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.

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.

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!

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?