Arizona is trying to be like an independent country. Arizona is not a sovereign nation. It’s part of the United States of America.
FORMER GOVERNOR RAÚL CASTRO, EAST VALLEY TRIBUNE, MAY 7, 2010
One hundred fifty-six years after Charles Poston’s entry, Senator John McCain and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu walked that same border with cameras rolling for a TV commercial. Faced with a surprisingly serious primary challenge from Tea Party candidate and former US Representative J. D. Hayworth, McCain refers to “drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder.” Babeu confirms: “We’re outmanned. Of all the illegals in America, more than half come through Arizona.” He asks McCain to “bring troops, state, county, and local law enforcement together” (presumably in a federally bankrolled plan). McCain chimes in with his salty sailor’s language: “And complete the danged fence.”
Babeu concludes with the Rambo kicker: “It’ll work this time, Senator. You’re one of us.”
One of us? Most longtime Arizonans probably wondered: Who was Paul Babeu? Most listeners of Fox News and conservative talk shows already knew; the overnight sensation had appeared on the network twenty-nine times in 2010.
In the tradition of the nineteenth-century “Tucson ring” carpetbaggers, every one of Arizona’s most vociferous “nativists”—including Governor Jan Brewer, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Attorney General Tom Horne, State Superintendent John Huppenthal, various state legislators, Babeu, and McCain—was a transplant from out of state. Horne, who led the legislative effort to end Mexican American Studies, was a Canadian, whose Jewish parents had fled wartime Poland. The only exception was State Senate President Russell Pearce, whose shadowy ancestry would later haunt his recall campaign.
In many respects, the political power of these new nativists had also been gained at the expense of generating fear of the borderlands and fomenting a battle over who would control the state’s natural resources—including its laborers.
With the aging Sheriff Arpaio and his barbed-wire ripostes saturating the airwaves, news producers had plucked the baby-faced and lanky Babeu from anonymity in his rural county and placed him in a new role as the TV darling of right-wing border defenders. With searing blue eyes and a shaved head, always clad in his decorative uniform or a cowboy hat and boots, the forty-one-year-old Babeu swaggered with the air of a veteran frontier sheriff and had the tough-guy language to match it.
But he couldn’t quite claim Pearce’s status as a fifth-generation Arizonan. Like Arpaio, Babeu could hardly hide his New England upbringing, despite his attempts at a complete Western makeover; he came from North Adams, an ailing mill town in Massachusetts, where he had been an upstart in the Republican Party and won a seat on his small town council as a teenager. In subsequent elections, he reportedly dressed up in his National Guard uniform to campaign, a habit that would remain in Arizona. When North Adams snubbed Babeu in an embarrassing mayoral race loss in 2001, he did what any deeply rooted and committed citizen would do: he pulled up anchor and followed his parents to Arizona, where he became a cop in the sprawling Phoenix suburb of Chandler.
Babeu was hardly a slacker, though: by 2008, he had managed to get elected as sheriff of Pinal County, a semirural area of cotton farms and cluster suburban housing subdivisions connected to the umbilical cord of Phoenix highways.
He was one of us now.
When the controversy over SB 1070 ignited in 2010, Babeu stationed himself at Fox News and other outlets as if on assignment. He echoed McCain’s fear-mongering ad on various tours of the border, telling CBS News about “assaults against police officers, officer-involved shootings, home invasions, carjackings, violent crimes. And you ask why is that? We can clearly point to the flow of illegal immigrants.” Huppenthal, who later campaigned for the state superintendent position with the promise that he would “Stop La Raza” (effectively translated as “stop the Mexican or Chicano people”) and the slogan that he was “One of Us,” had presented a more dramatic picture when he represented Chandler in the state legislature: he railed on the Senate floor that undocumented immigrants had “nuclear-bombed” neighborhoods in his district.
In the spring of 2011, Fox News featured a report on Babeu’s refusal to tone down his rhetoric, and noted in an interview that “Babeu said he has recently increased enforcement near the border with ‘constant patrols’ by SWAT team officers armed with AR-15s and night vision goggles. ‘I’m sending out deputies to meet these armed cartel members,’ Babeu said Wednesday. ‘And we will not use less than lethal force.’”
Just one thing Fox News and many news outlets forgot to note: although Pinal County supped at the federal trough for large-scale law enforcement funds, Babeu’s jurisdiction ended more than ninety miles from the border, blocked by Pima and Cochise counties. In essence: Babeu was all hat and no border.
That little detail didn’t seem to bother anyone when he appeared on the openly white supremacist and Holocaust-denying radio show Political Cesspool in the summer of 2010. On its website, the show championed “a philosophy that is pro-White. . . . We wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.”
Babeu encouraged listeners to apply for his “posse” program in order to combat a nation “sprinting down the path to socialism.” (That socialism presumably didn’t include millions of dollars in federal funds for immigration law enforcement in Pinal County.) He also gave a plug for political donations. Though the prime-time sheriff gig must have been gratifying, Babeu clearly had his sights set on Congress. Nonetheless, a posse of white supremacists conjured up all sorts of scenarios gone awry.
In the summer of 2011, Babeu sent an open letter to President Obama, charging that he “has failed to fulfill his core constitutional duty to protect America.” “We need focus on the solution to secure our border, not on a path to citizenship or amnesty for 12 million,” Babeu lectured the president. He threw down the gauntlet of terrorism and ramped up his rhetoric to include a threat to an American way of life: “If the majority of regular illegal immigrants can sneak into America, what does this say about the ability of terrorist sleeper cells? The porous US/Mexican border is the gravest national security threat facing America. This is no longer just a political fight to stop Barack Obama from giving amnesty to over 12 million illegals, it’s also about protecting our nation from terrorist threats. Thousands of illegal entrants hail from State Department countries of interest—Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others. In some cases, we have confirmed their troubling ties to terrorism.”
Not that everyone in Arizona agreed with Babeu. On February 9, 2011, the mayors from the three main border towns wrote Babeu a letter and urged him not to “cultivate a culture of fear.” “While your misstatements about efforts to keep communities along the U.S.-Mexico border may keep national media coming to Arizona,” the letter noted, “at the same time your consistent inaccuracies hurt cities and towns like ours by causing those who live and travel to the border to fear for their safety when in our communities. . . . The facts show that violent crime is down or remains flat in our border region as we are sure it is in your area as well. In 2002, it peaked at 742 per 100,000 residents, but has since drastically dropped to 219 per 100,000 in 2009 (per the FBI Uniform Crime Reports Program).”
A retired Mesa police officer who had worked on the border for the Drug Enforcement Agency told a Tucson newspaper during the SB 1070 debate that “Babeu’s claims of soaring violence have more to do with his own political aspirations than reality.” The retired officer, Bill Richardson, likened Babeu to a “college freshman pre-med student who’s had one anatomy class telling a veteran pathologist how to do an autopsy.”
“What he’s very skillfully doing, much like (Joe) Arpaio and (State Sen. Russell) Pearce,” Richardson told the Arizona Daily Star, “is he’s creating fear or fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not.”
“They want us to sit and shut up,” Babeu responded. “Well, that’s not going to happen. This isn’t a time to sit on our hands and ignore the issue. It’s a time for action.”
In the spring of 2012, Babeu’s soaring political career and front-runner status in a campaign for a seat representing Arizona’s Fourth District in Congress crashed when the Phoenix New Times broke the story that the sheriff had allegedly threatened to seek deportation measures against his former gay lover, a Mexican citizen whose visa status remained in doubt. Dogged by investigations over abuse of power and his office’s destruction of public records by the US Office of Special Counsel, the Arizona Solicitor General, and the Pima County Attorney’s Office, he officially abandoned his campaign on May 11 in a bid to salvage his sheriff’s position.
