A8


From Page One arizona from A1


drug addicts has cast some gloom upon the city motto, “Hang out in Benson!”


Some residents have come to


associate a general sense of de- cline with illegal immigration, which is visible here in the desert litter of backpacks and water jugs, and in the crammed-full vans that drivers sometimes ditch along the highways, send- ing passengers fleeing. In that context, the new law has inspired feelings from profound unease to a kind of righteous victory, which often sort along ethnic lines.


A sense of fear


“Amen” is what Danna Judd said when Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law in April. She and her husband, Bevin, a UPS salesman, moved from Tuc- son to a new house on 22 acres in San Pedro Ranches three years ago, but their rural-lifestyle fan- tasy was quickly spoiled. They found stashes of clothes when they were out for desert walks. They found a smuggler’s van abandoned in their gravel drive- way. More recently, they arrived home with their two kids from an evening baseball game to a scene of floodlights and U.S. Border Pa- trol agents scrambling across their property. “My neighbor called and said


they were chasing around 20 peo- ple,” Bevin Judd said. They ush- ered the kids to bed, turned on all the lights and locked the doors. Like many who grew up in Ben-


son, Bevin Judd remembers giv- ing bread and water to Mexican farmworkers who crossed through town when he was a kid. He remembers leaving doors un- locked, keys in the car. “But now it almost seems like there’s a criminal element to it,” he said. The sense that crime has in- creased with illegal immigration isn’t supported by either local or statewide crime statistics, al- though that is difficult for some around here to believe. “It makes you afraid,” said Dan-


na Judd, a deputy city clerk. “You don’t know who is out there. Are they drug smugglers? Do they have guns?” To the Judds’ relief, the one person who definitely does have guns is their neighbor Bob De- koschak, 62, who was cleaning out his horse barn in the late af- ternoon. The wind blew the chimes. His wife, Elise, arrived home from work, and they sat un- der ceiling fans in their library packed with James Michener novels and books on Latin Amer- ican culture. “When we were moving here,


S


KLMNO


THURSDAY, JULY 22, 2010 On Arizona immigration law, ‘pressure from all sides’


successful, glamorous-looking woman with a son attending Stanford University, she has been forced to wonder again how oth- ers see her. “My white friends say, ‘Oh, Me- lissa, you’re making such a big deal of it,’ ” she said, sitting in her office. “But they’re white. They don’t have to deal with it.” She, too, is afraid of drug-relat- ed violence spilling over from Mexico. And like everyone, she is hopeful that the controversy will push the federal government to deal with immigration reform, al- though realistically, she figures it won’t. And so she worries, about news that a list of illegal im- migrants was circulating in Utah, about a mood of vigilantism that she believes Arizona’s new law has encouraged. “There’s so much anger and


frustration,” she said. “If this law doesn’t work, what’s next?”


Wary of the effects JOSHUA LOTT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST No-trespassing signs are posted at Bob Dekoschak’s property in Benson, Ariz. “We can’t keep placating the Hispanic community,” he says.


on washingtonpost.com An Arizona town’s mixed emotions


A closer look at Benson, its residents and police chief as the weight of the immigration law is felt. postpolitics.com


we talked to a friend who said, ‘Oh, and how armed are you?’ ” explained Elise Dekoschak, 60, who works for the state govern- ment.


Bob Dekoschak, who works for an international software manu- facturer, already had a 12-gauge shotgun, but he bought two more, along with a .357 magnum. As the sun sank into the crum- bled landscape, the Dekoschaks talked of feeling isolated from law enforcement, which is spread so thin. They talked about the things they blame, at least partly, on illegal immigration: the state’s failing schools, the closed hospi- tals, strained local budgets. They question its comparative benefits of cheap lettuce and cheap houses that helped drive Ari- zona’s boom years. “When Brewer brought this


forth, she did it for those of us on the front lines,” Bob Dekoschak said. “Those of us armed. Those of us with illegals running through our yards. We can’t keep placating the Hispanic communi- ty. What we need is a division of Marines . . . ”


He paused. Elise held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “What’s that?”


A chopping noise; a helicopter,


they decided. Maybe Border Pa- trol.


No practical effect?


In the police station, Moncada was listening to radio calls. An of- ficer was investigating a burglary suspect; another was checking out a crystal-methamphetamine lab; a highway patrol officer had stopped two men in a car and needed a Spanish speaker. “I guess that’s me,” said Monca- da, one of two Hispanic Amer- icans on the force of 16 officers. He walked out into the 105-de- gree noon and sped off in his gray Chevy.


“I don’t know what it is,” he said, gliding onto Interstate 10. “But if you work in the southern part of Arizona, you should speak Spanish.”


