by Jan Brewer
The low point came on April 26, our first day back at work after the signing. Statehouse employees coming in early that morning found refried beans smeared on the doors of the legislative buildings in the shape of swastikas. The gourmet vandal had written on the sidewalk, AZ=NAZI. It was the first case of hate-crime vandalism—and it had taken only forty-eight hours.
It got so bad that even the Anti-Defamation League, whose Arizona regional board chair had accused the law of “engendering fear, encouraging discrimination and fanning the flames of hatred,” came out and publicly condemned the Hitler comparisons. “No matter how odious, bigoted, biased and unconstitutional Arizona’s new law may be,” said the ADL’s national director, Abe Foxman—leaving no doubt as to his own position on the bill—“let’s be clear that there is no comparison between the situation facing immigrants, legal or illegal, in Arizona and what happened in the Holocaust.”
My biggest mistake was reading the blogs. I knew I shouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t help myself. I had a Google alert on my name, so every time “Jan Brewer” showed up on a blog or in a news story, I would get an e-mail. There were the usual comparisons of me with Hitler and the Nazi references. (I was beginning to notice that there wasn’t a lot of original thinking among my critics.) I was called a “brainless blond bimbo.” My family was mocked. My education was mocked. Even my church was mocked! One particularly articulate writer wrote, “F—YOU JAN BREWER YOU F—ING RACIST BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!! F—YOU AND THE NAZI FACISTS WHO SUPPORT YOU YOU OLD F—ING HAG!”
It was tough, but toughest to take were the comments aimed at Arizona. I read how the state I love was being called “Nazizona.” People inside and outside the state were wishing the worst things on my state, starting with boycotts and ending with acts of violence.
Reading comments like these tore me apart and confused my heart and my brain. How could people say such things? How could they even think them? Was there really so much hatred out there in the country at large? Is this to be the reward for any public servant who tries to do the right thing, even—especially—when it’s the hard thing? When you spend midnight to five o’clock in the morning reading nasty things about yourself, your husband, your children, and your friends, you begin to question your judgment. I couldn’t help wondering whether I had done the right thing after all.
My staff yelled at me to stop. “Don’t go near it!” Chuck Coughlin, my political campaign consultant, told me. “You know who these people are? They’re losers. They don’t have a life! They’re sitting there with no shoes on, bare-chested, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. They hate the world!”
What saved me were the supporters I heard from: ordinary men and women, not bosses of any union or shills for any liberal interest group—just everyday Americans who shared my commitment to civil discourse and the rule of law. On Facebook, I quickly developed thousands of friends who did not hesitate to take on the haters. One person would post something ugly and there would be a dozen people ready to respond. When I first set up my Facebook page (Facebook.com/GovJanBrewer), it took us six months to get to 2,000 friends, and when we did, we were excited. By the Monday after signing SB 1070, it had jumped to 10,000. From there it grew exponentially. As I write, I have almost 500,000 friends on Facebook, and every day I take time to read the comments people leave on my wall.
Support also came in through other channels. As soon as I signed the bill, I started receiving letters from people around the country saying thank you. Newell Orr, vice president of the Sun Lakes Republican Club, wrote an encouraging note: “Thank you for sticking to your guns and keeping your word. . . . We appreciate you even though the ‘Messiah’ attacked you today. A lot of people out here back you 100%.” Another supporter wrote me a moving note: “For the sake of our country, someone has shown the courage to confront the issue. This will spark progress on a national level.” Letters like that were the wind beneath my wings. I thought, Okay, the people get it. The people understand.
A couple of days after I signed the law, my chief of staff, Eileen Klein, and my deputy chief of staff for policy, Richard Bark, saw a couple get on the elevator in the Capitol. The couple didn’t look as if they worked in the building. They were carrying this beautiful platform with a meticulously hand-carved, painted gourd on it. It depicted a majestic eagle carrying the U.S. and Arizona flags along with the words Freedom to Choose. They had made the whole thing by hand. They lived in California but had driven to Phoenix to personally deliver it to my office.
A few days later, a blanket arrived at the office, crocheted by hand. It was accompanied by a card. The handwriting was shaky—it was pretty clear that it had been written by an older person. The note explained that she couldn’t afford to send the blanket but that she had wanted to give me some comfort, so her neighbors had agreed to pay for the shipping.
In another gratifying moment, I was campaigning in Bullhead City when I was approached by a man I found out later was a Vietnam veteran. He was a big guy, a rough-looking character. To look at him, you wouldn’t think he was necessarily all that concerned with politics, so I wasn’t sure why he wanted to speak to me. Did I mention that it’s hot—very hot—in Bullhead City? My makeup was melting, and he wasn’t exactly cool as a cucumber, either. He walked right up to me, put his arms around me, and gave me a big, sweaty hug. “I am so thankful to you and proud of you for what you’ve done,” he said. “I fought for our country, and now you’re fighting for our country. We believe in you. Don’t let us down.” Tears were streaming down his face. What do you say when someone says that to you? I was so humbled. I was almost—almost!—left speechless by his support.
