspect” someone to be in the country illegally to stop them. And if they don’t have papers, to arrest them. Reasonable suspicion that a guy is an unauthorized immigrant must be accompanied by  a law being broken — your tail light is out, for instance, or you have a messy front yard, in the eyes of the policeman.   Next, the cop must have more than one reason to reasonably suspect you’re an undocumented immigrant. For instance, a person who dresses in a way a policeman thinks indicates that a person is an “illegal alien,” and travels down known smuggling corridors (that would be almost any road in Arizona) could arouse sufficient “reasonable suspicion” to be arrested if he’s not carrying papers.

Honestly, I didn’t make that up.

It’s in an instructional training video for  Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies. The guy in the video is Kris Kobach, who wrote the law and is called a “nativist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As for Kobach’s video on what constitutes “reasonable suspicion,” you can see it here.

This  explains why Rodriguez, an accomplished American with degrees and  honors, intuits he could be stopped by any policeman in Arizona who “reasonably” suspects that he’s an unauthorized immigrant.

That outrages him.

His great grandfather was an Arizona pioneer.

“It’s too much,” he says.

In a way he’s grateful for the new law, because in his view the law has  given voice and shape to discrimination against Mexicans that  has been festering in the United States for decades.

So Rodriguez, a guy who says he never made waves, is now giving voice to a reaction to Arizona’s  law: An outraged call to action.

In a song.

Rodriguez wrote a corrido, which is a stylized Mexican ballad about a current event. This particular  corrido is about Arizona’s new law, and it’s called  ”Estado de Verguenza,” which  means “State of Shame.” It calls for Mexican Americans to fight Arizona’s fear-based racism with money, votes, and pride.

It calls for them to make waves.

You can hear it here. And also see it. It’s on YouTube.

A week after Arizona’s governor signed the toughest immigration law in the nation, SB 1070, a Pinal County Sheriff’s deputy claimed he was shot with an AK-47 type weapon in an ambush with five drug traffickers. Bullets whizzed, he said. The ambushers disappeared, even after a massive search by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies and other law-enforcement groups, like the Border Patrol. The suspects: drug traffickers from Sinaloa, Mexico.

The deputy, Louie Puroll,  was released from the hospital a few hours after he was admitted. He’d been grazed by either one or two bullets.  He’s not talking to the press.

Now at least one journalist, and a very good one at that, is calling the shooting into question.

And here’s  the latest update, from a rival newspaper, in response to the story questioning the shooting.

You be the judge.

In 2004, I met Robert Krentz, the Arizona rancher who was gunned down in his ATV on March 27. When I met Krentz, I was on assignment for Arizona Highways, for a 2005 story about the Malpai Borderlands Group, a band of ranchers that teamed up to preserve their borderlands ranches from ecological ruin and wildcat development.  I also wrote a story for The Washington Post on the  group. I venture to say this group of men and women with divergent points of views on border enforcement will be tested mightily by the Krentz killing.

I remember sitting outside the Krentz house in 2004 and listening to Rob Krentz vent  about illegal immigration and drug trafficking,  which, given his apparent experiences with expensive vandalism, was understandable. He preferred riding his ATV to a cow pony, and he was almost always armed when he went out to check his borderlands ranch. If trespassers came on his property, he called the Border Patrol.

Of course, we don’t know who murdered Krentz, but his killing has become central to the immigration debate because people are speculating the killer was an undocumented immigrant or drug trafficker. Embattled Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who is being investigated by the FBI and the State Bar of Arizona for ethical violations, today used the Krentz murder as a reason to resign from office and run for Arizona Attorney General.

Of course Thomas isn’t the only politco using the Krentz killing for  ambitious political advantage. I wrote about my visit with Krentz and the political fallout of his unsolved death for The Daily Beast today, and I hope you enjoy the story.

It’s time to step back a  minute and let things cool off.

Remember, we don’t know who killed Krentz.

The murder is unsolved.

Let me explain.

Julián LeBarón was born in Mexico and lives in a town called Colonia LeBarón in Chihuahua, a Mexican border state where thousands of men, women, and children have been  slaughtered in a “drug war”  that  is increasingly difficult to comprehend or even define.

It began in 2006 as President Felipe Calderón launched an ongoing attack against some enterprising drug cartels who made billions selling coke and heroin and speed and pot to the largest consumer of drugs in the world — the United States of America.

So far, at least 16,000 people have died in that war.

That’s according to  a great study called Drug Violence in Mexico, published by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

The  bloodbath is inchoate, incomprehensible. The average Mexican may not  know who is on what side. Is the soldier really working for the narcotrafficker? Is the narcotrafficker really working for the government? And God knows how many have joined  the splinter (often coked out or tweaked out) gangs of kidnappers and for-hire murderers  in military outfits who kill and torture just to make a few bucks for themselves.

Of all the states in Mexico, Chihuahua endured the most killings in 2009 — Mexican newspaper reports range from 3,637 to 2,079, according to the Trans-Border Institute.

That death toll includes Julián’s brother, Benjamín. He had refused to pay a $1 million ransom for his kid brother, who was kidnapped near town.  The kid brother was eventually released unharmed and without ransom by the perplexed kidnappers, but they didn’t like Benjamín’s tough-on-crime attitude.

