Sen. John McCain, who set off a firestorm of controversy after claiming some Arizona’s wildfires were caused by people who crossed the border illegally, responded to national news stories that could not get the allegation confirmed.

In a joint press statement by Republican lawmakers, McCain said a USFS official told him some fires were caused by migrants.

Here is the press release.

STATEMENT BY SENATORS McCAIN, KYL AND CONGRESSMEN FLAKE, GOSAR ON THE ARIZONA WILDFIRES

June 20, 2011

Washington D.C. – U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Congressmen Jeff Flake (AZ-06) and Paul Gosar (AZ-01) today released the following statement regarding the Arizona wildfires:

“Arizona is currently facing the worst wildfire season in its history.  After touring the devastation in eastern Arizona, we would like to express our gratitude to the brave firefighters, first responders, and public lands personnel who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to preserve communities, homes, and our natural habitats.

“During our tour of the damaged areas caused by the Wallow Fire on Saturday, we were briefed by senior Forest Service officials, one of whom informed us that some wildfires in Arizona (across our southern border) are regrettably caused by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.  This statement is consistent with what we’ve been hearing for years, as well as testimony by the Forest Service and media reports dating back as far as 2006.

“While Arizonans continue to face the enormous challenges related to these wildfires, it’s unfortunate that some are inserting their political agenda into this tragedy.”

And who, exactly, is “inserting their political agenda into this tragedy”?

“Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone” gets excerpted on The Daily Beast.

Some readers were upset that I profiled a gay immigrant.

One reader wrote:

Are you seriously trying to create some sort of sympathy and tears for an illegal crossdressing freak? What kind of desperate “writer” are YOU? You’re more pitiful than him.
Sorry – DO NOT CARE. He needs to disappear. He’s using resources for Americans; he has no right being here. My interest in him is zero. My concern with fixing the oil leak and cleaning up the Gulf is paramount. Shame on you, TDB, you really are reaching. Pathetic.

And another reader wrote:

Of the many things one could say about cross dressing in the Mexican culture – and about this very interesting excerpt – “come on get a life, nobody really cares”?! Um, seriously? Terry: great excerpt, I look forward to reading the book.

So there you have it

TERRY GREENE STERLING: PHOTOS FROM A HOTBED OF (IMMIGRATION LAW) PROTEST – PHOENIX, ARIZONA

Soon, this site will be redesigned. We’ll have lots of new features, and my web designer, who is very smart about these things, says I won’t be able to use such HUGE pictures. What can I say? I’ll have to defer, after all, he knows what he’s doing. But until we get the new site launched, it is Bigpicturepalooza.

Here are two photos I shot at the May 29 pro-and-con immigration-law rallies.  You can read the law in earlier posts on these pages.

This is a picture of a boy marcher whose mother is an undocumented immigrant. She is a professional clown. She entertains kids at birthday parties. This explains why she painted her son’s face with the words: For America. Naturally, the boy and his mother are opposed to the law. Estimates for the march this child attended ranged from 10,000 to 100,000. I figure there were about 30,000 marchers, but I couldn’t be sure since I was reporting from the middle  of the march.

Below, a portrait of a man who doesn’t have work and came to pro-SB 1070  Tea Party rally in search of work. He told me he didn’t  really blame immigrants for taking his job, but  he said he figured he’d get work if he showed up at the rally. He didn’t get a job, but he got one lead by the time I left the rally around 9 p.m. Estimates for this sedentary rally, in a stadium, where people sat and listened to speakers, ranged from about 5,000 to 10,000. I think about 3,000 people were there when I visited.

PINAL COUNTY SHERIFF IN MCCAIN AD HAS PROBLEMS BACKING UP CLAIMS OF “ILLEGAL ALIEN” VIOLENCE

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.

PHOENIX NEW TIMES FILES ITS SECOND REPORT QUESTIONING  A MYSTERIOUS SHOOTING OF PINAL COUNTY DEPUTY, WHO SAID HE WAS SHOT BY MEXICAN DRUG TRAFFICKERS WITH AK-47-TYPE WEAPONS IN THE DESERT NEAR PHOENIX.  THE ALLEGED SHOOTERS, WHO WERE MOVING POT, ACCORDING TO THE DEPUTY, WERE NEVER FOUND, DESPITE A MASSIVE SEARCH. THE DEPUTY WAS TREATED AND RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL THAT SAME NIGHT.

******

Our thoughts & prayers go out to the Pinal County Deputy shot during a stop.Contrary to what some leaders say,our borders are not secure.6:13 PM Apr 30th via Tweetie –

A tweet by Governor Jan Brewer in the wake of the deputy shooting, one week after she signed controversial SB 1070.

*******

For those of you who don’t know me, I was a staff writer at Phoenix New Times for fourteen years.  One of my colleagues, Paul Rubin, was and is the best crime reporter in Arizona. He is really well sourced. Cops trust him and tell him things they won’t tell anyone else.

So when Rubin filed a report  that questioned the shooting of a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy just days after Gov. Jan Brewer signed the controversial SB 1070  immigration law, I took notice. He’s not the kind of reporter who shoots from the hip. He knows his business.

Here is his latest report.

“ILLEGAL, LIFE AND DEATH IN ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION WAR ZONE”

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.

Some Arizona schools have policemen on their campuses. The new immigration law, slated to go into effect in July if it is not stalled by court action or initiatives,  requires all police officers in the state to become immigration enforcers. If the police do not arrest people without papers they “reasonably suspect” of being in the country illegally, the law gives Arizona residents the right to sue the employers of the police agencies–which could be either the state, or a county, or cities and towns.

At taxpayer expense.

What effect does this have on Arizona schools, where Spanish speakers drop their kids off every day? Will the police officers be forced to ask the parents for papers?

School officials are grappling with this problem right now.

AN ARIZONA IMMIGRATION HOAX? QUESTIONS ARISE OVER SHOOTING OF PINAL COUNTY SHERIFF DEPUTY

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.

LAWSUITS LAUNCHED AGAINST ARIZONA FOR IMMIGRATION LAW

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.

DID A DRUG CARTEL SCOUT KILL RANCHER ROBERT KRENTZ ON THE ARIZONA BORDER?

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.