Napolitano's record lacks political courage
If Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano wins confirmation as secretary of homeland security, she will be responsible for enforcing immigration laws. This is a chilling thought for those of us who witnessed up close how Napolitano can be vexed to the point of paralysis by that highly charged issue.
I met Napolitano when I was working as a reporter and metro columnist at The Arizona Republic in the late 1990s. After serving as a legal adviser to Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991, she enjoyed a meteoric rise as a public official. She was named a U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton, then was elected Arizona's attorney general in 1998. Four years later, she was elected governor, winning re-election in 2006.
One thing that helped fuel her ascent, her critics say, is that Napolitano rarely takes action without doing the political equivalent of a cost-benefit analysis. A lot of politicians do the same thing. But Napolitano does it better, and she's more obvious about it. At the end of the day, she is a lawyer with one client: herself. And that instinct gets her into trouble when she puts political expediency before principle.
According to her critics, that's what happened in Chandler, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb where, in July 1997, Arizonans witnessed a horrendous abuse of power. A tag-team of local police and Border Patrol agents - in a futile attempt to purge the city of illegal immigrants over the course of a few days - trampled the civil rights of U.S. citizens. What became known as the Chandler Roundup resulted in the apprehension and deportation of more than 400 illegal immigrants. But because the law-enforcement net was cast wide enough to ensnare anyone who looked like an illegal immigrant - or even, as one Chandler police officer later told stunned state investigators looking into the incident, a "smell" common to the undocumented - scores of U.S.-born Hispanics were systematically harassed, detained and asked to produce birth certificates or citizenship papers.
In months that followed, there were protests, multimillion-dollar lawsuits and demands that officials punish those responsible. Talk radio was replete with people defending the roundup and criticizing activists seeking justice.
It was an ugly time and a defining moment that separated leaders from followers. According to Napolitano's critics, and from my own vantage point covering the conflict, she was in the second camp. There were maybe a dozen activists, elected officials and media figures taking arrows from pro-roundup nativists - while Napolitano, then the U.S. attorney with jurisdiction over the Border Patrol and already a candidate for state attorney general, hid under her desk. The most she was willing to do was to say her office had made a referral to the Justice Department.
Take it from one of the people who fought on the front lines of the Chandler controversy, who is now fighting a different kind of battle. Chandler City Councilman Martin Sepulveda, a Navy commander, is serving his third tour in Iraq.
"As the U.S. attorney, Napolitano spent more time figuring out how not to get involved," Sepulveda said in a phone interview from Anbar province. "I'm not sure how she, as the U.S. attorney, figured that she couldn't get involved in a federal issue that involved a federal agency, but she did."
Granted, this was 11 years ago when the Democrat was just a political novice. Maybe Napolitano has developed more courage since then. But, at that moment - a defining one for Arizona that helped set the stage for the ugly restrictionist impulses that now afflict the state - she ducked her responsibility and let others take the heat.
Arizonans experienced a moral crisis. And Janet Napolitano did everything she could to stay out of the fray.
© 2008, The San Diego Union-Tribune