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  It was late at night—past 11:00 P.M.—when Agent Brian Terry and his elite unit of the U.S. Border Patrol came upon a pack of heavily armed men last December. They were in Peck Canyon, about ten miles north of Nogales and the border. Terry and his unit were on the hunt for “rip crews”—gangs of criminals, often illegal aliens, who prey on the drug and human smugglers who inhabit the canyons of the desert Southwest. It was dark. A gun battle erupted. When the shooting stopped, Agent Terry was dead, shot in the back by a semiautomatic rifle.

  For Arizonans, Agent Terry’s death was one more tragic reminder of the reality we deal with every day. It came at the end of a year spent battling the federal government to do something about the violence on the border. Long used to negligence from Washington when it came to securing the border, we were now encountering resistance to our efforts to do something about it. Agent Terry’s death, we thought, was the tragic outcome.

  So imagine our shock and horror when we learned, seven months later, that not just federal negligence had contributed to Agent Terry’s death, but, it seemed, federal complicity as well. It was revealed that weapons found at the scene of Agent Terry’s killing had come from a program begun in November 2009 by the Obama Justice Department. Operation Fast and Furious was an operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to track weapons trafficking into Mexico. The ATF, with the backing of U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, allowed more than 2,000 firearms to be purchased at Phoenix-area stores. The idea was for the ATF to track the weapons to the Mexican drug cartels, but they quickly lost track of the guns. Of the 2,020 firearms put into circulation during the operation, more than 1,400 remain on the street, in either Mexico or the United States. Two were found at the scene of the Peck Canyon shoot-out. The FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that one of these guns was used to kill Agent Terry.

  The news that the federal government may have, through its incompetence, been complicit in the killing of a Border Patrol agent was almost more than I could bear. I had had an exhausting year. The Obama administration had resisted my attempts to protect the people of my state with everything they had. We had been told that our efforts were racist. What’s more, they said, our law would impede rather than assist law enforcement. But what was the federal government’s idea of effective law enforcement? Allowing more than 2,000 weapons to “walk” across the border to criminals in Mexico. The unbridled arrogance of it was astonishing to me. The feds had told us that they knew best, and their “best” had helped get Agent Brian Terry killed. This is what it has come to, I thought. This is what Arizonans can expect from their federal government.

  Six weeks earlier, I had been elected to a second term as Arizona’s governor. It had been an eventful race, to say the least. I had been handed the reins of government in the midst of the worst financial crisis in Arizona’s history. I had signed the most controversial law in anyone’s memory. The Arizona attorney general, who was supposed to defend that law in court, had decided to run against me—all the while insisting that he could continue to defend it.

  In the end, I was blessed to receive a wonderful mandate from the people of Arizona. But I knew it wasn’t just my victory. Something bigger—much bigger—was happening. Standing on the podium on election night before a crowd of boisterous supporters, I knew this wasn’t about me. It was about America. At first I decided to have a little fun with it.

  “Tonight we foreclosed on a house—the one that used to be run by Nancy Pelosi!”

  The crowd erupted in cheers.

  Then I got serious.

  “Here in Arizona, we have not forgotten what our state and our nation are made of,” I said, my voice almost breaking with the emotion that I felt.

  “We know what we are and we know what we are not. We are a free and striving people who trust and care for each other. We are not the subjects of an arrogant and overbearing government.”

  A free and striving people. That’s who we are. And that’s who I am fighting to let us remain.

  Chapter One

  Crisis

  When the sheriff’s deputies finally found Rob Krentz, his dog, Blue, was still clinging to life. Even after fourteen hours lying, wounded, in the back of Rob’s four-wheeler, Blue still fought to defend his master. But Blue’s loyalty was for nothing. Rob was dead. They found him lying beside his still-idling vehicle, with a gunshot wound in his left side. The sheriff’s office later said it had killed him within minutes.

  As investigators pieced together the events that led up to Rob’s death, we learned that the day Rob died, March 27, 2010, had been a pretty typical one. It began with him out on his four-wheeler, Blue by his side, working his sprawling 35,000-acre ranch in Cochise County, about twelve miles from the Mexican border. Rob was the third generation of the Krentz family to run the ranch, and it was more than a job. The land was both his livelihood and his life. And life in the desert Southwest is water. So Rob was out that morning checking the lines that delivered water to his 1,000 head of cattle.

  If the day was a typical one, the last words Rob spoke to his brother Phil were also pretty unremarkable. At about 10:00 A.M., Rob radioed to say that he had found an illegal alien on his property. He was going to help him, Rob said, and Phil should contact the Border Patrol.

  Like all the ranchers along the border, Rob regularly encountered exhausted, lost, and dehydrated illegal aliens on this land. He was well known for helping these desperate souls with some water, some food, and a kind word or two in Spanish. He helped them despite the trash and the fires they left on his property, the cut fences and broken water lines, and the frightened, unsettled cattle. Rob once estimated that over a five-year period, illegal immigration through his ranch had cost him a whopping $8 million. The damage he suffered because of the unsecured border to his south was real. But Rob never lost his humanity. He was that kind of guy.

