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.

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.

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.

Photograph by Kathy McCraine

Tent City is part of Sheriff Joe’s remarkable publicity machine. Yea, the tents are hot in the Phoenix summers. Each tent complex has its own air-cooled recreation room, though. Inmates go in these rooms to cool off, make phone calls, eat, take showers, play cards. It’s not ideal, but it’s not horrible, either. I knew I wouldn’t find mistreated inmates in any tent available to a reporter.

As I said, Sheriff Joe is not stupid.

Neither am I.

Sheriff Joe gave me relatively free access to the O-Tents, where undocumented immigrants are bunked before they are deported. Most of the inmates are serving time for minor crimes, like DUI or making fake IDs. Once their sentences are served, they are sent back to their countries of origin. If they return to the USA, they will face re-entry after deportation charges, which are serious.

Photo by Kathy McCraine

I have a lot to say about Tent City, and the undocumented immigrants who live there, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in my book, Illegal. It will be published by Globe Pequot Press in 2010.

Until then, here’s a taste of what’s to come via Kathy McCraine’s outstanding photography.