"Arpaio is a clown. A clown that's good for the times, but a clown. Thomas is smart. He's fiercely intelligent and civilized, but he's also vile and hateful," he says. "Arpaio has an obsessive need for public approval and media attention, and that's been true since the beginning. The green bologna, Tent City — it's all designed to keep him in the spotlight. Right around the Haab incident, it became clear to him that this was the next logical escalation. His primary motivation is seeing his face on television. Thomas is a different case. Thomas truly understands his actions and his manipulation of the sheriff is very purposeful."
Around the same time, the Arizona Legislature passed a law aimed at stopping human smuggling. Jonathan Paton, a Republican from Tucson, says he sponsored the bill with the thought that it would be aimed at the organized crime rings that traffic humans on the border, not at their cargo.
Morgan Bellinger
Phoenix lawyer Daniel Ortega
Morgan Bellinger
Activist Alfredo Gutierrez works the crowd outside M.D. Pruitt's furniture store, the site of a weekly immigration protest.
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The bill makes it illegal for a person to intentionally smuggle human beings for profit or commercial purposes and defines smuggling as the transportation of people who are known, or could reasonably be suspected, to be unlawfully in the state.
Paton remembers the committee sessions leading up to the bill's vote as intense.
"There was a lot of debate. They were grilling me to see if this could be used to go after someone driving a gardener around and all these different things. I have a district that goes up to the border. I'm not soft on border issues," he says. "But this [going after those being smuggled] was not part of my plan."
Thomas didn't care. In September 2005, he issued an official opinion on the law. Under Thomas' interpretation, anyone who pays a "coyote" to guide them to America is guilty of conspiracy to commit smuggling, a felony offense that puts the smuggled on the same level as the violent criminals who bring them here.
Of the 18 or so anti-trafficking state laws nationwide, none has this scope.
Florida, a state with a large trafficking problem, even ensures that victims are provided with state-funded services.
Still, Thomas' political moves have resonated in other states. Earlier this year, Oklahoma passed a comprehensive immigration package filled with laws modeled after those in Arizona. State Representative Randy Terrill, who authored the bill and brags that his is one of only three states truly cracking down on illegal immigration — the other two, according to Terrill are Georgia and Arizona — says he's looking at Arizona's law for guidance.
Two months after Thomas issued his opinion on smuggling, he hosted a conference on illegal immigration. The Southwest Conference on Illegal Immigration, Border Security and Crime was created under the guise of exploring the issue of illegal immigration, but its true purpose was to grab national attention.
The list of panelists included John Leo, a former New York Times columnist, and Kris Kobach, former counsel to John Ashcroft. Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute was also one of Thomas' invited panelists.
In a speech at the conference, Thomas made his feelings toward immigrants clear.
"We do, as a society, risk being turned into a different society that is less appealing by tolerating what is occurring," he said. Later in the speech, he went on, "I think we're dealing with something that fundamentally changes our democracy, not only in terms of our sense of human rights, [but in] the fact we are tolerating a sub-class of people."
Next, Thomas lobbied hard to pass Proposition 100, the statewide measure that denies bail to illegal immigrants accused, not convicted, of felonies. Since the measure passed, other states have followed suit. In Colorado, a bill to deny bail to illegal immigrants is part of a package of legislation for 2008 and in May of this year, Oklahoma's governor signed the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, which denies bail to illegal immigrants and also fines employers who knowingly hire them. Similar measures are under consideration in Nebraska and Idaho.
Oklahoma representative Terrill says Arizona's Prop 100 was a model for the bail provision of his state's act.
"I snatched the no bail provision from you guys," he says.
Thomas fought the judiciary tooth and nail to see it enforced as harshly as possible, going so far as to have attorney Dennis Wilenchik attempt to publicly humiliate judges who refused to fall in line.
Tamar Jacoby says these kinds of state actions are only making the problem worse.
"Arizona is the place where emotions are running highest in the whole country," she says. "Arizona is like an infected tooth. It's inflamed and everything makes it worse."
By the spring of 2006, Thomas had successfully added an important weapon to his arsenal — a guy with his own arsenal, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Local police departments weren't willing to enforce immigration or state smuggling laws, but Arpaio was.
But despite his posturing on the topic, Arpaio has yet to truly dismantle any organized smuggling rings.
In fact, he stumbled upon his biggest bust to date by accident, when his deputies picked up several barefoot, shirtless immigrants running through the streets of El Mirage.
