10 Years Ago, Arizona Changed How We Talk About Immigration

Ana Doan, a longtime friend who was driving him to a birthday celebration in Tucson, pleaded without success to be allowed to give him some water.

“I was screaming at the agents, telling them they were holding the former governor of the state of Arizona,” she said.

Born in 1916 in northern Mexico into a poverty-stricken family that crossed the border when he was a child, Castro was elected Arizona’s first and only Latino governor in 1974, the pinnacle of an exceptional political career that seems nearly unimaginable to replicate in today’s Arizona.

Since Castro’s historic victory 46 years ago, no Latino has been elected to any statewide office in Arizona, much less as governor. Instead, Arizona turned into a testing ground for policies aimed at keeping foreigners out and curbing the influence of Latinos in American politics — policies that helped lay the groundwork for anti-immigrant measures in other states and in the Trump White House.

Ten years ago this spring, Arizona’s leaders enacted one of the most contentious anti-immigration bills that any state has adopted in recent history: SB 1070, the first of the so-called “show me your papers” laws, which gave Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County and other local police officers broad power to detain anyone without a warrant if they suspected they had committed a deportable offense.

The state also required employers to screen out workers without documentation, disqualified unauthorized immigrants from in-state tuition rates, and introduced barriers making it harder for Latinos to vote. Even now, states around the country are implementing laws that mirror Arizona’s earlier attempts to limit immigration.

But as voters head to the polls for the state’s Democratic primary on Tuesday, the tangled politics of immigration in Arizona have become more unpredictable, and even some Republicans and independents in the state are rejecting the divisive politics of the past 20 years — suggesting that President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies may not find the widespread approval in Arizona they once might have.

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Just how far the pendulum has swung became clear earlier this year, when the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, proposed a constitutional amendment to enshrine a ban on sanctuary cities — a measure that only a few years ago might have won easy approval. Clearly, Ducey expected that it still might.

But hearings on the issue in the state legislature erupted into chaos, amid an outcry from Latino leaders and immigrant advocates. The state’s business community sent an immediate signal of alarm to the governor. Soon after he proposed the measure, the governor withdrew it.

“Ducey overplayed his hand,” said Isela Blanc, 48, herself once an immigrant in the country illegally, who won election to Arizona’s House of Representatives in 2016. “This isn’t the same Arizona as in 2010. There’s little appetite for reliving that nightmare again.”

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The story of Arizona’s turbulent evolution on immigration — from Raúl Castro to Joe Arpaio to the election in 2018 of Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate — provides a fascinating lesson in the history of the Southwest and, possibly, the future of the Democratic Party as it challenges Republican supremacy in traditional strongholds.

“Arizona is a cautionary tale for the rest of the United States,” said Lisa Urias, a Phoenix businesswoman who lived through Arizona’s fraught plunge into state-sponsored nativism. “It’s extremely troubling that we’re now repeating, front and center on the national stage, a painful chapter in Arizona history.”

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Arizona’s transformation came amid colossal demographic shifts that are still reshaping American politics.

Latinos today make up one-third of the state’s population, compared with only about 10% when Castro was elected governor in the mid-1970s.

Over the same span of time, Arizona has experienced one of the most remarkable domestic migrations of the past half-century. Americans from other states — largely white transplants from the Rust Belt, California and parts of the South — pushed the state’s population from 2.2 million in Castro’s time to more than 7 million today.

Many of the arrivals brought their conservative politics with them. Settling in sun-baked suburbs, they put down stakes in a state created by men who sought to prevent someone like Castro from ever rising to power.

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A Boxer Wins the Title

Castro was an unlikely candidate in Arizona, created as a territory in 1863 by severing the western half of New Mexico. While a large Hispanic population maintained some influence in New Mexico, Arizona from the start was a place where Anglos held the levers of power.

After statehood in 1912, officials enacted a poll tax aimed at preventing Hispanics from voting. Up until the 1960s, elected leaders like Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, sought to prevent Spanish-speaking citizens from voting by requiring English-literacy tests.

Castro scavenged for food as a child after his family crossed the border. He survived as a hobo during the Great Depression, hopping freight trains and eking out a living as a prizefighter on the carnival boxing circuit.

Returning to Arizona, Castro chafed at the segregation that relegated Hispanics to inferior status, and went on to become a prosecutor, judge and ambassador — unprecedented feats for a Mexican immigrant in the state.

When he ran for governor in 1974, he cultivated ties to prominent Republicans like Eugene Pulliam, the conservative publisher of The Arizona Republic.

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Meanwhile, new forms of political activism were resonating around the state.

Another Arizonan, Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who was born in Yuma in 1927, had mobilized Latinos against a law limiting union organizing in Arizona’s fields.

Castro, a lawyer who hewed to establishment ideals, hardly saw eye-to-eye with Chavez. Still, he drew momentum from the new activism.