McCain’s career had been far more enduring.
The venerable senator and onetime presidential candidate should have joined a celebratory summer-day gathering in 2011 at the Grand Canyon National Park when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar upheld a moratorium on a millionacre zone of uranium mining claims, assuring federal protection for Arizona’s singular natural heritage. Yet as Salazar stood beside Havasupai tribal elders and Congressman Raúl Grijalva for the historic announcement, Republicans across Arizona were scurrying to create their own roadside attraction about the state’s other iconic obsession—undocumented immigrants.
Much of Arizona was burning that summer. The Wallow Fire raging across the eastern part of state was the largest forest fire in Arizona history. More than 530,000 acres of ponderosa pines burned in the Apache and Sitgreaves National Forest areas, forcing thousands of people to temporarily relocate and costing nearly $80 million in damages. Two other fires in southeastern Arizona blazed near the US-Mexico border.
Amid such destruction, it might have seemed ironic that Salazar, Grijalva, and the tribal elders were gathered at the Grand Canyon in an act of preservation. “The announcement today begins to reverse the poisonous legacy of uranium mining and its devastating contamination to our region’s people, water, and land,” said Roger Clark, the air and energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust.
Instead of joining his colleagues at the Grand Canyon, McCain was falling over himself to trump Alabama’s new immigration crackdown and reclaim Arizona’s reputation as the xenophobic stalwart of the nation. A day before, he had unleashed his own firestorm on a Saturday TV news program, declaring he had “substantial evidence” that undocumented immigrants or smugglers were responsible for the Wallow Fire and other blazes across the state. McCain tried to clarify that his statement was intended as a general overview on border security, but he didn’t seem to notice that national forest rangers had already dismissed these types of rumors.
Quoted in the New York Times, one ranger “cited four other southern Arizona fires, all of them in known smuggling areas, that were found to have been caused by American citizens.” Far from any illegal alien activity, a rancher’s careless welding near dry underbrush, the sparks of target shooters, and training exercises by military jets accounted for the fires.
Not to be outdone, Fox News took McCain’s rumors one step further the next day. An interview with Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever carried this dramatic headline: “Arizona Sheriff: Wildfires Likely Started by Mexican Drug Traffickers, Smugglers.” Without any hard evidence, though, Dever had to admit toward the end of his interview, “there’s no way to know” who was responsible.
That little nugget was buried in the Fox News interview. And it didn’t prevent the newsroom from citing data linked to the nefarious activities of undocumented immigrants that had been collected by Glenn Spencer, an infamous anti-immigrant extremist and militia activist. To back up Dever’s claims and the screaming headlines, Fox News featured “an aerial photograph purportedly taken on June 12 of the area by American Border Patrol, an independent organization that monitors the border [which] claims the blaze actually started in Mexico and traveled upwind into the United States. Dever said that was an ‘accurate picture’ of what occurred.” Hardly an “independent organization,” the American Border Patrol was hailed by the civil rights watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center as a “virulent” magnet group for a motley crew of vigilantes on the border.
“When you have this much lunacy running rampant,” US Customs Service agent Lee Morgan II wrote in his memoir, The Reaper’s Line, “a government agent needs to figure out the single worst threat and deal with it first. To me, the vigilantism was the most dangerous.”
With decades of experience on the border, Morgan had written about the fire blame-game in 2006: “But it seemed to me that a conspiracy to blame the aliens for everything wrong in America was starting to form in Cochise County. I even overheard rednecks in a San Pedro bar planning to start a prairie fire and blame it on the aliens so their ‘cause’ would have more gunpowder with the politicians in Washington.”
Their gunpowder was certainly kept dry by McCain. Not everyone was impressed. “This level of intolerance has reached a new low,” Grijalva fumed.
Sure enough, two months after McCain’s comments, the US Attorney’s office hauled a pair of campers into court, charging them with the fire. The two cousins had inadvertently left their campfire ablaze one morning as they went on a hike with their dogs. They assumed the fire was out “because David threw a candy wrapper into the fire” and it didn’t melt. The two twentysomething Arizona residents now faced a possible six-month prison sentence. McCain never issued a retraction, or even a response.
What had happened to John McCain? Was he a casualty of the politics of SB 1070, as well? With Florida overbooked with transplanted politicians, the Vietnam War hero and celebrated POW had come to Arizona in 1981 in search of a congressional district. He was elected to the House a year later, deflecting the carpetbagger charges with his famous retort on his military family’s legacy: “The place I lived longest in my life is the Hanoi Hilton.” By 1986, McCain had joined the Senate.
McCain’s track record on immigration followed Senator Barry Goldwater’s fairly moderate views on keeping the borders open for guest-work permits. But McCain went further in representing the views of his Latino constituents.
The National Council of La Raza honored McCain in 1988 for his outspoken criticism of English-only legislation. According to journalist Geraldo Rivera, McCain told a La Raza gathering in Washington, “The building of our great nation is not the work of immigrants from one or two countries. . . . Our nation and the English language have done quite well with Chinese spoken in California, German in Pennsylvania, Italian in New York, Swedish in Minnesota, and Spanish throughout the Southwest. I fail to see the cause for alarm now.”
In 2003, McCain even used the loaded word “amnesty” in a special press conference in Tucson on guest-worker provisions. “I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people,” McCain declared. “Amnesty has to be an important part because there are people who have lived in this country for twenty, thirty, or forty years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens.”
When McCain teamed up with liberal icon Ted Kennedy in 2006 for the introduction of their Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, the Arizona senator went as far out on a limb for immigration reform as any Democrat. In a speech on the Senate floor that summer, he attempted to fashion a compromise: “Without enactment of comprehensive immigration reform as provided for under this bill, our nation’s security will remain vulnerable. . . . The new policies as provided for under this legislation will increase border security and provide for a new, temporary worker program to enable foreign workers to work legally in this country when there are jobs that American workers won’t fill. And it will acknowledge and address in a humanitarian and compassionate way the current undocumented population.”
Despite President Bush’s support, the bill never made it through Congress. And McCain recoiled. Admitting defeat, he shifted his focus to border security in his 2008 presidential campaign.
McCain explained: “Many Americans, with good cause, did not believe us when we said we would secure our borders, and so we failed in our efforts. We must prove to them that we can and will secure our borders first, while respecting the dignity and rights of citizens and legal residents. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that our responsibility to meet this challenge will end with that accomplishment.”
The retreat became a full reversal in 2010, when J. D. Hayworth’s insurgent Tea Party candidacy suddenly appeared to make inroads during the fallout over SB 1070. McCain completely threw his record of tolerance to the wind and fell into line behind Governor Brewer’s assertion that the federal government had failed to secure the border. “The border is broken,” McCain told CBS News a few days after the bill was signed. “The cartels are in an existential struggle with the government of Mexico, the violence is at an all-time high, and the federal government has a responsibility to secure the borders.”
“He risked his political career for immigration reform, and now he is compromising his principles to fight for his political life,” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, told the Politico.com news site.
The onetime champion of immigration reform finally embraced the reality of Republican politics in Arizona’s post–SB 1070 moment when his campaign aired the now infamous TV ad with Babeu along the US-Mexico border in Arizona: “Complete the danged fence!”
Raúl Castro clutched at the railing on his back porch and stared across the valley to Mexico. His balcony looked down the final seventy-yard stretch on the American gridiron of Nogales, Arizona. Once ambos, or conjoined—now divided by rusted iron bars.
