Border issue no longer a bright political divide

Tim Steller Arizona Daily Star
July 4, 2010 12:00 am

Fewer people are crossing Arizona's border from Mexico.

Fewer "criminal aliens" are being sent to Arizona's prisons.

More officers are patrolling Arizona's southern frontier.

The number of illegal immigrants in Arizona has declined by 100,000 or more.

Yet border security and illegal immigration are the hottest topic in Arizona's politics this year, returning the state to the center of a national debate.

On Thursday, President Obama cited Arizona's new immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070, when he launched a drive for "comprehensive" reform of the country's immigration laws. Gov. Jan Brewer has centered her election campaign on fighting illegal immigration, and her competitors have tried to match her border toughness.

Even Democrats, who traditionally have favored a way for illegal residents to become legal, are flexing their border muscles. After Obama's speech Thursday, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said via Twitter: "Mr. President I will personally show you what AZ needs: tough border security."

No matter the candidate or the office, it seems, border issues top the state's political agenda this year. Among the reasons:

• Drug violence continues to flare up just across the border in Mexico. In the worst recent example, 21 people died Thursday in a shootout between smuggling gangs 12 miles south of the Arizona border.

• Rancher Robert Krentz was murdered and Pinal County Deputy Louis Puroll was shot - both possibly by smugglers - as the state debated SB 1070.

• The anti-government sentiment that has colored Obama's tenure found a comfortable home in the border-security debate. Many candidates and voters blame the federal government for doing too little to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

• Janet Napolitano's departure from the governor's seat let the Republican legislation escape her prolific veto stamp and become law.

• Former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth challenged Sen. John McCain in the Republican primary, confronting McCain on border and immigration issues. McCain responded with an intense effort to build credentials as a border-security hawk.

The issue has been near the top of Arizona voters' priority list for more than a decade, Republican pollster Margaret Kenski said.

"I think the widespread perception is that the border is not secure, that it's fairly porous. That's what people are responding to," she said.

More officers on the border

More law enforcement officers than ever are patrolling Arizona's southern border, including increasing numbers who aren't Border Patrol agents.

One of them is Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Scott Woodworth. One night in late June, he stopped his duty vehicle, a Chevrolet Tahoe, on unpaved West Silverbell Road, about 40 miles northwest of downtown Tucson. He pulled out a sandwich, his dinner, and took in the quiet, moonlit evening while he waited.

It's often quiet like this for Woodworth, one of 18 members of the Pima County Sheriff's Department's border crime unit. He and the other members go to the remote regions of the county looking for drug smugglers, lost border crossers, stolen vehicles and loads of money headed south.

Working the border these days can be boring, but it is seldom lonely.

During his shift, Woodworth stayed in contact with members of his squad, who were scouring an area farther west, near the Tohono O'odham Nation. He also ran into a Bureau of Land Management ranger on Ironwood National Monument and two Marana police officers out patrolling the remote areas as part of the federal Operation Stonegarden, which pays local law-enforcement officers to patrol border areas.

The Border Patrol's Tucson sector employs about 3,200 agents, more than double the number it had eight years ago. Add to that agents sent in temporarily from different sectors, sheriff's deputies in border counties, rangers on federal lands, officers working Stonegarden assignments and a temporary National Guard deployment. Arizona's border is patrolled more heavily than ever.

Thanks to hundreds more agents and miles of new fencing, the entire Yuma Sector is considered under "operational control," said sector spokesman Kenneth Quillin, a supervisory Border Patrol agent.

In the Tucson Sector, agents have gained "operational control" of several segments of the border, said Brandon Judd, president of the agents' union local. Assignments in and near the border towns, where the main objective is to maintain control by deterring crossings, can be inactive.

"It's insanely boring," Judd said.

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants in the Arizona's two Border Patrol sectors peaked at about 590,000 in 2004 and dropped to about 249,000 last year. There is wide agreement that the drop reflects a steep decrease in attempts to cross, due mostly to the recession but also to increased enforcement.

"There really has been a huge drop of inflows in undocumented immigrants and especially Mexican immigrants," said Jeff Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Border hot spots

But there still is action along Arizona's border. Judd points to the Huachuca Mountains, the corridor near the Chiricahua Mountains and some routes through the Tohono O'odham Nation as hot spots.

Rancher and cowboy poet Bud Strom is out on his property near the southern end of the Huachucas daily, and he says the illegal traffic has slowed dramatically in the year or so since the federal government finished a nearby 18-foot-high border fence. Pedestrian crossings of his ranch, which he had estimated at 1,000 per week, have dwindled to 50 to 100, Strom said. Vehicles no longer cross there.

"But it still ticks me off that they leave trash on the ranch," he said.

While Strom counts crossers by the dozens, Pam Saxman and her husband can count incidents on one hand in the four years since they moved from central Tucson to the remote hills in the western Avra Valley. Someone tried to steal a horse once, and recently a group of 40 people approached their home, about 70 miles north of the border. Still, that irks her.

"I don't think any of it's tolerable," she said.

Robert Krentz was working his family's ranch northeast of Douglas, in one of those hot corridors, when he was shot and killed March 27. Authorities don't know who attacked Krentz, but he radioed before he was killed that he was going to check on an illegal immigrant he had encountered.

