Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  The political temperature climbed faster than the mercury in Phoenix as we moved into April. The bill was continuing to move through the legislature, and it seemed as though everyone wanted to know what I was going to do. Phones were ringing and people were screaming. Even former Arizona attorney general Grant Woods, a longtime friend and my campaign co-chairman, was urging me to veto the bill. At our weekly campaign strategy meetings, Grant would lay out his arguments. I always listened respectfully. I wanted to understand people’s concerns and fears. Grant didn’t change my mind, but he remained co-chairman of my campaign.

  As the bill came closer to my desk for signing, more critics came out of the woodwork. Some of the Arizona business community, which had been silent up to that point, suddenly lit up the phones with calls for me to reject the bill. Their talking points sounded like something borrowed from the liberal activist groups. All SB 1070 did was enforce the federal law. What could be their objection to that? Besides, they were coming late to the game. “Where were you during the legislative process?” I asked. They had no answer—no one had shown up. But now that it was time to make a decision, they wanted me to take the heat.

  On April 13, the House passed the bill, and the pressure only increased. I still hadn’t said publicly whether I would sign it or not, and for a very specific reason. I honestly wanted to listen to people and hear what they had to say. I knew that there are people in Arizona and in the rest of America who don’t really believe there should be a border between the United States and Mexico. They don’t want the law enforced because they have political, cultural, or commercial reasons to want to ignore it. Some Arizonans, like so many Americans, rely on illegal aliens for cheap lawn care and child care, among other things. Some believed that enforcing the border was enforcing a kind of white privilege—that wanting to control who comes to America was asserting an exceptionalism they do not believe America has. Others, like the labor unions and some in the Democratic Party, see illegal aliens as sources of future votes. As we will see, they believe in open borders as an electoral strategy, plain and simple.

  But I knew in my gut that most Arizonans felt differently. And they wanted the law enforced. A Rasmussen poll after I signed SB 1070 showed that 70 percent of Arizona voters favored the bill. I knew the dramatic effect that signing the bill would have, but I also believed it was the right thing to do. There were fifty-, sixty-, seventy-year-old men and women who had lived in southern Arizona their whole lives, and they were living in fear, sleeping with their guns on their nightstands, frightened to go out and walk their dogs or let their kids or grandkids walk to the bus stop alone. This state of fear had to come to an end.

  But before I announced my decision, I wanted to hear from as many Arizonans as possible. As luck would have it, the social event of the year for Arizona Hispanics, a fund-raiser for the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce dubbed the Black & White Ball, was scheduled for April 17, just days after SB 1070 passed the House. It had been on my calendar for a long time. But some of my staff and security detail argued that I should cancel. Tensions were high, and they were increasingly aimed directly at me. My office was being inundated with hate mail, including threats to harm me physically.

  I wasn’t as worried about my physical safety, but I knew that going to the dinner was a political risk. It could either help my cause or greatly inflame the situation. But I felt the risk was worth it. I wasn’t going to hide, and I wasn’t going to back down. I owed it to Arizona’s Hispanic business leaders. I thought that if I could just explain to them—earnestly and sincerely—that this was a reasonable piece of legislation, maybe I could convince them that we didn’t need to have all this tension and protest.

  So I went. The media called it my foray “into the lion’s den.” As we drove up to the hotel, there were protestors outside holding up signs with pictures of Arizona, saying, THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH. Tuxedoed attendees had to walk a gantlet of chanting and banging drums. “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” My security detail decided to bring me in the back way. As I walked through the door, I could hear whispers and murmurs from the crowd. I thought incredulously, Some of these people I’ve known forever. Some for forty years! These are my friends. They’re part of our community. I tried to shake it off and made my way to my table.

  The ballroom of the Sheraton hotel in downtown Phoenix was packed with Arizona’s Latino power brokers. As I sat in the audience, Chamber president Armando Contreras didn’t waste time getting to the point. “It is with great respect for you, Governor Brewer, and the office you were sworn to uphold, that I ask that you veto Senate Bill 1070,” he said. The crowd responded as if goosed: “Veto! Veto!” Contreras said Latino immigrants were now in danger from a “hostile contingent in our legislature” that made the entire state look “backward and uncaring.”

  When it was my turn to speak, I got up and addressed the screaming crowd. “In regards to Senate Bill 1070,” I said, “I will tell you that I never make comment, like most governors throughout our country, before a bill reaches my desk. But I hear you, and I will assure you that I will do what I believe is the right thing so that everyone is treated fairly.” Sensing the opportunity for a cheap shot, Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix tried to force my hand: “I think what I just heard was a commitment to veto that bill, whaddya think?” he asked the riled-up crowd. The mayor’s goading had its intended effect. More jeers and shouts of “Veto! Veto!” Gordon went on to urge Arizonans to speak out against those who, he said, “would return [Arizona] to the 1950s,” when haters hid behind “white sheets.”

  I walked out proud that I had gone into the lion’s den but uncertain as to what I had accomplished. I was listening to my critics. Were they listening to me?