  The Krentz family is an Arizona ranching institution. They have been ranching along the border since 1907. Rob worked the land along with Phil, Phil’s son Ben, Rob’s wife, Sue, and their son Frank, one of three children they had raised on the ranch. Rob had been outspoken about the threat illegal immigration posed to him and his neighbors. Their house had been broken into, they’d been physically threatened, and one of their calves had been butchered. But his was always the voice of reason, not hatred and resentment. He and Sue had repeatedly called on the federal government to do its job. That’s all: just do its job and keep them safe.

  As Phil Krentz hung up the radio that day, a seed of worry began to grow in his mind. The day before, Phil had spotted marijuana smugglers on the ranch and called the Border Patrol. Border agents responded and seized more than 200 pounds of marijuana and arrested eight illegal aliens. Phil knew that the Mexican drug cartels viciously guarded their smuggling routes. Was a member of the smuggling ring planning to take revenge on the Krentz family? Was Rob just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had he seen too much?

  Rob and Phil were supposed to meet up that day at noon. When Rob didn’t show and didn’t respond to Phil’s radio calls, the Krentz family and friends took off on their ATVs to search the ranch. When they hadn’t found Rob by six o’clock that evening, they made two calls: One was to Rob’s wife, Sue, who was in Phoenix visiting family. Come home, they said. We can’t find Rob. The second was to Cochise County sheriff Larry Dever. Sheriff Dever immediately contacted his search-and-rescue squad, and the Border Patrol responded as well. But it was after dark when the Arizona Department of Public Safety helicopter finally spotted Rob by the lights of his still-running ATV.

  I was at home when I got the call. It was late at night. A highly regarded rancher had been killed in the south of the state, I was told. Rob Krentz had been killed. That’s all they knew. I hung up the phone. And as I waited for my staff to get back to me with more information, I grieved, I worried, and I wondered. Everyone in Arizona, it seemed, either knew Rob or knew of him. I had met him
at a couple of meetings with the ranchers. Had he been a victim of the escalating violence on the border? As I waited, I couldn’t help but fear the worst. Oh my God, what has happened? We have to get a handle on this.

  I was determined to find out exactly what had happened. I called Sheriff Dever. My staff kept me updated with any news. Soon we learned that the officers who responded to the scene had found some important clues. Whoever shot Rob had done so without warning: Rob’s rifle and a pistol were found secured in his ATV. Still, Rob had managed to drive about 300 yards after he had been shot. By following the tracks of his four-wheeler, law enforcement found three spent bullet shells, and something else: the dusty footprints of one person. Trackers followed the footprints south for about twenty miles, all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. Then they lost them. And that’s where the trail went cold.

  To this day, Rob Krentz’s killer has never been found. Still, it’s difficult to overstate the impact his death had on Arizona, and on America. After Rob was murdered, politicians from Representative Gabrielle Giffords to Senator John McCain joined me in calling for President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to deploy the National Guard to the border. Former congressman J. D. Hayworth, who was challenging Senator John McCain in the GOP primary at the time, called Rob a “martyr” for the cause of border security. Rob’s funeral mass in Douglas attracted more than 1,000 people.

  Many liberal critics in the mainstream media have attributed the passage of SB 1070 to the “hysterical” reaction to Rob’s death. The fact is, the legislation had been working its way through the legislature for months before he was killed. But Rob’s death gave the bill momentum. It’s not as if people didn’t see the killing coming. And it’s not as if government was powerless to prevent it. After Rob was murdered, the idea of doing nothing while Washington ignored the crisis was no longer acceptable. Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sheriff Dever summed up the mood of Arizonans well: “We cannot sit by while our citizens are terrorized, robbed, and murdered by ruthless and desperate people who enter our country illegally.”

  The Arizona ranchers—the cattlemen, as they are known—are the salt of the earth. They’re the men and women who built Arizona and the American West. They’re the rugged, independent-minded Americans Teddy Roosevelt looked to when he created his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. These are some of the toughest people you will ever know, and they had been living in fear. When I was secretary of state, I attended many meetings with the ranchers on the border. Illegal immigration was the number-one topic. Families told me that they were under siege. People were afraid to let their kids play outside. They were walking around their homes armed with guns.

  They can be outspoken, but Arizona ranchers like Rob Krentz aren’t complainers. They’re not takers. All they want is for the border to be secured and for their families, their neighbors, and their land to be protected. That’s all they ever asked for. That’s all they continue to ask for today. And although there are few in southern Arizona who doubt that Rob was a victim of the drug violence coming across the border from Mexico, justice has still not been done. But what’s most amazing is that these remarkable people don’t blame the ordinary Mexicans and Mexican Americans they know. They blame the leaders whose job it was to protect Rob Krentz in the first place. Rob’s family, with their usual class and humanity, said it best in a statement issued after his death:

  We hold no malice toward the Mexican people for this senseless act but do hold the political forces in this country and Mexico accountable for what has happened. Their disregard of our repeated pleas and warnings of impending violence towards our community fell on deaf ears shrouded in political correctness. As a result, we have paid the ultimate price for their negligence in credibly securing our border.