“They just don’t understand the border or our history,” Castro said. At the age of ninety-five, Castro had experienced nearly a century of his state’s history. After he retired from his legal practice in Phoenix, Castro and his wife left the affluent Paradise Valley in Scottsdale and purchased a historic home on Nogales’s hillside border neighborhood. “I’ve lived along this border all of my life. I even spent time in San Diego and Tijuana. I worked in Mexico in Aqua Prieta. I used to walk across the border. I’d go to Juarez, El Paso.”
The son of a pearl diver from Baja, Mexico, Castro was born in the historic mining camp of Cananea in 1916, when his father crossed the Sea of Cortez and found work in Colonel William Greene’s former copper mine. A onetime business partner with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Greene had built a ranching and mining empire in Sonora and Chihuahua that underscored the vast American corporate interests in Mexico’s economy during the thirty-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Many historians consider the brutal crackdown on a strike at Greene’s mine in 1906, which resulted in the “massacre” of twenty-three miners, as the opening salvo in the Mexican Revolution. A huge posse of mercenaries, led by the government-funded Arizona Rangers, crossed the border on Greene’s orders to suppress the strike.
For Arizona mining barons like Greene, whose Cananea Consolidated Copper Company headquarters was based in Nogales, the concept of “national interests” and “protecting border security” applied only to the northern route. Americans had a right to plunder Mexico. In his study “Southern Arizona and the Mexican Revolution,” historian Paul Schlegel showed how the low taxes and concessions granted by the Porfiriato dictatorship to mostly American companies led to the “push-pull” relationship that characterized labor conditions along the border and in Arizona. “Peasants lost their land and were forced to seek employment with foreign firms,” which eventually led to large-scale migration to the United States or urban centers.
Castro’s family fell victim to the new rapacious mine operations. As a union leader, his father was targeted by owners as a rabble-rouser and thrown in prison for leading a wildcat strike in Cananea in 1918. Six months later, he was released as part of a special asylum deal that sent Castro and his family across the border to a small community near Douglas, Arizona.
In effect, perhaps as a precursor to Greene’s misfortune during the Mexican Revolution, the copper baron’s repression of miners inadvertently gifted Arizona with one of Mexico’s best and brightest native sons.
Castro grew up in Douglas, where a smelter treated the ore from Bisbee’s copper mines. His father ensured Castro’s international and border-crossing upbringing; he would read aloud from Spanish-language newspapers from Mexico and Texas in the parlor room. He died, though, when Castro was ten, leaving behind his wife and ten children in the hardscrabble mining region. Castro’s mother became a partera, or midwife. His brothers found work in the mines or smelter. Notably studious, Castro was the first child in the family to finish high school, and he earned a football scholarship to the Arizona State Teacher’s College in Flagstaff.
This was no free ride. Over the next decade, Castro went through a series of achievements and setbacks from racial discrimination that would have derailed most people. As a child, he had walked four miles to school while Anglo children in the same area were picked up by a school bus. During his school breaks, Castro earned half the salary of his Anglo counterparts at the smelter.
Despite a number of honors, Castro couldn’t find a teaching job after he graduated from the university in the 1930s. Not that his problem was a secret: “The community would never hire a Mexican American,” he told me in his Nogales living room. Forced to hit the road as a migrant worker and bantamweight boxer, Castro roved across the country at the height of the Great Depression.
If anything, he learned that Mexican Americans were not unique in ethnic discrimination. In the ring in Pennsylvania, catcalls to kill his “dago” and “bohunk” rivals stunned the Arizona boxer.
When his younger brother turned down a chance to attend college, citing the futility of the job market, Castro returned home and found a job across the border at the US consulate in Agua Prieta. With impeccable bilingual skills, Castro was hired to handle the protective services for Americans in Mexico. He spent the next five years carving out an impressive niche in borderland diplomacy. His work didn’t go unnoticed. His main supervisor praised Castro’s level of diplomatic skills and then suggested he look elsewhere for work: no Mexican-born alien would ever have a future in the American foreign service.
The experience both devastated and challenged Castro; he headed to Tucson to pursue a law degree at the University of Arizona, only managing to enter the program by talking his way into a job as a Spanish teacher. Unable to read in English, Castro’s mother failed to open his successful results on the Arizona bar exam, fearing it might be a brush with the law, until he arrived home. Within months, Castro opened his attorney’s office in downtown Tucson.
In the 1950s, sitting in a barbershop in the Tucson barrio, Castro overheard customers complaining about racism and discrimination. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked. He criticized their retreat into Mexican American and immigrant enclaves, and the fear or timidity that prevented them from confronting Anglos in their political games. “I’m going to run for county attorney,” he announced, if only to prove that Mexican Americans should be part of the law enforcement field, not its victims. People thought he was nuts. Active in the Red Cross, the YMCA, and other civic groups—“I joined everything I could join, including the Tuberculosis Association”—Castro was the first Mexican American in Arizona to be elected county attorney. Within a few years, he ran and won another historic election as a Superior Court judge.
Hailed by the Latin American press as the “Yanqui” Castro, not to be confused with Fidel’s younger brother, he was appointed as ambassador to El Salvador and then Bolivia by President Lyndon Johnson. (At one point, incredible as it may seem, the Texan had asked Castro to consider changing his surname. He didn’t.) His timing in the mountainous South American country in 1967 was chilling; revolutionary hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara was murdered by the military on the same day Castro arrived for his appointment. With the country in an upheaval, he spent the rest of his term dodging assassination threats.
The most trying episode occurred in 1969, when New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his wife wired to announce their impending arrival in Bolivia as part of a special twenty-country fact-finding mission on Latin American affairs for the Nixon White House. At first, Castro turned them down. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil family legacy in Bolivia was nothing less than a match in search of petrol; Castro imagined such a visit would set off violent protests. When Rockefeller insisted on landing, Castro finally relented, setting up a brief press conference at the airport. Within an hour, Rockefeller was gone, but the political clash had long-term repercussions for Castro. He soon received a cable from Nixon “accepting” a resignation he had never tendered. The IRS began an investigation of his tax filings.
For most diplomats, this would have been the end of the road. For Castro, who had overcome unthinkable odds to become an ambassador and elected official in Arizona, this was simply one more hurdle in his extraordinary mission to prove that Mexican Americans belonged in leadership positions. The dismissal sent him back to Tucson. When Castro stepped off the plane, an arrival party of Democrats had plans for his future.
His international stature placed him in the forefront of other Democratic candidates for governor in 1970. Agreeing to challenge Jack Williams, the conservative radio announcer and longtime Phoenix politician, Castro ran a campaign on a shoestring budget that stressed his law-and-order background and placed an emphasis on environmental and criminal justice issues. He rejected any doubts that a Mexican immigrant could become governor of Arizona.
“I’ve been lots of places for a guy who didn’t have a chance,” he declared. In a speech in Yuma, he referred to his naturalized status as an “asset” for a governor in the borderlands.
The Arizona Republic had other thoughts. The Phoenix newspaper endorsed Williams, and even printed a photo of Cuban leader Fidel Castro with the headline: “Running for Governor of Arizona.”
Castro lost the race to Williams by a hair—less than 1 percent, or 7,400 votes.
Thanks to the fieldwork of Cesar Chavez and a failed recall campaign against Williams by the United Farm Workers in 1972, which added more than 150,000 new voters to the state ranks, Castro had the infrastructure to launch a statewide campaign in 1974 against Goldwater-backed businessman Russ Williams (no relation to Jack Williams). Emphasizing his law enforcement background, Castro did not embrace the Chicano movement but ran as a conservative Democrat in an admittedly conservative state.