Benjamín organized his  extended family (it’s a very large extended family,  we’ll get to why soon) against kidnapping and killing and thuggery and wanton violence in  Colonia LeBarón. Then masked men  broke into his home, kidnapped him and a brother-in-law,  and shot them to death.

Besides Benjamín and his brother-in-law, Julían tells me over the phone, five others have been murdered, and Julián has gotten death threats and  was recently assaulted by four masked creeps  in the middle of town in the middle of the day and everyone knows who they were but no one’s done anything about it.

“I’m not safe at all,” he tells me. “I am threatened with death all the time. At least five people have told me I’m on a hit list.”

He refuses to run, to give in to the bad guys.

He could go to the United States, where he holds dual citizenship with Mexico. But he’s always been more comfortable in the country where he was born. So instead of running, he writes. In  early January, he  published a manifesto against violence, in Spanish, on the Internet.

In this manifesto, he proposes a non-violent national organized opposition to violence.

Mexicans are strong courageous people who should rise up and say “BASTA” to the slaughter, the manifesto says.

“You might think I’m crazy,” Julián tells me, “but it can be done.”

The manifesto serves another purpose — it attracts press attention, spotlights Julián’s predicament. The more  publicity, perhaps, the less danger.

And to think that just a few years ago, Colonia LeBarón was a peaceful little town.

“The (Calderón) drug war is not something most Mexicans agree with,” he says.

In the old days, before the Drug War, drug dealers were seen as Robin Hoods who sold “poison” to the gringos who deserved it because they screwed Mexico with trade agreements that made people even more poor than they already were, he tells me. And he makes sure I know that he doesn’t believe gringos should be poisoned with drugs, and that he has never had any association with drug dealers or drugs.

The problem now is that Mexicans themselves are consuming the “poison” that they were selling to gringos, he says.

I’ve seen newspaper photos of the little desert farming town where he lives. It’s got a lot of pecan orchards. It sits near mountains. It’s  called Colonia LeBarón because it is inhabited mostly by LeBaróns, who trace their roots to fundamentalist Mormon polygamists who moved to Mexico in the 1880′s. They came south in part to escape growing controversy and outrage over their lifestyle, which was espoused by the founding Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith.

The  LeBaróns have cousins  in places like Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah and ElDorado, Texas. These fundamentalist polygamous Mormon cults have been disavowed by  mainstream Mormons since polygamy was outlawed in the 1890′s. Such  standoffish polygamous sects in the American West face increasing scrutiny and several cult leaders have been sentenced to prison in connection with marrying underage girls.

In the history of fundamentalist Mormons, the LeBarón name isn’t without controversy. An ancestor, Ervil LeBarón, died in prison in 1981 while serving time for  murder. He issued dicta from prison that allegedly set off a killing spree of  his enemies.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Julián LeBaron, who was a baby  at the time of the killings and who tells me he despises everything  about Ervil LeBarón.

Julián is a devout Mormon fundamentalist, and belongs to a religious group that believes in the practice of polygamy, also called “plural marriage.”  (He has never practiced it himself, and doesn’t intend to, and doesn’t want his name associated with it, he says.)

According to Julián, the  Chihuahua LeBaróns may believe plural marriage but they  differ from their gringo counterparts in a number of ways. The sister wives at Colonia LeBarón don’t wear prairie dresses and pull their hair on top of their heads. The guys don’t marry underage girls. They own land and property individually, instead of communally. And there’s no strict ban on alcohol — Julián himself downs a cold one every now and again, although he points out he’s no drunkard.

Julián is thirty-two years old, and for many years he traveled north to the United States to earn a living as a bilingual framer.  He saved his money, sent it down to Mexico to his family, just like a lot of Mexicans.

He tells me he’s  framed  buildings “all over the country,” including in New Orleans right  after Hurricane Katrina. His first job in New Orleans: Repairing  a funeral home. There were so many dead bodies.

Now he’s trying to stay alive, keep himself from being a stiff in a funeral home.

Julián knows he could come to the United States and run away from the violence.

But he won’t, because Mexico is in his soul.

So-called “sister wives”  in some Arizona polygamist enclaves are  married off as teens to old men and then reassigned to other old men, all for the glory of God and, critics say, the political well being of whoever happens to be prophet at the time. The women go along with the degradation because they choose to believe it is their only route to eternal salvation.

Sister wives are American citizens. They could enjoy all sorts of rights and liberties if they wanted them.

But they don’t.

Undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, aren’t American citizens. In Arizona, they  can’t legally drive or work. College is out of the question for most, because they’re barred from paying in-state tuition, even though many undocumented kids have  lived here for most of their lives. They pay taxes, but enjoy few of the benefits afforded to taxpayers. You’d think these people would want to go back to their homelands after they get arrested for jaywalking or working or having broken tail lights, but many  choose to spend the equivalent of a whole year’s salary  to hire a lawyer to fight  deportation. They don’t want to leave, despite the hardships.

So who has the most American spirit?

The sister wives?

Or the undocumented immigrants?

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.

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?