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Castro courted liberals by supporting anti-poverty spending and women’s rights, while appeasing conservatives with his opposition to legalizing marijuana and to higher taxes on mining companies. After campaigning in places neglected by Republicans, especially in remote areas of the Navajo Nation, he won a razor-thin victory over his Republican opponent, a businessman who had moved to Arizona from Indiana.

To the dismay of his supporters, Castro served just two years before accepting President Jimmy Carter’s nomination as ambassador to Argentina in 1977.

Arizona started a march even further to the right. Goldwater, still in the Senate, threw his support in the late 1970s behind the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement in the West to assert local control over federal lands — and one of the first signs of a new upswell in militant nativism in Arizona.

The state beckoned men and women like Jack Oliphant, a Florida evangelical preacher who moved to Arizona in 1976, when Castro was governor. Like others in the militia movement who followed in his footsteps, Oliphant found that Arizona’s desert was the perfect place to nourish prophecies of bloodshed.

‘Keep Out Everyone Undesirable’

Oliphant, known to his followers as “Preacher Jack,” ran a remote Christian-oriented work camp for troubled teenagers. He told his congregants that a race war was imminent and formed a militia, the Arizona Patriots, to prosecute Arizona’s side of the conflict.

According to the FBI, which secretly infiltrated the group, the Patriots were establishing a “defense compound” protected by 50-caliber machine guns “to keep out everyone undesirable.”

Federal agents arrested Oliphant and his supporters in 1986 after finding a weapons stockpile and plans to attack synagogues and federal buildings using arrows with exploding tips, homemade mortars and sleeping gas.

In 1986, the same year Preacher Jack was arrested, a Pontiac dealer named Evan Mecham mounted a campaign for governor by attacking the state’s Republican elite.

Shocking Arizona’s political establishment, he won.

On Inauguration Day in 1987, Mecham announced he was canceling Arizona’s holiday honoring the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Not long after, he demanded a list of state employees who were gay. He enraged Hispanic leaders by appointing a weather reporter as his liaison to their community, explaining that he liked the reporter’s looks.

Such moves prompted economic boycotts of Arizona and outrage in the state’s business community. By 1988, the state Senate had ousted Mecham from office after convicting him of obstruction of justice and misuse of public funds in an impeachment trial.

The move had the effect of emboldening his supporters. Some recast themselves as anti-establishment insurgents and won seats in the state Legislature, where they began opening a new front against the state’s growing immigrant population.

Russell Pearce, a former police officer who had been elected to the legislature in 2000, was an avid reader of the work of Cleon Skousen, a Mormon political theorist and former FBI agent who called for the elimination of anti-discrimination laws and of the separation of church and state.

Long before Trump campaigned on removing millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally, Pearce was calling for mass deportations, citing as inspiration the military-style tactics used in the 1950s to deport hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, including many who were U.S. citizens.

“We know what we need to do,” Pearce told an Arizona radio station in 2006.

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While Pearce was lamenting the growth of Arizona’s immigrant population, another demographic shift was reshaping Arizona: White transplants from other parts of the United States were being drawn by the state’s sunny weather and low taxes.

In one six-year period, the state’s population surged 20%, to 6.2 million in 2006 from 5.1 million in 2000. People from other states -— largely white transplants -— accounted for more than half of the increase.

The growth of the Hispanic population that was happening at the same time jolted some of the white transplants who had settled largely in suburban areas around Phoenix, like Mesa, the city to the east that Pearce called home, and friction was building.

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Sheriff Arpaio Rustles His Handcuffs

It was shortly past midnight on Oct. 16, 2008, when the voice of the dispatcher from the Mesa Police Department crackled over the walkie-talkies.

“Hey, there’s a large number of men dressed in what appears to be tactical gear gathering at a local park,” the dispatcher said.

The 60-member force in the park near Mesa’s Mormon Temple was dressed SWAT-style, grasping rifles. Accompanied by police dogs, the group stormed Mesa’s City Hall around 2:30 a.m. in a sweep targeting Latino immigrants. The raid had been ordered by the county sheriff, Joe Arpaio.

The operation was a dud. Officers found only three middle-aged cleaning women without residency papers. Neither the mayor nor the police chief in Mesa, a city of half a million, had been given any inkling of Arpaio’s plans.

Born in 1932 to Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, Arpaio made divisive tactics a signature of his 24-year reign as sheriff of Maricopa County. He held prisoners in a sweltering tent camp outside City Hall and ordered immigration sweeps that amounted to illegal racial profiling.

The police chief in Mesa at the height of Arpaio’s power was a Cuban immigrant, George Gascón. Gascón clashed repeatedly with Arpaio over the sheriff’s assertions that Latino immigrants were a criminal threat.

“In Arizona, being anti-immigrant is code language for disliking brown people,” Gascón, who went on to become a district attorney in San Francisco and is now running for the same job in Los Angeles.

Arpaio claimed that lawlessness from Mexico’s escalating drug war was seeping across the border. Anti-immigrant groups began gathering signatures for a measure requiring Arizona voters to provide proof of citizenship, while issuing studies blaming immigration in the state for violent crimes.