With one of the highest turnout rates in the state’s election history, Castro became the first and only Mexican American governor in Arizona on November 6, 1974, once again by a hair. The late-night results from the Navajo Nation pushed Castro over the victory hump by a little more than four thousand votes.
Such a legacy was foretold, perhaps, by Arizona’s first state governor, the progressive Democrat George W. P. Hunt in the 1920s. For, in 2002, Castro returned to his hometown of Douglas for the renaming of a park in his honor. On the same bandstand platform, Hunt had made an incredibly prescient speech that had always remained in Castro’s memory. The rotund and bald politician, dressed impeccably in his white linen suit, pointed to the crowd and announced: “In this great state of ours, anyone can be governor. Why, even one of those little barefooted Mexican kids sitting over there could one day be governor.”
Nearly a decade later, with the Tea Party in control of his state, Castro took to his back veranda to contemplate his state’s regression in view of the border wall. In 2011, as the state’s failing schools languished at the bottom of national rankings for funding (rivaling Mississippi for last place) and the legislature cut an estimated $450 million from the education budget, Arizona’s Tea Party–led politicos launched a $50 million online fundraising campaign to build an additional border wall. The price tag seemed a bit low—the George W. Bush and Obama administrations had already invested $1.1 billion on the scrapped high-tech “virtual border fence,” and most estimates (including from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office) typically price a mile of border fence at between $3 million and $6 million. Borrowing a page from nineteenth-century convict leasing policies, the state’s new border law required state prisoners to build this illusory border wall. Supporters hoped that suppliers from the war in Iraq would chip in surplus materials for free.
To kick off the campaign, Arizona’s extremist legislators threw a party with then State Senate President Russell Pearce as its headline speaker.
“What a media stunt,” Castro muttered. For Castro, it should not be a crime to cross the border for vacant jobs. “If people are willing to do jobs Americans won’t do, we should come up with some sort of temporary labor permit.”
For the state’s most experienced diplomat, the border “problem” was a diplomacy problem. “We have abandoned Latin America,” he told one newspaper after the signing of SB 1070. “We spend all our time in the Middle East. We need more diplomacy.”
More than four decades ago, Castro had invoked his diplomatic experience and made the same charges against Republican Governor Jack Williams in their gubernatorial race. “Thirty years ago,” Castro told reporters at a news conference in Yuma in the summer of 1970, “I was holding conferences with Mexico on drug control. So the problem is not new to me. Has the governor of Arizona been invited to Mexico for anything?”
Unlike former Arizona governor and current Department of Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano—and every other governor in the past half-century, for that matter—Governor Jan Brewer never consulted with Castro. Then again, Brewer’s staff didn’t even bother to inform her about one of Napolitano’s much-publicized visits and policy updates on the Arizona border during the summer of 2011.
In fact, flanked by a detachment of border and immigration commissioners in Brewer’s absence, Napolitano issued an update in Nogales, Arizona, on July 7, 2011, on the Obama administration’s border security policy, which included a record number of deportations and the deployment of 21,000 Border Patrol agents and unmanned aerial drones along the US-Mexico border.
Not that Brewer and Castro had failed to meet. A week before Brewer signed SB 1070, she appeared for a photo-op at a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce awards banquet in Phoenix, where Castro was being honored.
“Some woman approached, put her arms around me, asked for a photo, and then introduced herself,” Castro recalled. “She signed the bill a week later.” Castro told Brewer he considered the new law unjust and wrong. “Immigration is a national problem,” he continued. “A federal problem. Can you imagine every state in the union having its own immigration policy?”
In an extensive review of crime data from 1,600 local and federal law enforcement agencies along the border by a team of USA Today reporters, law enforcement experts echoed Castro’s sentiments. Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor told the reporters: “Everything looks really good, which is why it’s so distressing and frustrating to read about these reports about crime going up everywhere along the border, when I know for a fact that the numbers don’t support those allegations.” According to a USA Today analysis that week, “rates of violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border have been falling for years—even before the U.S. security buildup that has included thousands of law enforcement officers and expansion of a massive fence along the border.” The newspaper report concluded:
The murder rate for cities within 50 miles of the border was lower in nearly every year from 1998 to 2009, compared with the respective state average. For example, California had its lowest murder rate during that time period in 2009, when 5.3 people were murdered per 100,000 residents. In cities within 50 miles of the border, the highest murder rate over that time period occurred in 2003, when 4.6 people were murdered per 100,000 residents.
The robbery rate for cities within 50 miles of the border was lower each year compared with the state average. In Texas over that time span, the robbery rate ranged from 145 to 173 per 100,000 people in the state, while the robbery rate throughout Texas’ border region never rose above 100 per 100,000.
Kidnapping cases investigated by the FBI along the border are on the decline. The bureau’s Southwestern offices identified 62 cartel-related kidnapping cases on U.S. soil that involved cartels or illegal immigrants in 2009. That fell to 25 in 2010 and 10 so far in 2011.
In the spring of 2012, the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center released a new report stating that undocumented entries by Mexican immigrants had plunged in the past year. “The historic wave” of Mexican migration, according to center director Paul Taylor, “seemed to have come to a standstill.”
“This is the difficulty with Arizona,” Castro explained, describing the issues surrounding SB 1070 as cyclical. “When times are good, the economy is good and sound, you won’t find a single person who wants to work in the cotton fields or pick fruit. Then the immigrants, even illegals, are welcome. No one squawks. When times are bad, and the economy is in the condition it is today, people don’t want them around. They’re criminals. I’ve been through three recessions, I know.”
Declaring that SB 1070 was a step backward—“at least forty years, maybe seventy, eighty years”—Castro reminded every reporter that racial profiling by immigration authorities was not a new issue.
“I once had a home in San Diego. One day my daughter and I returned and were stopped by Border Patrol. ‘Hey, where were you born, donde nacío?’ I wasn’t about to lie. I was born in Mexico, I said. The guard starts questioning me. ‘What about that young lady?’ She was born in Japan, I said, during the Korean War. He thought we were being smart. In the meantime, someone came by and recognized me. Governor, how are you?”
A similar incident had occurred in Tucson at his horse farm in the 1960s. Working on the front fence in his farm clothes, Castro was stopped by a passing Border Patrol car. The agents asked if he had his work card. Castro said no. When they asked whom he worked for, Castro referred to “the señorita inside.” The agents nearly arrested Castro until he showed them the sign by his farm entrance: “Judge Castro.”
Such stories would be meaningless to State Senator Steve Smith, who introduced the bill to build a new wall to keep out undocumented immigrants.
A first-term senator, Smith represented the suburban sprawl zone of Maricopa, where Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol had purchased a home. A Midwestern transplant and the director of a talent agency, he had lived in Maricopa for less than ten years. During the month of the signing of SB 1070, his town had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country.
Unfair as it may seem, comparing Smith to Castro underscores a demographic shift in Arizona’s politics.
“I just loved coming out here because—well, first, it was new,” he gushed to a public radio reporter at the kickoff event for the new border wall. “And my wife likes new. I mean, new buildings and new restaurants. I mean, nothing was sixty years old. It was all built in the last seven to eight years. Yet much like Maricopa itself, underneath the newness is a deep affinity for the traditional.”
He told the reporter he was “horrified by the phenomenon he refers to as ‘Press Two For Spanish.’ Don’t make me change my country for where you come from. If you don’t like this country with you, you wanna bring your language with you, your gangfare with you, stay where you were! Or face the consequences. But don’t make me change because you don’t want to.”
Smith singled out Pearce as his inspiration for entering politics. “When I had this idea of running,” he said, “I looked through the whole legislature and I said, ‘Well, who do I identify with? Who do I want to talk to, who do I want advice from?’ I asked one person. I asked Russell Pearce.”