  From that point on, the calls rolled in at an unprecedented level, burning up the lines. Phones rang off the hook. During the four-day period from Thursday, April 15, to Monday, April 19, we received more than 13,000 contacts. Just 10 percent of them were in favor of SB 1070.

  A few days later, events quickened even further. On Monday, April 19, the State Senate had its final vote on SB 1070, approved it, and transmitted it to me. That started the clock. I had five days to sign or veto the bill, or it would become law without any signature.

  Looking back, those five days are a blur of meetings, protests, intensive review of the bill, and profound private reflection. The Arizona Capitol was literally under siege. Protesters had been in the square in front of our copper-domed Capitol for weeks. And from the beginning, it was clear that the protests weren’t grassroots—they were Astroturf. The purple T-shirts of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) were everywhere, as were their professionally printed purple signs that said “SB 1070” with a Ghostbusters-style yellow slash through it and the words IT STOPS IN ARIZONA.

  That Monday, busloads of chanting, seemingly outraged people began to arrive. The media reported that the unions had brought them in from California, Texas, Colorado, and all over the Southwest. What’s more, pickup trucks full of high school kids from Arizona schools began pulling up. Other students walked right out of classrooms and marched over to the Capitol. I guess it was the unions’ version of Senior Skip Day. They were chanting, screaming, yelling. They surrounded the Capitol building. At one point, nine students chained themselves to the building, yelling, “Today we are chained to the Capitol, just like our community is chained by this legislation.” How exactly their community was being “chained” was left unsaid. Capitol police were forced to cut through the chains and forcibly remove the screaming kids.

  Throughout the period before I signed the bill and for months after, the involvement of the unions, particularly the SEIU, in orchestrating protests against the bill was clear. They organized a camera-ready march and rally on May 29 that brought in SEIU executive vice president Eliseo Medina as well as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and the co-founder of the United Farm Workers, Dolores Huerta. They descended on Do
dger Stadium for the opening game of a three-game series between the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks to protest the bill. Their members filled the stadium to boo Arizona and turn their backs on the Diamondbacks’ first pitch. They also demonstrated to put pressure on the Dodgers to stop using their Arizona-based spring training facilities.

  As the protests grew, so did the media contingent at the Capitol. The national media descended en masse. Our local stations were joined by ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. What had been an Arizona story—the story of a state fighting back against federal indifference—had become a divisive national issue. All I was trying to do was the right thing for the people of Arizona. But our opponents, particularly the labor unions, seemed to think that the right thing for us was the wrong thing for them. They were determined to rally their base—and inflame the passions of Hispanics all over the country—by twisting and distorting what was happening. They issued calls for a massive campaign of nonviolent “civil disobedience all over Arizona and all over the United States of America.” And sure enough, protests against SB 1070—a bill with the force of law only in Arizona—broke out in cities from Los Angeles to New York. What exactly were they afraid of? We weren’t sure. All we knew was that they were virtually inciting riots, and the national media couldn’t get enough of it. As I sat in my office on the ninth floor, I could see helicopters hovering overhead like giant dragonflies. My security detail became so concerned for the safety of state employees that SWAT teams took up positions on the roofs of the Capitol and executive buildings.

  Even before the bill had been signed, liberal activists, abetted by the national mainstream media, were moving into boycott mode. The New York Times said we’d gone “off the deep end,” and the Los Angeles Times suggested that our state was “hostile.” They had said none of this when Janet Napolitano signed measures designed to curb illegal immigration, and had seemed totally unconcerned about the rising levels of violence on the border. But their campaign of distortions and lies was already having an effect. “I am notifying you that I will never be able to visit Arizona again,” one misinformed citizen wrote. “[SB 1070] reminds me so much of Germany in the 1930s and also Communist Russia. . . . There is a real sense of hatred in your state now.” We received scores of notes like these. I wish I had had time to write back to these folks and let them know they’d been lied to. In the end, very few people made good on these threats, but at the time it was unbelievably frustrating.

  While the pandemonium grew outside the Capitol, my staff and I pored over the bill. We had already spent a lot of time working to shape the law, but I wanted—I needed—to make sure that every i was dotted and every t was crossed. I got our policy wonks together for hours on end, with me grilling them and ensuring that I understood every provision down to the marrow. I went through it as carefully as humanly possible to make sure it was exactly what we wanted it to be. I was still worried, however. “We have this nice thing on paper here,” I said. “But we all know that too often things written on paper don’t translate into real life.”

  The clock was ticking on the five days I had to make my decision, but I asked my staff to go back to the drawing board. I was still deeply concerned about perceptions that the bill was racist, even though I knew it wasn’t. We know there are racists out there, but we also know that our police officers are the finest men and women our state has to offer. They’re professionals. So we began crafting a solution: an executive order mandating training of the police on how to implement SB 1070 in a nondiscriminatory manner. Later, I would use the same pen I used to sign SB 1070 to sign an executive order requiring that every peace officer in the state be trained in the provisions of the law and specifically forbidding racial profiling.

