Attendees hold signs at the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Arizona was in the throes of anti-immigrant hysteria in 2010. The legislature enthusiastically passed the first major state laws targeting the undocumented, and Gov. Jan Brewer signed them. State and county officials locked up immigrants. They took them to the border and pushed them across. They denied them bail. They pulled drivers over because they looked Hispanic. They curtailed educational opportunities for their children.
But the U.S. Supreme Court neutered most of those laws created by SB1070. And by the next election cycle, the three politicians who most relished surfing that anti-immigrant wave had crashed on the rocks and landed out of office. One was disbarred as an attorney. Maricopa County was on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars from a federal racial-profiling lawsuit. The experiment failed.
Is history repeating itself on a national level?
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Certainly, immigration enforcement is not the only issue confronting voters in the upcoming midterm elections. But it has been wearing on them. All through 2026, national polls have shown that majorities of Americans disapprove of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the job it is doing to implement President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Immigration control is a nice concept in the abstract. It’s not so nice when you realize it takes away people you know and like at work, people you see daily in stores and restaurants, your neighbors or your children’s friends’ parents. Worse still is cruelty at a level Americans can’t stomach; separation of families, outright brutality against women and the elderly, deaths by indifference, even murder.
When I came to Phoenix as a reporter in the early 1990s, the Latino community, by my observation, was split between well-assimilated families who had been here for generations and a newer immigrant working class. But there was already a phobia about speaking Spanish in government settings or schools.
Before I was a journalist, I was a college Spanish instructor and an editor of foreign language and bilingual education textbooks. So, I was naturally interested when battles erupted over bilingual education in the Arizona Legislature. Sometimes it was almost comical: A white Republican representative made a speech about only allowing non-English languages in the schools that were spoken at the time of statehood, by which he meant Native American dialects. Then a Latino legislator stood up and suggested that people might have been speaking Spanish in Arizona in 1912, and the proposal was quickly scuttled.
I interviewed another Republican legislator who stridently told me that her grandfather had migrated from Italy, and HE didn’t need bilingual education. When I asked how far the grandfather had gone in school, she said, “Oh, he didn’t go to school.” The irony hung in the air, unnoticed. A short time later, in 2000, I quit my job at a local weekly newspaper after a dispute with the editor over how to cover a national crusade against bilingual education that had come to Arizona.
By 2010, the Latino population in Maricopa County had diversified to include a large Spanish-speaking middle class. I knew mortgage brokers and dieticians and entrepreneurs and attorneys and journalists who were Spanish-language dominant.
Enter Andrew Thomas.
Thomas was a novice attorney who had already run and lost as the Republican candidate for state attorney general. Undaunted, he resigned from an entry-level position at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to run for county attorney in 2004. In addition to the usual Republican tough-on-crime adages, he also put up campaign signs saying he would stop illegal immigration. This was initially laughed at, because immigration was the bailiwick of the feds, but it got him elected.
The anti-immigrant fervor grew among Republicans, and “immigrant” was essentially synonymous with “Latino.” The GOP-controlled legislature responded by generating anti-immigrant laws: no out-of-state tuition for undocumented students; charging people brought illegally into the state as co-conspirators to human smuggling; ruling that undocumented immigrants could not bail out of jail even if charged with relatively low-level felonies.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who arrested an Army veteran who held undocumented immigrants at gunpoint and chafed when Thomas wouldn’t prosecute him, soon saw which way the political winds were blowing and signed on as Thomas’ biggest supporter. His office published statistics showing that the county jails were overwhelmingly filled with undocumented immigrants as proof of their criminality.
The reality was that they couldn’t bond out for the same crimes that citizens could. I looked instead at arrest records and published a story in The Arizona Republic that proved that undocumented persons were arrested in exact proportion to their numbers in the general population. A high-ranking county prosecutor still insisted there was an illegal immigrant crime wave. When I asked for proof, he answered that they just hadn’t caught them yet.
Thomas picked fights with Maricopa County Superior Court judges for conducting DUI classes in Spanish. Arpaio staked patrol cars outside a Latina judge’s Paradise Valley home to see if the workers putting a new roof on her house were undocumented.
I did a ride-along with sheriff’s deputies, and despite having a reporter in the car, they made little effort to disguise racial profiling, pointing out that brown person and that one driving by as worth questioning.
Brewer signed into law a first-in-the-nation anti-immigrant omnibus statute called Senate Bill 1070 in April 2010. Sponsored by Sen. Russell Pearce, a former Maricopa County Sheriff’s Deputy, it required immigrants to carry alien registration papers; allowed for warrantless arrest of suspected illegal immigrants; prohibited solicitation of day labor; banned so-called “sanctuary cities;” and made it a crime to simply have an undocumented person in your house or car.
As a bilingual reporter who specialized in legal affairs, I was frequently consulted by the Spanish-language media to explain the fine points of the new laws and Thomas’ interpretation of them.
On the day SB1070 went into effect, the newspaper sent me to Pearce’s district in Central Mesa. It was a ghost town. People had already moved away in fear and anticipation, and the streets were lined with newly vacant shops and empty apartment buildings with curtains blowing out open windows. He had ravaged his own district.
After an hour searching for people, I came across a single man who was willing to talk. He had lived in Arizona for 20 years, although he didn’t have a green card. His daughter was a native-born citizen, his wife had recently died. He was just waiting to be arrested and sent back to a place where he no longer belonged and worrying what would become of his American child.
Things fall apart.
Much of SB1070 was nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court because it was pre-empted by federal statutes.
Thomas had resigned from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to run again for attorney general. He lost in the Republican primary. The State Bar was already investigating his time as county attorney, and in 2012, he was disbarred for investigating and criminally prosecuting his perceived political enemies on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and the Superior Court.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was hit with a massive federal lawsuit in 2013, alleging the agency systematically racially profiled Hispanics. It cost the county more than $300 million. In 2016, a federal judge held Arpaio in criminal contempt of court for defying orders to stop the profiling. He was pardoned by newly elected President Donald Trump, but Arpaio had already been voted out of office.
Pearce began 2011 at the pinnacle of his career: SB1070 was law and he was elected president of the Arizona Senate. But by November, he had been removed from office in a recall election.
“Mesa voters decided they have had enough of the anti-immigrant vitriol that Pearce used to create divisiveness throughout Arizona and the rest of the nation,” Margaret Moran, then-president of the Latino activist group LULAC, stated in a press release afterward. “This historic recall … should be a clear signal to unscrupulous politicians across the country that immigrant bashing will not help you get elected.”
But how quickly we forget. When Trump made his 2015 campaign remarks that Mexicans were criminals and rapists, it was déjà vu, or maybe “Esto, ya lo vivimos.” In his second term, Trump has obviously taken immigrant bashing to deadly new levels, with his ICE raids, with deportations to remote hostile countries, with summary executions of sailors in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, with the people who have died in custody or been murdered on the street, including Anglo U.S. citizens for the apparent crime of talking back to ICE agents.
A decade ago, voters reacted decisively in Arizona. What will happen this year?
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Courtesy of Arizona Mirror