Looking across the valley into his native Mexico, Castro was speechless, shaking his head at Smith’s inane media circus and his new law, which failed to take into account the exorbitant costs or the fact that much of the unfenced border areas crossed federal and private lands.
Within six months, despite a full-press publicity effort by numerous Fox News TV reports, Smith had raised less than $300,000—not quite enough money to build and maintain a fence the size of a few football fields, according to GAO estimates. Smith was undaunted.
“I call this Extreme Home Makeover: Border Edition,” he told the Fox Business show Follow the Money. With inmate labor to dig the ditches and trenches, since “we are paying for them anyways,” Smith still held out hope of getting the job done.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio went beyond a mere wall to divide the United States and Mexico and prevent illegal entries.
“And I wasn’t kidding, or speaking off the cuff, when I talked to Lou Dobbs about putting up tents near the border,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir, Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes on Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. “That’s what I wanted the federal government to do, to gather together as many old army tents as they could find, erect those tents along the border, arraign and try the illegals in courts set up close to those tents, and put those people convicted of illegally crossing the border into the United States into these tents for six months.”
First, though, Arpaio had more pressing issues. In the somber days of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, long after Donald Trump had thrown in the towel and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck had exhausted their diatribes, Arpaio met with Tea Party activists from Surprise, Arizona, and agreed to assign his “Cold Case Posse” to reopen an investigation on the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.
“The individuals on this posse have been sworn in by me, and I have granted them the authority required to conduct this investigation,” Arpaio told the media. “But the results of their investigation ultimately come to me, and I will then decide how best to proceed from there.”
It was breaking news: Arpaio graced the cover of the venerable supermarket tabloid Globe magazine.
Many critics tended to describe Arpaio as the modern-day embodiment of civil rights scourge Eugene “Bull” Connor, the onetime Klansman and commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who presided over a reign of terror against African Americans for more than twenty years. Connor famously unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on activists, including children, and harassed, arrested, and imprisoned religious and civil rights leaders during some of the bloodiest episodes in that period. His most egregious work, perhaps, was his complete indifference (if not tacit approval) of violent attacks, including bombings, against African Americans and white supporters by racist elements in his state.
The comparison with Arpaio ends there, though. Marketed as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Arpaio drew national attention for his use of chain gangs and the cruel deprivation tactics of his “Tent City,” which had been subjecting prisoners to 120-degree summer weather conditions since 1993. Arpaio was also under investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for racial profiling and abuses, and even deaths during detention in his facility. And he has become the poster image of ruthlessness in the immigrant debate as a result of his choreographed crime sweeps, which have targeted and shattered the lives of untold thousands of immigrants and their families.
But once Connor’s bigotry and brutal tactics appeared on the evening news, it affected the conscience of enough people in the nation to shift the discussion on civil rights laws and instigate federal intervention. Connor himself was out of a job within a year of the bloody summer of 1963 in Birmingham.
The nearly eighty-year-old Sheriff Arpaio, with his Italian American crooning and Massachusetts-accented folksiness, on the other hand, became an ever more popular TV celebrity with virtually every sordid allegation over two decades. Few interviews ended without the sheriff belting out a bar of “My Way” by his beloved paisano Frank Sinatra. He became “Sheriff Joe.”
Had Arpaio manipulated the media for his own gains on behalf of punitive law enforcement, or, in the profitable and competitive business of media entertainment, had he been coddled as the nasty caricature of a frontier sheriff to meet the insatiable appetite of true-crime chronicles for a national viewership?
According to the watchdog group Media Matters, Fox News hosted Arpaio eight times in the immediate aftermath of the SB 1070 debate, “with virtually no criticism of his controversial statements and enforcement tactics.”
In the fall of 2007, Arpaio quipped on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight that he thought it was “an honor” to be compared by his critics to the Ku Klux Klan—an obnoxious gaffe that would have cost any sheriff in the South his job. Sheriff Joe got away with a few shrugs and a “clarification” of his comments.
One thing was certain: although the mainstream media had no problem holding Southern racists accountable in the days of black-and-white television, the verdict was still out on folksy Italian American attacks on Latinos in living color.
If anything, Arpaio borrowed more from the media-savvy antics of gunman Wyatt Earp, the legendary Tombstone marshal who embellished his exploits in the shootout at the OK Corral for fame and fortune, and from Earp’s Hollywood pal Tom Mix, the gunslinging cowboy hero of silent movies, than from any of Bull Connor’s vicious devices. Mix wept as a pallbearer at Earp’s funeral in California in 1929; it should have marked an end to the mythic six-shooter approach to law enforcement that had made Arizona so famous, but Arpaio was doing his best to keep Arizona on the big screen.
In 2008, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon wasn’t so entertained by what he deemed Arpaio’s “made-for-TV” raids. He asked the FBI to investigate the sheriff for civil rights abuses. When the Major League Baseball All-Star game came to Chase Field in the summer of 2011, Arpaio, undaunted by the seeming slap on the wrist by the Justice Department, announced his intentions to parade his clean-up chain gang of immigrants and women in front of the nationally televised event. He opted out at the last minute, thanks to pressure from Gordon and city law enforcement officials.
It probably didn’t matter to Arpaio; the national media, including National Public Radio, had already covered his plans. In effect, if the intent was to showcase Arizona’s punitive stripes to the world, it didn’t really matter if it happened. He had made his point.
Nonetheless, the blur between tall tale and reality, history and Hollywood, and right and wrong didn’t die with the passing of Arpaio’s beloved Western icons. Their version of Arizona justice defined the great American myth of the lawless frontier and its heroes and villains for a century of blockbuster movies and best-selling books.
“Let me tell you something and I’m not bragging,” Arpaio gushed to reporter Terry Greene Sterling in 2009. “I’m so high profile I went from 98 percent to probably 99 percent on name identification. . . . You know, sometimes I understand how a movie star feels, or a celebrity.”
Case in point: on the day Arpaio appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report in 2008, peddling a ghostwritten memoir he would later admit he hadn’t even read thoroughly, two reporters from the East Valley Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for their damning five-part exposé on how Arpaio’s obsession with hunting down nonviolent undocumented immigrants shifted limited resources and law enforcement efforts from violent crime investigations. Pointing out that more than forty thousand felony warrants remained on Arpaio’s desk, Mayor Gordon chastised the sheriff for fashioning a “sanctuary” for felons.
“Let them blast me,” Arpaio boasted in Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, as Sterling reported. “I ought to pay them for blasting me, since it makes me go up in the polls.”
In fact, much of Arpaio’s book is a rehash of self-promotional appearances on TV and criticism he has received in major newspapers and magazines. In the chapter “Media Matters,” he mocks TV talk-show host Phil Donahue for comparing him to a character in a Charles Dickens story. He also cites all his big ideas—such as erecting a tent city on the border—from interviews on TV, including multiple appearances with former CNN host Lou Dobbs.
Arpaio, of course, is hardly an original. In some respects, he follows in the tradition of the first city marshal in Phoenix, Mexican immigrant Henry Garfias. Elected for the first time in the newly incorporated town in 1881, Garfias won six elections as a no-nonsense law-and-order enforcer. Unlike Arpaio, Garfias also edited a Spanish-language newspaper and meted out his forms of “lightning-fast gunfighter” justice in every neighborhood. The Gazette newspaper praised Garfias most of all for his “good work” with “his chain gang.” In fact, he earned an extra two dollars a day for his chain-gang initiatives.