  We all knew what “political forces” the Krentz family was pointing to. For years, real immigration reform in Washington had been held up by demands for the euphemistically named “comprehensive reform.” But we also knew what that meant. That meant a repeat of the 1986 immigration amnesty, signed by my hero Ronald Reagan. Back then, border security and tough reforms were supposed to accompany the amnesty of millions of illegal aliens that was granted in the law. But security and reform never came, and the amnesty encouraged millions more illegal aliens to come to America, secure in the belief that amnesty for them was just around the corner. I couldn’t do anything about that in 1986, but in 2009, as governor of Arizona, I could choose not to be one of the “political forces” that endangered the lives of people like Rob Krentz. I was more determined than ever, after I saw the courage and dignity his family showed following his death, to finally do something. It was too late for Rob, and I was sick about that. But no more Arizona families would suffer like his, not if I could help it.

  I got a firsthand glimpse of the “political correctness” the Krentz family referred to about ten days later. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson expressed an interest in touring the border after Rob died, so I took him on a tour of the area. As we flew across the beautiful but ravaged landscape, Governor Richardson seemed to join in my sorrow and indignation. All I could think was that these people—my fellow Arizonans—didn’t have to live like this. Rob Krentz did not have to die. When we finished the tour, speaking to the large media gaggle that met us on the landing field in Douglas, I echoed one more time the call that the Arizona ranchers and lawmakers from both parties had made so many times before. We needed help. “It’s incumbent upon the federal government to respond,” I said. “We cannot do it alone.”

  While the cameras were on, Governor Richardson joined me in my call for help. I remember being grateful for his public words of support but wishing his actions as governor tracked more with the tough talk he was serving up. Under Governor Richardson, New Mexico in 2003 began a policy of not requiring proof of residency to get a New Mexico driver’s license. New Mexico has issued an estimated 80,000 licenses to foreign nationals under Richardson’s policy, but they have no way of knowing whether these licenses have gone to illegal aliens, because they don’t ask applicants about their immigration status.

  I’ve always believed that this is an incredibly dangerous, wrongheaded policy. New Mexico had no idea to whom it was giving its driver’s licenses—and, with them, the ability to board planes or buy chemicals and fertilizer and any number of things that are useful to a terrorist. In Arizona, Richardson’s policy was making it more difficult for us to enforce our laws against illegal immigration, to ensure the integrity of our elections, and to put the rights and needs of legal, law-abiding residents above those of lawbreakers. I was, frankly, unconvinced to hear Governor Richardson talk about getting on the border-security bandwagon following Rob’s death since his policies had encouraged illegal immigration for years.

  This is what the Krentz family meant by “deaf ears shrouded in political correctness”—politicians like Bill Richardson talking out of both sides of their mouth, pretending to protect their citizens while they actively encouraged illegal immigration through their policies. These so-called leaders don’t hear the calls from the people for border security because they don’t want to hear them. If they hear them, they will be expected to do something about them, and that’s the last thing they want to do.

  In June, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by an illegal alien named Jose Antonio Vargas. It recounted his life coming to the United States from the Philippines under a fake passport when he was twelve, being supplied a fake green card, and growing up to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Vargas described being undocumented in the United States as “going about my day in fear.” I always found it interesting that the Times never gave such prominent treatment to Rob Krentz. He, too, lived in fear, but of a different kind. His fear wasn’t that his green card would be discovered as fake. His fear was for his family and his neighbors. His fear was of the violence and lawlessness that eventually took his life.
/>   The mainstream media were interested in Rob’s story for a while, but mainly as an example of how the right-wingers out in Arizona exploited the issue to pass their right-wing laws. They never covered the story in any depth—they never put the same human face on Rob Krentz that they did for Jose Antonio Vargas, because to do so would have exposed not only the violence on the border created by thuggish illegal aliens but also the humanity and tolerance of people like the Krentzes who believe the border should be secured. In the liberal media’s view of the world, violent illegal aliens and tolerant supporters of the rule of law run counter to the story they want to tell, so they pretend they don’t exist.

  Instead, immigration is often portrayed as a tale of good versus evil, a political and cultural battle that pits two different visions of America against each other. One is the vision of America in which it’s our moral obligation to absorb virtually unlimited numbers of poor, uneducated immigrants. Those who hold this view are the good guys—the ones who cherish and defend America’s welcoming and generous spirit. The other vision, in the media’s black-and-white interpretation, is the restrictionist view. In this vision, consciously or unconsciously racist Americans (there can be no other motive) seek an airtight border in order to preserve their western, white privilege. These, needless to say, are the bad guys. There’s no middle ground in this popular media narrative; there are no “good guys” who believe we still need to control our border, and no “bad guys” who aren’t racists and nativists.

  Needless to say, this is a cartoon version of the problem we face on our border. It’s also just one reason why so many Americans view the press as at best unreliable and at worst nakedly partisan. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to do the right thing, both for our country and for law-abiding newcomers. That means, for most of us, securing our border first and then—and only then—figuring out how to fix our broken immigration system. As I like to say, you don’t call the architect when your house catches fire. You call the fire department. Later, you can get to the job of rebuilding.