According to Sarah Palin, Obama Doesn’t Have the “Cojones” to Detain Illegal Immigrants

There is still resentment from the presidential campaign of two years ago. Every time it is possible, they jab at each other. This time the ineffable Sarah Palin, the ex-vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party and current leader of the ultraconservative Tea Party, took her turn. On a television show she said that President Barack Obama doesn’t have “los cojones” (spoken in Spanish and repeated multiple times) to secure the borders and prevent more undocumented immigrants from entering.

Mr. Obama, who finds himself with a low voter approval rating, responds by saying, “I understand the frustration of people in Arizona. But what we can’t do is demagogue the issue.” He added, “And what we can’t do is allow a patchwork of 50 different states, or cities or localities, where anybody who wants to make a name for themselves suddenly says, ‘I’m gonna be anti-immigrant and I’m gonna try to see if I can solve the problem ourself.’”

On the other hand, Ms. Palin thinks that Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, “has the cojones that our president does not have to look out for all Americans, not just Arizonans, but all Americans.”

The debate over what to do with the 12 million Latin American immigrants who live in the United States without legal residence is becoming even more heated. It culminated last Thursday when a judge blocked a law called SB1070, which would for the first time give the local police the power to detain any individual in order to ask them for identification as a resident, from going into effect. If an individual does not have the proper papers, the police would be able to turn him or her in to the immigration authorities for deportation. The rest of this anti-immigrant law went into effect, but these special provisions will be revised in November by the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the man that took center stage in all of the controversy, the sheriff of the city of Phoenix and the surrounding area, Joe Arpaio, announced that he received a death threat from a Mexican drug cartel that, he assures, put a price of one million dollars on his head. The office of public relations for Mr. Arpaio stated that the threat came directly from a disposable Mexican cell phone.

Finding themselves in the middle of all this are 3,000 Argentineans who arrived here after the crisis of 2001. They are losing their jobs due to the end of the economic boom in Arizona. They live in fear that the political confrontation between these ultraconservative groups and the liberal government of Mr. Obama will end with them as scapegoats.