It was those kinds of things that got me through the days—things like that hug from a veteran in Bullhead City whose name I never knew. They helped to renew my conviction that I was doing what was right for Arizona. In contrast to the noisy, hate-filled rhetoric and orchestrated protests from the left, I’m still amazed at the quiet gestures of support I received from private citizens all over the country: the letters, the flowers, the gift baskets, the artwork, the cards, the flags, the woodworking, the hundreds of personalized T-shirts, handmade pens, books, carvings, angels, and scripture. I received so many flowers from across the country that my office looked like the neighborhood florist shop. I love flowers, so I thought it was wonderful!
I was more gratified by these gestures of support than I can say. But still, I was worried. The media and special interest reaction to the bill had been at once intensely negative and outrageously misinformed. Could the people see that what I was doing was the right thing? The answer came the Tuesday after I signed the bill, when a Rasmussen Poll showed that an amazing 70 percent of Arizonans supported SB 1070, while an astounding 60 percent of all Americans said they would support a similar law. Despite the constant and deliberate campaign of distortion, it was a tremendous relief to know that a clear majority of Americans was on our side.
One of the most entertaining expressions of this support came a few weeks later when an artist in Iowa, Linda Eddy, created a poster of me as Rosie the Riveter, the iconic image of the women who worked on the home front during World War II. The cartoon image showed me in a blue work shirt with my sleeves rolled up and a red polka-dot bandanna on my head. I’m flexing my muscles next to the words ARIZONA: DOING THE JOB THE FEDS WON’T DO! As soon as Linda released it on her Web site, LindaEddy.com, the cartoon went viral on the Internet. (Yes, the Internet can also be a force for good!) It was even made into T-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs, and bumper stickers. I was so flattered. It was a perfect expression of the strength of our state and the optimism we felt about its future. Most important, it reflected the message we had tried so hard to get across: We were doing the job that the feds wouldn’t do. It was wonderful to know that so many Americans got it.
Just as state employees in Phoenix were arriving to swastikas painted in refried beans on the Capitol doors, in Washington the Obama ad
ministration was getting to work as well—seeking to undermine the law and thwart the political will of Arizonans.
On Good Morning America that Monday morning, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano sounded off about SB 1070. The law, she pronounced, was “misguided.” Viewing the issue through the peculiarly distorting lens of a federal bureaucrat, she complained that because we wanted to enforce federal law, we were going to inspire other states to imitate us, creating a “patchwork” of laws and throwing the country into chaos. Good heavens, we can’t have too much of that messy local democracy, with people in different states just doing what they want. Of course, this is precisely what she herself had done only a couple of years earlier. It was further proof of the adage “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
But give Janet credit for toeing the party line—she knew what her boss wanted to hear. And the very next day, President Obama reinserted himself into the debate over our state law. At a fund-raiser in Ottumwa, Iowa, he reached new heights of distortion in describing the adverse impact of the law. “Now suddenly if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed—that’s something that could potentially happen,” he said. This was a ridiculous and totally irresponsible assertion. In fact, it was a total inversion of the law. For a police officer to ask a law-abiding family on an innocuous errand like buying ice cream about their immigration status would be a violation of SB 1070, not a consequence of it. I watched the coverage of the president’s remarks in my office in the Capitol and fumed. There was no way this kind of misinformation could be anything but a deliberate attempt to inflame people’s passions and stir up opposition to the bill—a textbook case of demagoguery.
The leader of the free world wasn’t the only head of state who was cynically twisting the argument. Immediately after the law was passed, the Mexican Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a travel advisory to Mexicans traveling in Arizona. This was apparently their response to the U.S. State Department’s repeated advisories to Americans traveling in Mexico because of the hideous drug cartels and violence in that country. I guess they thought it was tit for tat. Only we hadn’t kidnapped or beheaded anybody; we had just passed a law.
A few weeks later, Mexican president Felipe Calderón came to Washington for a state visit. Standing next to President Obama on the south lawn of the White House, the Mexican president took aim at SB 1070, and both leaders showed their clear disdain for the law.
President Obama: In the United States of America, no law-abiding person—be they an American citizen, illegal immigrant, or a visitor or tourist from Mexico—should ever be subject to suspicion simply because of what they look like. [Emphasis mine.]
President Calderón: We will retain our firm rejection to criminalized migration so that people that work and provide things to this nation would be treated as criminals. [Emphasis mine.]
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Put aside the misrepresentations of the law in both of these statements; both leaders were simply rejecting the idea that there was anything wrong with crossing the border illegally. They were openly disregarding the law and rejecting the very existence of the border. And they were standing there, in the safety of the White House compound, calling those who wanted to enforce the law not just wrong or misguided. They were calling us racist.
It got worse the next day when President Calderón addressed a joint session of Congress. There, he proceeded to lecture Americans about SB 1070. “I strongly disagree with your recently adopted law in Arizona. That’s why I agree with the president that the law carries a great amount of risk to the values we both care about,” Calderón announced as Democrats in Congress rose and cheered. “It is a law that not only ignores a reality that cannot be erased by decree but also introduces a terrible idea using racial—racial profiling as the basis for law enforcement.”