The ABC News program “Nightline” raised the stakes in 2009, claiming, without factual basis, that Mexican drug cartels had turned Phoenix into the kidnapping capital of the world, second only to Mexico City.

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Soon politicians were repeating the claim. “Why is it that Phoenix, Arizona, is the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world?” said Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who died in 2018, said on “Meet the Press.” “Does that mean our border’s safe? Of course not.”

New militias sprang into action. Just how violent they could be became clear one night in May 2009, when a woman named Gina Gonzalez called 911 from her home in the town of Arivaca, near the border.

“I can’t believe they killed my family,” she said.

Assailants identifying themselves as law enforcement officers had broken into the home. They fatally shot Gonzalez’s partner, Raul Flores Jr., 29, and her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia. Gonzalez was shot three times but survived.

Arivaca hadn’t seemed like the kind of place for such bloodshed. The sleepy town of about 600 was a haven for artists and retirees. But that was before Minutemen American Defense, one of the militant nativist groups exerting sway in Arizona’s immigration wars, set up camp.

When the militia members knocked on the family’s door, they said they were looking for fugitives. But the authorities later said the assailants believed cash was stashed in the home. The ringleader was a former beautician named Shawna Forde.

Federal agents traced her to a remote ranch on the border and arrested her. She and the man accused of pulling the trigger in the killings were eventually sentenced to death.

Still, even after the Arivaca killings, political leaders failed to crack down on the vigilantes. Instead, they shifted their focus to another point along the border: a 35,000-acre ranch near Douglas.

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A Rancher’s Death

Robert Krentz Jr.’s family had ranched in the parched area around Douglas for decades. Krentz was used to migrants crossing the property; he told visitors that he often gave water to thirsty border crossers.

One day in 2010, when Krentz drove his all-terrain vehicle out to check water lines on the ranch, he made a garbled radio call, apparently about seeing someone in distress. Then the radio went silent. A police search team found Krentz’s body later that day, still on his ATV. He had three gunshot wounds.

Gun sales in the border region where he was killed surged by 20%. The anti-immigrant hysteria that had started with the fear over kidnappings kicked into overdrive as the authorities claimed that Krentz’s killer was probably an immigrant — though the murder was never solved.

“The combination of these two factors caused people to be ready to believe and accept anything,” said Stan Barnes, a longtime Republican strategist in Phoenix.

Russell Pearce, the state legislator known for targeting immigrants, was ready. His bill, SB 1070, won approval in the Arizona legislature. A national outcry ensued.

Jan Brewer, the Republican governor at the time, attended a gala of Hispanic business leaders honoring none other than Raúl Castro. Brewer said in a speech that night that she had heard the concerns of Hispanic leaders about the proposed legislation. She assured them that she would “do the right thing, so that everyone is treated fairly.”

Some in attendance took that to mean she planned to veto Pearce’s bill. Instead, she signed SB 1070 into law.

Boycotts Begin

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Just two weeks later, Juan Varela was watering the chile plants in his front yard on South Montezuma Street in Phoenix when a neighbor, Gary Kelley, wandered over to discuss the legislation. Kelley had been drinking, and started shouting insults.

“Wetback!” Kelley yelled, according to a police report. “If you don’t go back to Mexico, you’re going to die!”

Varela, a U.S. citizen, warned Kelley.

“Don’t come here and disrespect me at home,” said Varela. “I’ve lived here a long time. This country was Mexico before it was the U.S.”

Varela tried to kick Kelley in the groin, but missed. Then Kelley pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and fatally shot Varela in the head. Prosecutors called it a hate crime.

In the aftermath of SB 1070, one thing was clear: Blood was spilling again.

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Latino organizations pushed for economic boycotts of the state. Out-of-state travelers began canceling hotel reservations. Inspiring other cities, the Los Angeles City Council approved a measure to curb purchases from Arizona and prevent city employees from traveling to the state on official business.

Pearce and his allies doubled down. Claiming that Latino children would grow up wanting to overthrow the U.S. government, they shut down the Tucson public schools’ Mexican-American studies program and banned ethnic studies around the state.

Then, with Pearce as president of the state Senate, conservative legislators drafted proposals to compel school officials and medical professionals to question students and patients about their immigration status.

But the Arizona Senate defied its own leader by rejecting the proposed legislation. Many in the state had finally had enough.

Repudiation from various parts of the United States made it clear that Arizona’s crackdown had been awful for business. Phoenix, which had ranked among the top four tourist destinations in the country before the anti-immigration drive, plunged to 23rd place.

A group of 60 business leaders, including chief executives of Arizona’s largest companies, sent Pearce a letter in March 2011 laying out the damage.

As Pearce dug in his heels, voters ousted him in a recall in 2011.

A year later, Castro, near the end of his long life, endured his demeaning detention by Border Patrol agents. Courts went on to declare large parts of SB 1070 unconstitutional, and when it was gutted, Arizona’s hard-liners found themselves sidelined in a state trying to move on from a bout of nativist agitation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .