Hazing Arizona Award for Denigrating Immigration Enforcement

“I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon. Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state....Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects [during the Nazi occupation]. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: ‘I Could Be Illegal.’”

“With this new law, will you ramp it up? Will you, will you grab people on street corners? I mean, what will you do with this new law?”

Anchor Diane Sawyer: “Tonight, undocumented immigrants — many working in this country for decades — are fleeing the state, or hiding in fear....”

Correspondent Bill Weir: “There is a fear-driven exodus going on in Arizona tonight. More vacant apartments, more empty shops, more kids disappearing from school.... Francisco has been in Phoenix without papers for 14 years, but says now he’s afraid to walk the streets. So he’ll take his family and leave as soon as he can.”

Anchor Katie Couric: “Hundreds of thousands of them [illegal immigrants] now live in Arizona. But as Kelly Cobiella reports, many no longer feel welcome.”

Reporter Kelly Cobiella: “On a dusty block in Phoenix, 15 years of the Quintana family’s possessions are for sale. [to Manuela Quintana] When did you decide to leave? [translating] ‘When the governor signed the immigration law,’ Manuela Quintana says, ‘I knew we had to move.’...The family packed up before dawn today and headed north to Colorado. Manuela says she’s lost hope in this state. She thinks she’ll find it again in another.”

Telemundo’s Maria Celeste Arraras: : “Their mother Claudia, illegal in the U.S., was arrested for violating immigration laws by overstaying her visa....[to kids] What would you say has been the hardest thing of having your mom away?”

Matt Ramirez: : “Not having a mother figure there, you know, looking over you and helping you out.”

Kathy Ramirez: : “I have to wake up knowing that my mom is not gonna be here....”

Arraras: : “Some people may say, ‘Well, this is a very sad case but too bad, your mother should not have come here in the first place.’ What, what would you say to that?”

Kathy Ramirez: : “Have a heart.”

“One way to measure the effect of Arizona’s pending immigration law is the length of this line. It stretches around the Mexican Consulate in Phoenix every day, immigrants trying to figure out not how to stay in Arizona, but how to flee it....It may be months before anyone knows for sure just how many illegal immigrants and their business the law has scared away.”