The killing happened amid a rash of burglaries around nearby Portal that residents attributed to cross-border criminals. And it happened as the state was debating SB 1070, which requires law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people whom they question for another reason if they have reasonable suspicion that those people are in the country illegally.

After Krentz's slaying, "candidates immediately jumped on the bandwagon," said Jennifer Allen, executive director of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, which works on behalf of legal and illegal immigrants.

Attorney General Terry Goddard, the only Democrat in the governor's race, speculated on television after the slaying that the killer was "a trained professional."

"These are commandos, these are paramilitary professionals who unfortunately are throughout the high desert in Southern Arizona," he said, clarifying later that he was supposing this to be true.

Krentz's murder galvanized support for SB 1070, partly because "he was a rancher on his own property, minding his own business," said Tucsonan John Munger, who dropped out of the race for governor in May.

Napolitano, who vetoed a record 180 bills as governor, would have vetoed the law had she not become Obama's secretary of homeland security, Munger said. But Brewer signed it, citing "the crisis caused by illegal immigration and Arizona's porous border."

Fear drug violence

In signing 1070, Brewer also cited another concern - that drug-war violence in Mexico could cross the border into Arizona.

"We cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north," she said.

Incidents reinforcing that fear occur regularly. On Monday, gunmen in Tamaulipas, a Mexican state that borders Texas, shot to death the leading candidate for governor in today's Mexican elections. On Thursday morning, a shootout between suspected smuggling gangs killed 21 people south of the Arizona border, between the Sonoran towns of Saric and Tubutama.

In Arizona, crime related to smuggling has existed for decades. But the Krentz killing and incidents such as the April 30 shooting of Pinal County Deputy Puroll, allegedly by smugglers, reinforced the idea that things are getting worse.

Crime data, though, shows crime rates steady or down for Arizona's border towns and the state as a whole.

The number of "criminal aliens" admitted to Arizona's prisons is down in the fiscal year that ended June 30. The number peaked in fiscal 2009 at 3,436 and dropped last year to 2,743.

And the number of illegal immigrants estimated to be living in Arizona dropped from 560,000 in January 2008 to 460,000 in January 2009, the Department of Homeland Security estimates. The recession has likely pushed that population down more, said Passel of the Pew center.

Border security has been "a top-tier worry in Arizona for years," said Democratic pollster Lisa Grove. "What I think is new is heightened concern about border violence. As people are hearing about cartels, gangs, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the ante is up for voters."

The risk of violence crossing the border is real, said Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence for the Austin, Texas-based firm Stratfor Global Intelligence. But the data is lacking to say whether it's happening because, for example, a person who disappears in Texas may not be listed as a murder victim if his body turns up in Mexico.

Also, the cartels have reason not to challenge the stronger civil authorities in the United States, he said:

"They run the risk, if they come into the U.S. and assassinate the wrong person, of a more concerted law enforcement effort to go after them."

Key element of campaigns

Most candidates for Arizona governor and other offices have made border security a key component of their races.

On May 27, state Treasurer and would-be governor Dean Martin established a fund for donations from people concerned about border security. So far, it has $1,035. On June 8 he announced a border plan that includes a "tent city" for "illegal aliens convicted of crimes in Arizona."

For some voters, he said, "you can be right with them on everything, but if you're for amnesty, forget it. They're not going to support you."

Brewer has a border-security fund of her own - an account to pay for the legal defense of SB 1070 - with about $138,000 in contributions. The fund is a minor part of a major effort to show herself as tough on border security and illegal immigration.

She has gone even beyond the bounds of the facts, saying in June that most illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs and implying that beheadings have occurred in Arizona.

And she has picked a fight with the president, accusing Obama of leaving Arizona unprotected. In an online video, Brewer stands next to a sign warning of smuggling activity in a spot 80 miles from the border.

"Washington says the border is as safe as it's ever been. Does this look safe to you?" she says, before addressing Obama directly: "Do your job! Protect our borders!"

As a Republican gubernatorial debate wound down on June 15, candidate Matt Jette wound up the other candidates by telling Brewer: "You act as if the state of Arizona is being terrorized by illegal immigrants."

"It is," candidate Buz Mills interjected.

"I have been to the border," Mills said. "The folks down there are living in fear and intimidation. They're terrorized down there."

In an interview last week, Mills acknowledged that border security isn't necessarily the most important issue facing Arizona, and he accused the governor of avoiding issues like the state budget and joblessness by talking about the border.

Brewer did not respond to a request for an interview.

Democrat Goddard has also staked out a position as tough on border crime and illegal immigration.

"I've always had my hair on fire about this," he told the Arizona Daily Star editorial board. "The cartels are a security threat to the United States, and we've been fools to ignore it."

Measuring Arizona's border security

Measure 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Arizona apprehensions*: 577,517 510,623 416,231 326,059 248,624

Arizona-based Border Patrol agents**: 3,024 3,384 3692 3,965 4,170

Arizona marijuana seizures***: 884,204 879,523 1,264,095 1,132,323 1,655,265

Arizona illegal immigrant population****: 510,000 490,000 530,000 560,000 460,000

* U.S. Border Patrol, Yuma and Tucson sectors ** Sources: Yuma Sector, Star archives *** Source Arizona HIDTA. Refers to all seizures over 20 lbs. **** Department of Homeland Security

Contact reporter Tim Steller at tsteller@azstarnet.com

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/ ... 21ac1.html