Like Garfias, Arpaio is the son of an immigrant; his father slipped into the country from the volatile southern Italy region of Campania only months before the restrictive quotas from the Immigration Act of 1924 clamped down on Italian immigration. A popular Italian song of the period, Laggiù nell’Arizona, waxed romantically about Arpaio’s future land (though it was joyously populated by guitar-playing bandoleros).
In Joe’s Law, Arpaio juxtaposes the experience of his Italian family of immigrants and those of Mexicans. Dismissing the legacy of his predecessor Garfias, who was praised by the Republican newspaper in Phoenix “as one of the bravest men who ever was known,” Arpaio makes a startling one-liner of racist revisionism that would have made Bull Connor blush: “My parents, like all other immigrants exclusive of those from Mexico, held to certain hopes and truths.”
Among various points, Arpaio doubts Mexican allegiance to the United States and claims that Mexican immigrants and “some Mexican-Americans” cling to the belief in the “reconquista of these lands, returning to them to Mexico.” And while Italians congregated in their “Little Italy” communities, this was in “stark contrast to the exceptional concentration of Mexicans in the Southwest.”
For all of his nearly eight decades of wisdom, Arpaio’s chronicle demonstrates a select memory of recent American history. Among the estimated 4.5–5.5 million Italian immigrants who poured into the United States in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, 90 percent congregated in urban areas in eleven states. The great majority of Italian immigrants in that period originated from Arpaio’s impoverished and politically disenfranchised southern provinces. In a haunting resonance with today, the “racial threat” of his ancestors underscored the most egregious planks in setting quotas on Italians, among others, in 1924. A congressional report set out the scenario that loomed if the “invasion” of Arpaio’s people wasn’t slowed:
With full recognition of the material progress which we owe to the races from southern and eastern Europe, we are conscious that the continued arrival of great numbers tends to upset our balance of population, to depress our standard of living, and to unduly charge our institutions for the care of the socially inadequate.
If immigration from southern and eastern Europe may enter the United States on a basis of substantial equality with that admitted from the older sources of supply, it is clear that if any appreciable number of immigrants are to be allowed to land upon our shores the balance of racial preponderance must in time pass to those elements of the population who reproduce more rapidly on a lower standard of living than those possessing other ideals.
While more than six hundred thousand of Arpaio’s Italian kinfolk were obliged to tote “resident alien” identity cards during World War II, the loyalty of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants was never questioned. An estimated three hundred fifty thousand Mexican Americans served in World War II, bringing home seventeen Medals of Honor. In a different form of discrimination than that against many Italians in the period, Mexican American soldiers returned to wage their own battles for veterans’ benefits and civil rights in Arizona and across the nation. In Arpaio’s adopted city of Phoenix, in fact, the American Legion Post 41 was founded by returning Mexican American vets who had to struggle for fair housing benefits. Even access to certain city swimming pools had been cut off to returning vets because of segregation.
Without any documentation, Arpaio asserts in his book that “no other group except the Mexicans, and other Hispanics as well, has broken the immigration laws in such astonishing numbers.” The statement helps explain Arpaio’s quip on Larry King Live in the spring of 2010 that his forces admittedly arrest “very few” suspects who are not Latino. Such a blanket pardon for other immigrant groups—not only Italians but also the Irish, whose ranks reportedly included more than thirty thousand undocumented immigrants in New York City alone in the year Arpaio published his book—might be the most telling reminder of his select view on who has the right to the American Dream.
Nonetheless, the bizarre investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate obsessed Sheriff Joe, with his posse and a handful of “birther” extremists flanking his showdown.
Arpaio’s sense of timing was impeccable. On the anniversary of Cesar Chavez’s celebrated birthday in March 2011, he unveiled a new media stunt, invoking wartime with Operation Desert Sky—a thirty-plane air posse of armed volunteers tracking Mexican immigrants. Only days before, Arpaio had rolled his department’s private tank into a quiet west Phoenix neighborhood to apprehend a flock of chickens and their unarmed cockfighting enthusiast.
While Arpaio’s reality show on Fox, Smile . . . You’re Under Arrest, went the route of Sarah Palin’s hopeless reality show in Alaska, he didn’t hesitate to place his Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office at the disposal of Steven Seagal’s reality show Lawman.
One spring morning, as Phoenix resident Debra Ross told KPHO-TV, she thought an earthquake was rocking her West Valley neighborhood. It was Seagal and his posse, decked out in Arpaio’s celebrated Army tank in search of a suspected cockfighting operation. The thunder of the operation blew out windows in the area. SWAT members took up defensive positions around armored vehicles and a bomb robot. “When the tank came in and pushed the wall over and you see what’s in there, and all it is, is a bunch of chickens,” Ross told KPHO. In the end, Seagal and Arpaio busted an unarmed and solitary homeowner, 115 chickens, and a puppy. The animals didn’t fare as well as the alleged cockfighter, who later sued Arpaio for killing his dog.
While many would question the logic of Arpaio’s extremist follies, or the cost to taxpayers (Arpaio was quick to point out that donations and RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] funds underwrote his armory), he was under investigation for the mismanagement of nearly $100 million—at the same time the state of Arizona was witnessing the deaths of denied transplant patients and dealing with draconian cuts to education.
But such questions had been asked in vain in Arizona. The real question might be: who represented Arizona in the media’s eyes—episodes from reality TV spotlighting the anti-immigrant antics of a Massachusetts-transplanted DEA agent-turned-sheriff who ran a travel agency with his wife in Phoenix until boredom set in, or the towering legacy of Arizona native and labor leader Cesar Chavez, who devoted his life to the pursuit of environmental justice and democratic reform? On the other hand, if the travel industry had been lucrative for Arpaio, would America ever have placed Phoenix on the road map to penal perdition?
French pop star Manu Chao framed the question for the national media over who truly represented Arizona in the fall of 2011. Appearing at a protest in front of Arpaio’s office at the downtown Phoenix Wells Fargo Bank building before his benefit concert for the Alto Arizona human rights group, Chao pulled out his guitar and played a few verses from his song “Clandestino”: “Mano Negra, clandestino, Mexicano, clandestino, Boliviano, clandestino, Joe Arpaio, illegal.”
Informed of the growing crowd and large media pool, Arpaio had come out to confront the internationally renowned recording artist, crowing that he might belt out a version of “My Way” to join the fun. Hardly anyone noticed the sheriff. Especially not Chao, who worked the media and discussed his hopes for a new generation of activists. “That’s not poetry, that’s a reality,” he told New Times, referring to Arizona’s demographic shift.
The media converged on Chao. Upstaged by the French singer, Arpaio stormed off.
The bell finally tolled at 1,095 days and eleven hours for Sheriff Arpaio—at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: “How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?”
That investigation culminated in the winter of 2011 when the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department released a long-awaited report that found a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” in Arpaio’s office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and more than four hundred interviews with sheriff’s department personnel, inmates, and experts, the report documented “a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,” resulting in gross violations of constitutional rights.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio, giving him until January 4, 2012, to accept the Justice Department’s measures and start taking “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit. Perez expressed the department’s willingness “to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform” of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.
One federal department was not even waiting: within hours of the announcement, the Department of Homeland Security had terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.
The announcement came amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department had mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.
Representative Raúl Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down. “Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”
A few days later Representative Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement saying that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”
“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”
Arpaio acted unimpressed. The sheriff expressed his disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration—earlier in the week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his Cold Case Posse’s investigation of Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”
Two years earlier, after Janet Napolitano announced her intentions to terminate the Department of Homeland Security’s cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Joe appeared on Glenn Beck’s show and openly mocked federal authority. Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allowed him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared . . . whatever . . . if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
The Justice Department’s report concluded that Arpaio was engaged in racial profiling. “Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”
The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”
Another law enforcement officer levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in El Mirage, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic declaring, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”
Would Arpaio comply with the Justice Department’s demands? “I’ve seen police chiefs, DAs and others who have been able to reform the system,” Perez said at his press conference. But “reform” and “Arpaio” were two words rarely seen together. In the spring of 2012, as if in defiance of the Justice Department, Arpaio released the results of his Cold Case Posse investigation of the president’s birth certificate: it was a “forgery,” worthy of a criminal investigation.