  I also wanted to highlight our belief that, while SB 1070 was an important tool in discouraging illegal immigration, it wasn’t the solution to our problems. So I had my staff put together a detailed plan of action for securing the border. My plan asked for more covert National Guard reconnaissance, aerial patrolling, military exercises along the border, more support for local law enforcement, and improved county and federal interaction with regard to border security. I announced the plan on Thursday morning, April 22, the day before the law had to be signed. The media largely ignored it. It was, after all, a realistic, detailed plan to solve the problem. Where was the story in that?

  Throughout those five days, the pressure mounted. I was taking fire from the unions, some Hispanic groups, liberal special interests—even some of my supposed allies on the right. The United Farm Workers sent me a note that utterly misread the bill and insisted that racial profiling would be the inevitable side effect. “Will an undocumented immigrant from Ireland be a suspect?” they asked. “Probably not. Will Latino dads bringing their sons to spring training baseball camp be suspects? Perhaps. Will the thousands of farm workers who harvest our food be automatic suspects? Certainly.” This was a gross and purposeful misreading of the law. The law did not require police officers to interrogate Latino visitors—in fact, it banned them from doing so on the basis of race.

  The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce followed suit. Apparently, walking into the lion’s den at the Black & White Ball hadn’t won me any points. The chamber declared that the bill would “jeopardize the safety of Arizona communities and result in the racial profiling of Latinos.” Even more hurtful was chamber president Javier Palomarez’s suggestion that by signing the bill I would be “attacking the entire Hispanic community in the zeal for enforcing civil immigration laws.”

  I had been working on amendments to the bill since March, including a trailer bill that would make improvements to SB 1070. Even as I worked to get the bill in shape, I began receiving flak from conservatives asking why it was taking me so long. Some people claimed that I was waiting for a poll to come out before making up my mind. One of my opponents in the Republican primary claimed that he would have signed the bill on the first day. The fact that I was receiving criticism from both sides actually made me feel better about taking the extra time.

  But any feeling of reassurance that week was short-lived. The waterboarding continued. The evening before I had to make the call, I was slated to appear at a dinner for Chicanos por la Causa, a group formed in 1967 to advocate for Arizona’s Mexican American population. It promised to be another one of my “into the lion’s den” moments. Earlier in the week, Chicanos por la Causa had sent me a letter stating that SB 1070 would “force entire communities to live in perpetual fear of harassment.” This was intemperate, to say the least, and highly uninformed. It certainly didn’t promise a smooth reception that night. Once again, some of my staff suggested that I cancel. But I insisted on attending. I wasn’t ashamed of what I was going to do. But I knew that if I didn’t show up, they’d think I was, or that I didn’t have the courage of my convictions. I wasn’t going to run and hide.

  On the way to the downtown Sheraton that night, I could feel the tension in the air. There were the by-now-familiar mobs with their by-now-familiar signs. I found out later that the group protesting was something called the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles—they had bused the protesters in from California! Once inside, though, things were quieter. I could see that there were Arizonans there who didn’t agree with me but wanted to be respectful and hear me out.

  And then there were those who didn’t. Erica Gonzalez-Melendez, the chairwoman of the board for Chicanos por la Causa, rose with the supposed purpose of introducing me. But after a perfunctory reading of my résumé, she launched into a diatribe. She gave up any pretense of addressing the crowd and spoke to me directly. “The eyes of our state and the eyes of the nation are upon you. What sits before you on your desk is the most painful piece of legislation directed at Latinos in the recent history of our state,” she publicly lectured me. There were raucous shouts and applause. “We are the people whose sons and daughters have fought greatly for this nation. People who’ve buried their sons, their heroes
, in this soil. Now, as you consider signing a bill that makes those same people second-class citizens,” she continued, “Governor, we want to remind you that we vote too. Governor, we ask—actually, we respectfully demand—that you veto Senate Bill 1070.” There were screams of applause. There was a standing ovation.

  “Embarrassing” doesn’t do it justice. Every word of this speech was insulting, even slanderous. The law I was about to sign didn’t turn anyone into a second-class citizen. It didn’t target vulnerable communities or give racist police a license to harass innocent workers and defenseless kids. It was an act of deep respect for the people of Arizona—people of all races—who’d fought and died to defend our freedoms and our rights.

  This isn’t an attempt to have an adult conversation, I thought. It was just nasty.

  When I finally took the microphone, I talked, as I had many times in the past, about my mother and how she taught me that a person is measured by how she meets challenges. Since the moment I became governor, I said, I had been confronted with the challenge of how to keep Arizonans safe and prosperous. I told the crowd that I had thought about this challenge and prayed about this challenge. “I am my mother’s daughter,” I said. “I am up to the challenge.” I wasn’t yet ready to announce whether I would sign SB 1070, but I wanted them to know that I would do what was right for Arizona, regardless of whether or not it was popular.

  Then I thought—being Pollyanna again—that I would try to address their concerns. They were yelling questions: “Are you going to veto it? What are you going to do?” So I said I’d take a couple of questions. I got into a dialogue, trying to calm the place down a little bit, to let them know I wasn’t their enemy. Even as I spoke, I could hear the catcalls. As I left the stage, the crowd chanted, “Veto! Veto! Veto the bill! Veto the bill!”