January 10, 2008, 1:32 pm
An Immigration Boiling Point Cools Down
By Lawrence Downes

The standoff in Phoenix between Latino protesters and immigration hard-liners has been taken off the boil.
For nearly three months, advocates for immigrants had been demonstrating on Saturday mornings outside M.D. Pruitt’s furniture store.
They were angry that the store’s owners, Roger and Michael Sensing, had posted off-duty officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in its parking lot to keep Latino day laborers away, and furious at the sheriff, Joe Arpaio, whom they accused of using racial profiling and dubious traffic stops to sweep the streets for undocumented immigrants.
They said the Sensings and Sheriff Arpaio had been spreading a climate of fear and intimidation throughout the neighborhood.
The protests had been a hot draw for the bleacher bums of the immigration debate – hundreds of Harley-riding, flag-wearing, bullhorn-shouting Minutemen and their allies, and the odd white supremacist or two, who showed up to demand that the border be locked down and illegal immigrants rounded up. This unruly crowd presented itself as stout defenders of the rule of law and of legal immigration, although some –- like the ones who shouted “Monkeys!â€