The media attention this time, however, was sparse in comparison to his earlier stunts. Within days, the sheriff shifted his attention to his reelection campaign, which suddenly seemed in doubt. For the first time in his career, he faced serious opposition. The Phoenix-based human rights group Puente, whose leader, Sal Reza, and other activists had long been targeted by Arpaio’s department, had launched the “Arrest Arpaio, Not the People” campaign.
“When they passed SB 1070, its authors declared a war of attrition on immigrants where ‘undocumented people are treated as criminals and Latinos are treated as suspects,’” Puente director Carlos Garcia said in Phoenix. “But as the Department of Justice concluded in their investigation into Arpaio, that was already the reality we lived in the state.”
On April 4, 2012, chastising his office’s “refusal to engage in good faith negotiations,” the Justice Department announced its decision to sue Arpaio. The sheriff remained defiant. “Appointment of an outside monitor essentially usurps the powers and duties of an elected Sheriff and transfers them to a person or group of persons selected by the federal government,” he said in a statement. “And so to the Obama administration, who is attempting to strong arm me into submission only for its political gain, I say, ‘This will not happen, not on my watch!’”
One month later, Arpaio received a thirty-two-page letter detailing the Justice Department’s “notice of intent to file civil action”: United States v. Joseph M. Arpaio. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez called the sheriff’s bluff. The federal government would see Arpaio in court “to remedy the serious Constitutional and federal law violations.”
On June 12, 2009, little over a year before Sheriff Arpaio and Russell Pearce headlined a “United We Stand” Tea Party rally on Glenn Spencer’s ranch property in 2010, a battalion of sheriff deputies, FBI agents, and SWAT team members in armored vehicles blocked off the entrance to Spencer’s nearby home. Earlier that day, a leader of a renegade faction of an anti-immigrant border group called the Minutemen American Defense (MAD) had dropped into Spencer’s home and sent an email. Within hours, MAD leader Shawna Forde was in custody for the murder of American citizen Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia.
Earlier that spring, Phoenix New Times reporter Stephen Lemons had uncovered a blog message that Forde, a transplant from the state of Washington, had written after she attended a Tea Party rally in Phoenix. “This is the time for all Americans to join organizations and REVOLT!!!” The message went on: “Refuse to be part of a system only designed to enslave you and your children. Times will be worse before they get worse. *Say no to illegal immigration* Lock and Load, Shawna Forde.”
Brisenia was the same age as Christine Taylor Green, who was murdered in the tragic Gabrielle Giffords shooting. When Forde and another partner threatened their way into the Flores household in the town of Arivaca, Arizona, less than an hour south of Tucson, Brisenia had begged for her life after her father was shot. She was shot in the face and died. Her mother managed to call 911 before exchanging shots. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who also handled Giffords shooter Jeremy Loughner, summed up his thoughts on Forde: “She’s, at best, a psychopath.”
Despite the fact that he had allowed Forde to encamp on his ranch, Spencer immediately denied any connection to her rampage—an apparent bungled robbery attempt to fund her militia group. Within recent years, though, Forde had become a well-known character in the vigilante sphere, both online and on the ground, and had split with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to form her own group. In fact, with the rise and fall and changing of names of groups on the border vigilante circuit, it could be difficult to keep up. Not that their mission of stopping the “invasion” of Mexicans ever faltered.
All border-patrolling militia, vigilante, and white supremacist groups did share one trait: as a magnet for out-of-state extremists, they sported some of the slickest websites, with updates and photos of their activities.
There were some local exceptions. The Hannigan family in Cochise County made national headlines in the late 1970s for the level of depravity they meted out against undocumented Mexicans on their property. “After being robbed and burglarized a few times by Mexican bandits,” customs agent Lee Morgan wrote in his memoir of life on the border, “the Hannigans had taken it upon themselves to administer Wild West justice to the next aliens who ventured across the ranch.”
They caught a couple or three Mexican fellers one day crossing their property and strung them up by ropes in a tree. Now, it didn’t matter to the Hannigans that these boys were innocent “looking for work” fellers and not border bandits. . . . So the salty old son of a bitch started a fire on the desert floor, much like the one a rancher would use for the branding of cattle. When the irons were hot, the Hannigans’ Beast was exposed to the world. After the sadistic bastards were done burning and torturing the Mexicans, the redneck vigilantes unleashed a volley of shotgun blasts that ripped apart the flesh of their defenseless victims.
The elder Hannigan died before the trial in which an all-white jury found the sons not guilty in 1977. “The outcome incensed Mexican Americans and Mexicans alike,” reported Time magazine. “Racist, frontier justice,” charged Raúl Grijalva, then a Tucson school district board member. When a second trial ended in a hung jury, more protests erupted and the US prosecutor warned about a “chilling effect” among ethnic divisions in the state. According to a local poll in 1980, “100 percent of the Hispanics and 64 percent of the Anglos surveyed expressed the opinion that the brothers were guilty.” In the third round in federal court, one brother was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to three years in prison, while the other walked free. Not entirely free—he was soon convicted on marijuana smuggling, reenforcing the hypocrisy of the supposedly antidrug border patrols.
While the fallout over the Hannigan case continued to overshadow public debate on immigration and border security, the Barnett brothers emerged in Cochise County as the next cause célèbre for the extremist right wing in the 1990s. In large part because of a tremendous amount of media coverage, according to Mark Potok, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Barnetts were “probably more than any people in this country . . . responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists.” In a 2000 Time magazine feature, Roger Barnett toted an M-16 automatic rifle and bragged about knocking an undocumented migrant to the ground after being challenged for his credentials. “So I slammed him back down and took his photo,” he recounted. “‘Why’d you do that?’ the illegal says, all surprised. ‘Because we want you to go home with a before picture and an after picture—that is, after we beat the s___ outta you.’ You can bet he started behavin’ then.” (In 2011, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Roger Barnett had to pay $87,000 for holding four unarmed undocumented immigrants at gunpoint. The Arizona Supreme Court had upheld a similar judgment for a different case in 2008.)
Described as ranchers, the Barnetts seemingly had more in mind for their vast grazing lands. After a period of “hunting” with mercenaries in South Africa, agent Morgan claimed, the Barnetts approached him as a US customs agent to see if they could be named “informants,” which would have granted them “a legal license to hunt Mexican dope mules and illegal aliens.” Morgan said no, but that didn’t stop him from encountering “a baker’s dozen of the armed dickheads riding in pickup trucks up and down Highway 80” in search of migrants. The “ranch-hand” vigilantes dressed in camouflage tagged with patches that read “US Patriot Patrol,” almost indistinguishable from a Border Patrol patch; one of them told Morgan of the Barnetts’ big plans to build a hunting lodge. Morgan added, “You guessed it. These crazy sons of bitches were going to have safari adventures for people who wanted to track down illegal aliens!” A 2006 New York Times profile of Roger Barnett that depicted him with a “pistol to his hip” and “an assault rifle in his truck” described his hunts: “Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.”