At the scene, the patrol officer


explained that he’d pulled over the burgundy Dodge Falcon for speeding and following another car too closely. The driver had


Sherrod called on grit to help carry her


Woman at center of USDA flap has history of public service


by Krissah Thompson


Shirley Sherrod is a woman who has been failed by the sys- tem again and again. She was a 17-year-old high school senior when a white man shot her father, Hosie Miller, in the back. A grand jury refused to bring murder charges. Twenty years later, she and her husband, Charles, watched the 6,000-acre farming cooperative they founded in Lee County, Ga., suffocate under the weight of systematic discrimination by feder- al officials. This week she en- dured becoming a cari- cature on cable news as a video clip from a speech she gave in March spun for 24 hours. Sherrod was la- beled a racist black woman, ousted from her job with the Agri- culture Department and condemned by the NAACP, whose members she had joined in the struggle for racial equality. As Sherrod, 62, saw it all un- fold from her home in Albany, Ga., she called upon the same grit that has always seemed to carry her. On Wednesday, she traveled to Atlanta and became an instant television star — con- fidently having her say on CNN from morning to night.


She smiled slightly as she


watched White House press sec- retary Robert Gibbs apologize to her. Then she said casually that she would need a few days to think about whether to return to the USDA. Its secretary, Tom Vil- sack, had offered her an unspeci- fied role at the department work- ing on civil rights issues. After watching her life whip-


sawed, she defended herself and let the story unfold. In a part of that much-dis-


cussed speech not shown on tele- vision, Sherrod described herself as a farm girl and recounted how, after her father’s death, she took hold of the rural sensibility preached by Booker T. Washing- ton — that you can use the land to lift yourself up. Until that time, she was sure that she would leave the South. “Picking cotton, picking cu-


Shirley Sherrod has experienced discrimination in the past.


cumbers, shaking peanuts, doing all that work on the farm. It’ll make you want to get an educa- tion more than anything,” she told NAACP members gathered for a banquet in Douglas, Ga. “The discrimination that we had to endure made you just want to leave.” She stayed and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit- tee in 1965, committed to integration and se- curing voting rights for blacks. Charles Sherrod, a minister, became the committee’s field direc- tor in southwest Geor- gia, according to history books and friends of the Sherrods. Julian Bond, a civil


rights leader and former NAACP chairman, said Charles was “good, brave and courageous,” going into rural counties outside of Albany. Friends say Shirley was right there with him. Once SNCC began to devolve, she became a welfare rights ac- tivist and began working on com- munity projects, including New Communities — a cooperative that grew soybeans, corn, cotton and fruit. For 15 years, it was the largest black-owned farming or-


ganization in the country. The dream turned into a battle for loans with USDA, said Sher- rod’s lawyer, Rose Saunders. The government denied the Sher- rods, and they lost the land. “It was sad, but by the time it happened, it was sort of inevi- table,” said Joseph Pfister, a friend of the Sherrods and a civil rights activist. (It was 14 years before the U.S.


government would right that wrong, settling with them for $13 million. Most of the money went to a nonprofit intended to buy back the land, Saunders said. The Sherrods were awarded $330,000 for pain and suffering.) Not two years after the govern- ment foreclosed, Sherrod joined the Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund. It was there that she encountered Roger Spooner, a white farmer who had come to the cooperative for help, said Jerry Pennick, director of the fund. It is Spooner whom Sherrod was talking about when she re- lated the story that became bait for conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart’s false proposition —


that Sherrod had denied Spooner help — was revealed when the farmer appeared on CNN to back her. “I tell you what, I never was treated no better than Shirley,” Spooner said as his wife, Eloise, nodded in agreement. Her friends back home said she made her point with flair. “Shirley has shown that you don’t have to be afraid. All you have to do is be right,” Pennick said.


thompsonk@washpost.com


Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.


on washingtonpost.com The Sherrod situation, from all sides


Chat at noon and 2 p.m. with an expert on politics and race and with a farmer helped by Sherrod; view players in the drama, see


supporters of Sherrod rally and check out the speech in its entirety. washingtonpost.com/politics


produced a Mexican license and a proper visa. The passenger pro- duced his legal resident card. But the car was not registered to them. And after Moncada asked a few questions, the two men’s sto- ries did not match. Moncada watched the two men as the patrol officer searched the trunk, the door frames, the en- gine, shining his flashlight into its crevices. Nothing. They let the men go.


“I think he was running heat,” the chief said of the driver, re- ferring to a common smuggling tactic around here, in which one car distracts the police so others get through. He got back into his Chevy. “With the new law,” he said, re- hearsing a future scenario, “noth- ing would have changed on that stop.”