I was apoplectic. Racial profiling? Calderón clearly didn’t understand what the law actually said. And why should he, when the president of the United States—a former law professor—was saying the same thing! Had he even read the bill? And what hypocrisy! Calderón was pointing the finger at us when, in fact, Mexican laws regarding illegal immigration to his country are essentially the same. In Mexico, local police are required to check the immigration documents of people they suspect are not in the country legally. The difference is, in Mexico many of the police are more likely to beat and rob illegal aliens than deport them. Human rights groups report that police routinely racially profile migrants and have been involved in kidnappings of migrants. We had honest police and had built safeguards against racial profiling into our law. Where did Calderón get off?
For Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to give the president of Mexico a global forum to malign the state of Arizona and its duly enacted laws was nothing short of outrageous. As I sat there and watched, I had to wonder where our country was going under Obama. It started to dawn on me that this president and his liberal allies in Congress don’t really understand what America is all about and what our fundamental principles are. We are the greatest country in the world, yet he was acting as though we were the problem. Americans, he seemed to be saying, rarely live up to their principles and therefore must learn from those who would victimize us. This wasn’t hope and change; this was recrimination and blame.
It was then that I knew that we were in a war. My staff and I had worked hard over the past four months, putting in long days, agonizing over every detail, debating with our critics and ourselves, to craft a law that would be effective and fair. We had been scrupulous about mirroring the federal law: If SB 1070 was racial profiling in the state of Arizona, then the federal government had been racially profiling for decades. We had gone beyond the letter of the law to see that our officers were properly trained. I had done everything I could in the naive hope that I could avoid having my motives impugned for doing what was necessary to protect and serve the people of my state.
None of it had mattered. As I listened to the American and Mexican presidents lecture Arizonans on political morality and “fairness,” I was suddenly reminded of the bitter statement Rob Krentz’s family had made about how nothing ever changed down on the border because of political forces “on both sides of the border.” I knew then that they were right: There was an agenda at work that didn’t want the law enforced. After oil exports, money sent home from Mexican immigrants living in America is Mexico’s chief source of foreign income. President Calderón clearly wanted to keep the gravy train coming and to look tough for the cameras back home to boot. As for President Obama, it seemed as though the only thing he liked better than the status quo of uncontrolled illegal immigration was having the target of SB 1070 to shoot at. By accusing us of being bigots, he could look as if he were doing something about immigration when he was actually doing nothing at all.
Supporters of this agenda would always play the race card to get their way, because that was the most powerful weapon in any debate. There is nothing worse than being called a racist in America today. It demonizes those it describes and makes their views unworthy of discussion or debate. What is the point of trying to have an adult conversation with a racist? Opponents of SB 1070, from the president on down, were throwing this accusation around so frequently not because they wanted to fix the border but because they did not.
I was involved in a war with a deeper and more entrenched set of political interests than I had realized. But at least, thank the Lord, I wasn’t alone. The cavalry came charging to the rescue in the form of Sarah Palin, beaming in via satellite from Wasilla. While talking with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she promptly put the rhetorical wood to President Obama. “Governor Jan Brewer did what she had to do as the CEO of that state,” Sarah said in her inimitable style. “To help protect the citizens of her state, she had to do what the federal government has refused to do, and that is help secure the border.”
Governor Palin also brilliantly analyzed President
Obama’s failure to respect or understand the Tenth Amendment—the one that reserves to the states all powers not specifically granted to Congress. The president had ignored the Tenth Amendment when it came to Obamacare by mandating that citizens purchase a good that they have a right not to buy. By the same token, Palin said, Obama would neither allow the states to enforce federal law nor enforce it himself. He wanted it both ways: states as powerless lackeys of the federal government, and states as powerless non-lackeys of the federal government. Arizona’s new law, she said, was “telling the federal government that they better wake up, buck up, and do their job in securing our borders.”
Throughout the battle that was to come, Governor Palin would be an insightful and fearless ally. She rallied Americans to stand together and declare, “We’re all Arizonans now.” She goaded the president to do his job, observing tartly that “Jan Brewer had the cojones that our president does not have.” I will forever be grateful for her courage in standing with me in this fight.
I did some fighting back myself that week as well. The day after Sarah first spoke about SB 1070, I took to the airwaves to defend myself and my state. During an interview on Fox News with Greta Van Susteren, I explained, “We have no other choice. We have a right to feel free in our state and feel safe.” Greta asked whether I had spoken with Secretary Napolitano. “She obviously is turning a blind eye to Arizona. She understands what the situation is,” I replied. “For her to make the comment that she made that—what was it?—that the borders are more secure than they’ve ever been, well, they’ve never been secure.” Finally, I told Greta what I had realized listening to Presidents Obama and Calderón: This wasn’t a debate about securing the border. It was a Democratic vote-getting scheme.