You can read a really good analysis of  just why, exactly, Obama chose this time and place to speak about immigration in a big way. Just link here. Obama delivered his talk at American University, in Washington. He  said this, in a nutshell: It’s time to reform federal immigration policy using a four-pronged approach of border enforcement, workplace enforcement, visa policy modernization and a stand-in-line-and-pay-your-fees pathway to a green card. (Citizenship, and voting privileges, would come years later.) (Oh, and the comprehensive immigration reform Obama touted is not new;   Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, with President Bush’s blessing, tried to get it passed  back in 2006. )

Obama also took a couple of jabs at Arizona and SB 1070, saying the law pummels law enforcement authorities with burdendome expenses and responsibilities, and, of course, opens the door to racial profiling.

Almost immediately after Obama stepped down from the podium,  John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills legislator who has become a key spokesman for SB 1070 after sponsoring a similar law in the Arizona House, appeared on TV in Phoenix. He told  FOX News he was offended that Obama lumped immigrants who came here illegally with immigrants who came legally, like his grandparents. He said the Obama plan meant “amnesty” and SB 1070 protected against racial profiling.

Kavanagh had recently done a little offending of his own, when  he “joked” to a roomful of Latino journalists that Canadian “illegals” could stay in Arizona because they had money. You can read about that here.

Sen. Russell Pearce, the main sponsor of SB 1070, told Phoenix FOX news that Obama was fear mongering and just wanted “amnesty.” Pearce has been accused of fearmongering, too. The Arizona Republic noted that Pearce erred when he attributed 9,000 deaths to “illegal immigration.” In a fascinating and informative profile, reporter Gary Nelson notes:

Pearce has frequently cited a soaring crime rate caused by illegal immigration as one of the reasons for his stance.

However, statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that violent and property crimes in Phoenix have decreased in the last three years at a rate that is even faster than the nation’s as a whole.

As recently as two months ago, Pearce wrote a constituent that illegal immigrants are responsible for “over 9,000 American deaths every year.” The number has been attributed to U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who said he “extrapolated” from a Government Accountability Office study. The study, however, was on illegal-immigrant prison populations and does not mention that figure.

Read more: azcentral.com

Just days before Pearce accused the President of fear mongering, Gov. Jan Brewer talked about “beheadings” that couldn’t be substantiated, and said all those “illegals” crossing the border were drug mules.

Here’s Brewer’s beheadings video: Brewer talks about beheadings.

The beheadings couldn’t be substantiated, according to Politico.

SB 1070 has long been promoted by proponents as kicking in only after a  cop  lawfully stops detains or arrests someone they suspect of committing a  ”crime”  ( the ” crime” category includes   city ordinances and  traffic violations) and then only after “reasonable suspicion” exists that the  person is in the country illegally.

Today, thanks to  Evan Wyloge, a rising star  journalist who has been covering this angle relentlessly we learn:

Lyle Mann, director of the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training board, said what constitutes a “stop, detainment or arrest” is really much broader than the law’s supporter’s have been conveying since the law was signed April 23.

“The truth of the matter is an officer can stop anyone for any reason and ask them anything,” Mann said. “Is that kind? Is that brutish? That’s another question.”

Does this broad interpretation also apply to US citizens who are lawfully stopped detained or arrested while driving their undocumented relatives?

We’ll know for sure on July 29, when the law kicks in, barring court injunctions.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

HERE IT IS.

HERE IS THE AMENDMENT.

HERE IS THE GOVERNOR’S  EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT TRAINING.

HERE IS VIDEO OF AUTHOR OF LAW INSTRUCTING POLICE ON “REASONABLE SUSPICION.”

You’ll note in the text that the law does not address border security.

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.

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.

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.