And for Moncada, at least, that is the irony of the new law: Al- though heightening fears and ex- pectations, threatening lawsuits and creating confusion, it is un- likely to change much about how his officers do their jobs, he said. Already, if they stop a speeding


van and people bail out running, officers generally make the leap and call Border Patrol. The new law essentially requires that call, along with one to verify the immi- gration status of every local drug addict, drunk driver or shoplifter arrested after next Thursday,


when the law takes effect, barring an injunction. Although the law might play out differently in oth- er places, Moncada said, his po- lice will not use it as an excuse to hunt illegal immigrants. As a practical matter, he and other chiefs said, they are simply too busy with regular crime. “I really don’t know if it will


have any significant effect at all,” the chief said. “Will it fill the jails? Probably not. Will it be a de- terrent? Probably not.” He drove down Route 80, past a blur of beige desert, past the iron gate where some ranchers found a body a few weeks ago. “The poor guy was just laid out


there,” Moncada said, pointing to the spot. “We didn’t find any wa- ter jugs. No backpack. It was mis- erably hot that day, 109 degrees. You can only imagine what kind of death . . . ”


‘What’s next?’


When the new law was in- troduced, Melissa Herrera-DiPe- so, who runs a real estate agency in town, interpreted it as a license for the police to racially profile Hispanic Americans. This was based upon her memories of growing up in Tucson, when some white parents didn’t let their daughters play with her. In high school, she had a white friend who was not allowed to have a Mexican boyfriend. Now a


Down a gravel driveway, be- hind a locked gate, a man who preferred that only his first name, Marco, be used, considered that question. He arrived in Tucson seven years ago on a tourist visa, found work framing the new houses. He got a paycheck then and paid tax- es. He brought his wife and two kids to join him, and they moved to Benson, where he works for a rancher. “We’re not just here to benefit,”


said Marco, 37. “We’re also giv- ing.” He rents a trailer where he sat down on an overstuffed couch in a room decorated with frilly ma- roon curtains, his son’s baseball trophies, family photos, two paintings of Jesus and one of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He is nervous about the new


law, he said, and like everyone else, he is preparing. He has gathered all the docu- ments he can find in a desperate hope that they might satisfy po- lice asking for papers: some in- voices from a store he owns in Mexico; a letter of recommenda- tion from his home town’s mayor. He plans to fix the small crack in the windshield of the sedan he drives to work, an infraction that could lead to his deportation if the law takes effect. He will try to look friendly but unassuming. “I always try to dress clean, not


dirty, like I’ve been walking through the desert,” Marco said. Still, he worries about what might happen. “Maybe it was a mistake to bring my family here,” he said. “If it gets too tough, I will go. Maybe California.”


mccrummens@washpost.com


MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS Zaccai Free, left, and Tighe Barry rally outside the USDA building in support of Shirley Sherrod. White House apologizes to fired USDA official sherrod from A1


tary Robert Gibbs said at his daily briefing, which CNN broadcast on a split screen with a live shot of Sherrod watching from its stu- dio. In the snippet of video on Breitbart’s Web site, Sherrod, who is black, admitted to having been reluctant to help a white farmer who sought her aid 24 years before, when she was work- ing for a nonprofit agency estab- lished to help black farmers. What the clip did not show was the larger point Sherrod had made, one that was the opposite of the perception it created. From that episode, she told the NAACP audience, she had recognized her own prejudice, moved beyond it to an understanding that “there is no difference between us,” and ultimately had helped the white farmer save his land. In the reaction that followed the posting of the video, Sherrod not only was fired from her USDA post but was denounced by the Obama administration, the me- dia and even the civil rights or- ganization whose local chapter had invited her to speak.


Sherrod mounted her own de- fense in a series of appearances on CNN, and the farmer, Roger Spooner, and his family backed her up. But not until the NAACP released a video of the full speech Tuesday night did it become clear how misleading the excerpt was. In an interview Wednesday, Breitbart said he first learned of Sherrod’s speech in April, when a source he declined to name sent him a DVD copy of it. But the DVD did not work. He said he for- got about the speech until last week, when the NAACP de- nounced what it called “racist ele- ments” of the “tea party” move- ment.


Angry at the NAACP’s move, Breitbart said he contacted the source again asking for copies of the speech and obtained two ed- ited clips over the weekend. After Breitbart first referred to


the existence of the video clip during a radio interview last Thursday, Sherrod tried to con- tact Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan through e- mail accounts the department had created for employee feed- back. But they are checked in- frequently, a spokesman said.


As a result, USDA aides did not learn of it until Monday, after Breitbart had posted them. Obama officials rejected accu-


sations that they overreacted out of fear of inciting their conserva- tive critics. Presidential aides insisted that no one at the White House pressed Vilsack to dismiss Sher- rod, despite her claims that they had. But when the facts became clear, and the public view of Sher- rod flipped from vilification to sympathy, the White House let it be known that someone there — it wouldn’t say who or when — pressed the agriculture secretary to reconsider.


Vilsack was especially sensitive to the issue. Since taking over, he has made it a priority to rectify the injustices of a department with a long history of racial dis- crimination. After publicly apologizing to Sherrod, Vilsack met with Con- gressional Black Caucus mem- bers on Capitol Hill on Wednes- day afternoon. According to a spokeswoman, he was there to apologize and to listen. tumultyk@washpost.com


ed.okeefe@washingtonpost.com


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