An even more outrageous episode nearly took place in the same county in 1929, when a cadre of local entrepreneurs in Cochise County had formed the Fimbres Apache Expedition as a “gentlemen’s club” to carry out another kind of big-game hunt; for $200, participants would have the opportunity to shoot Apache Indians in the Mexican outback in Chihuahua. “I have hunted big game in many parts of America,” one applicant wrote, “but I am sure shooting at an Apache Indian would give me a greater thrill than any I have heretofore shot at.” Thanks to the Mexican government and the intervention of the secretary of state, that applicant didn’t get the chance. The operation was shut down.
For Phoenix playwright James Garcia, who organized a series of plays in the aftermath of SB 1070 on immigration issues, the measure effectively opened a new season of police hunting of anyone of Mexican, Latino, or indigenous heritage. “You felt like you had a target on your back now,” he said as he prepared for a new show, Amexica: Tales of the Fourth World, which ran at the Mesa Arts Center in the heart of Russell Pearce’s district.
On February 22, 2011, two weeks before Pearce would have his final showdown over his omnibus immigration legislation, including a special bill that would prevent undocumented immigrants from obtaining any legal damages in court from attacks, the forty-three-year-old Forde was convicted and sentenced to the death penalty. Another death on Sonora’s death row.
By taking the stage at Spencer’s ranch after Forde’s murder spree—along with J. D. Hayworth and Arpaio—Pearce openly flaunted his associations with other vigilantes and extremists. His own son Sean, in fact, had participated in the Minuteman Project, “a month-long action in which revolving casts of 150 to 200 anti-immigration militants wearing cheap plastic ‘Undocumented Border Patrol Agent’ badges mobilized in southeastern Arizona,” according to a Southern Poverty Law Center report in 2005. The project’s stated goal was to “protect America” from the “tens of millions of invading illegal aliens who are devouring and plundering our nation.”
Despite being denounced by President George W. Bush, the Minuteman Project captured the fancy of the news media, which reportedly outnumbered the gallant force that assembled in Tombstone that spring. Once again an invention of outsiders—in this case Jim Gilchrist, a California-based Vietnam veteran, and Chris Simcox, a California-transplant to Arizona—that movement eventually faltered and splintered into various factions.
In Pearce’s Mesa district, neo-Nazi enthusiast J. T. Ready had formed his own US Border Guard, which not only led armed excursions along the border but embraced Sheriff Paul Babeu’s challenge across the white supremacist radio airwaves to conduct patrols for undocumented immigrants in Pinal County’s Vekol Valley. Forever on their trail, Lemons posted a New Times blog about Ready’s announcement in the summer of 2010 on his “white supremacist New Saxon site, inviting participants to ‘bring plenty of firearms and ammo.’” Ready admonished, “Camouflage or earth tone clothing [is] preferred. . . . Bandanas, balaclavas, or other identity concealing items are permissible and encouraged.” He declared, “This is the Minuteman Project on steroids! THE INVASION STOPS HERE!”
As delusional as Ready’s patrol might have been, Pearce couldn’t stay away from the militia leader’s media parade. The more he attempted to distance himself from Mesa’s most notorious white supremacist, the deeper his connection seemed to grow. Ready had been court-marshaled twice from the military, yet he still managed to invoke the veteran tag until he was stripped of his role as master of ceremonies for a Veteran’s Day parade in Mesa. That didn’t stop him from making a failed bid for the Mesa City Council, or from gaining a spot as a precinct committeeman for the Republican Party in 2008. Lemons’s indefatigable muckraking at New Times over several years exposed Ready’s involvement with the National Socialist Movement and his crossover exploits with border groups. But none of these revelations seemed to upset his relationship with Pearce, who had taken part in Ready’s baptism in the Mormon Church and ordained him as an elder in the Melchizedek priesthood.
Despite the mounting evidence, Pearce denied any association with Ready beyond casual contact at public events. But in a stunning discovery, legendary videographer Dennis Gilman uncovered footage from 2006 of Pearce commenting on Ready’s Mesa City Council candidacy: “He’s a true patriot, to the real purpose, the limited purpose, to the Republican platform that we have.”
Pearce emailed Lemons in response to the video in the winter of 2011: “No one could have known or guessed he [Ready] would later become involved with radical hate groups.”
However, the Anti-Defamation League in Phoenix had already warned Pearce about Ready’s Nazi activities in 2006. A year later, after a legislative hearing, local media began to report on Ready’s white supremacist affiliations. At an anti-immigrant rally in Phoenix in the summer of 2007, Pearce watched admiringly as Ready wooed the crowd.
In the end, it was Ready who felt betrayed by Pearce’s political maneuvers. “He’s supposed to be a lawman,” Ready charged after Pearce closed the door on their relationship in response to all the media attention, “but he has a pattern of criminality.”
“He is the worst kind of racist,” Ready said of Pearce in a New Times interview in the fall of 2010. “One who will do anything to achieve power, then trample on our rights like a tyrant when he gets that power.”
Ready added, “I christen him Grand Wizard of the AZ Senate!”
On May 2, 2012, two weeks after armed militia activists in camouflage ambushed and killed two undocumented migrants in a Pinal County incident that remains unsolved, Ready drew a borderline inside his own home in the neighboring suburb of Gilbert and gunned down his girlfriend, along with her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and their eighteen-month-old toddler, and then turned the gun on himself in an apparent mass murder/suicide. Investigators found an enormous stockpile of weapons, including antitank grenades.
Hounded by the media, Russell Pearce released a statement on his association with the murderous neo-Nazi. “I knew JT Ready, I did, as did many of us who have been involved in Mesa politics for a long time. When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,” it read, in part. “At some point in time darkness took his life over, his heart changed, and he began to associate with the more despicable groups in society.”
Spencer’s American Border Patrol was one of the first border groups to openly court white supremacists like Ready, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which described Spencer as “a vitriolic Mexican-basher and self-appointed guardian of the border who may have done more than anyone to spread the myth of a secret Mexican conspiracy to reconquer the Southwest.” Once he migrated from California to southern Arizona, Spencer unleashed his conspiracy theories while ramping up his patrols (including airplane flyovers) of the border region. He didn’t halt at Mexicans: in an online essay, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?” Spencer warned, “I think it is now time that Americans be forewarned that they are probably subject to clever pro-illegal alien propaganda every time they watch something produced in Hollywood.”
President Obama’s election in 2008 nearly pushed Spencer over the ledge. “Obama represents the greatest threat to the United States of America since the Civil War,” he touted on his website. “Brainwashed Americans have just voted to commit national suicide.”
Nonetheless, the epic battle to hold off the hordes of invading Mexicans remained Spencer’s main focus. In 1999 he told supporters, “Every illegal alien in our nation must be deported immediately. . . . If we can bomb the TV station in Belgrade [in the former Yugoslavia], we can shut down [US Spanish-language TV networks] Telemundo and Univision.” A year later, he ramped up the volume on his American Patrol website, warning readers, “Our country is being invaded by Mexico with hostile intentions. When it blows up, they can’t say we didn’t tell them, when the blood starts flowing on the border and in L.A. We’re [talking] about la reconquista.”
Such crackpot conspiracies would be laughable—if they did not inspire the bloodthirsty actions of deranged gun-toters like Forde and Ready. Or shape the narrative and policies of Arizona legislators like Pearce, Horne, and Brewer.
In the spring of 2012, State Senator Sylvia Allen and her wall-building colleague Steve Smith invited the unrepentant Spencer to address a special Senate Committee as an expert on the topic of “border security.” Embracing his role as an elder statesman and border expert, he lectured the legislature on the need to create a “sonic barrier” as part of a beefed-up technological effort on the border. Democratic members of the chamber walked out.
How much longer would Arizona allow this Tea Party to take the state to such an extremist fringe?