Tucson Weekly: Border Billing (June 3

Does TUSD Really Need A Legal Opinion On This Half-Baked Idea?
By Chris Limberis
RICHARD HUMPHRIES IS an ex-cop who lives on a remote spread in the hills some 15 miles outside the small southeast Arizona town of Elfrida.
He has nearly shot Mexicans who have crossed the border and wandered onto his property.
He has a four-point plan to make his world a better place.
Currents • Seal the border, he says, with "whatever it takes to stop the millions and millions of illegal immigrants."
• Enable and force the Immigration and Naturalization Service to do its job. "I'd really like to see the INS that you and I pay for to round these people up and oust them. Send them back to Mexico."
• "Impose really hard sanctions on Mexico and its leaders."
• And finally, get churches and charitable organizations to help ease the plight of poor Mexicans.
And, in what made Humphries a Tucson topic, he wants the Tucson Unified School District to send a bill to Mexico for the cost of educating the children of undocumented Mexican immigrants.
"My concern is for my nation," Humphries says. "I'm scared to death with what is happening to our nation."
Humphries says illegal Mexican immigrants "do irreparable harm" to the United States "in terms of social life, the criminal element and the monetary element. If the media would do its job and report it, if the American people knew the numbers, they would not stand for it."
Humphries left Tucson, where he had an Indian arts and crafts shop following his law-enforcement career with Scottsdale and the state, for remote Cochise County. He considers himself fortunate to live far enough from the border to not suffer what he says his friends do--a nearly constant parade of illegal immigrants, trash and damage. He says he has not joined the well-publicized patrols undertaken by his rancher buddies.
Instead, he patrols the Internet where he latched onto the idea that TUSD should bill Mexico for educating students whose parents are not legally in the United States. Via americanpatrol.com, Humphries learned that Harold Martin, an Anaheim police officer and member of the Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees, was pushing a resolution last week for that district to bill Mexico $50 million for the cost of educating who he considers illegal immigrants in that Orange County, California, district.
Martin, whose work as a cop as been criticized as racist by Anaheim residents and Hispanic leaders, ignited a lengthy debate at the Anaheim school board meeting on May 27.
As noted on the americanpatrol website, with its pervasive anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant articles and speeches and alarmist predictions, Humphries says "California will be Mexican in 2025."
"They can call me racist if they want," Humphries says.
Not Mary Belle McCorkle, the president of TUSD Governing Board and an educator whose career has spanned three decades.
In a late-night e-mail on May 23 to the TUSD Board, Humphries forwarded a newspaper account of Martin's proposed resolution along with the note: "I urge you to see what you can do to have Arizona follow suit. I think this is a great idea as long as you are doing nothing to oust all illegal students from our public school system."
The quick, easy and inexpensive two-part answer that even non-educators know: 1) TUSD has no authority to file a claim against Mexico, and 2) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 17 years ago that children of illegal immigrants cannot be denied an education. Moreover, school officials may not ask about the residency status of students.
Still, McCorkle hurried to answer Humphries, who lives 100 miles outside TUSD and did not ask his own school district to also follow the move by Anaheim's Martin.
Famous for prefacing many of her statements and votes by imploring colleagues that they "are here for the kids," McCorkle unilaterally directed Superintendent George F. Garcia to have TUSD's legal counsel "check on this issue and advise the Board."
And she told Humphries in an e-mail: "Tucson Unified School District governing Board Members received your e-mail of May 23rd with the Orange Country Register article attached. We have asked our Legal Counsel for an opinion on this subject. Thank you for writing."
McCorkle, a former TUSD and Sunnyside School District administrator who is in her second term, misled Humphries. The TUSD board, which last met May 11, never discussed his letter and request.
The communication violates provisions of the very Board behavior policy that McCorkle, Garcia and three other Board members pushed for earlier this year. It forbids the type of unilateral action she undertook. It also forbids Board members, including the president, from speaking for the entire Board on matters other than in the instances of retirements, congratulatory messages or condolences. Finally, the rules also state that Board members may ask for information or opinions only for items that have been or will be on Board agendas for discussion. The immigrant question has neither been discussed nor set for an agenda.
McCorkle backpeddled when her oddly cheerful work in response to Humphries was discovered by first-year Board Member Rosalie Lopez, a southside native who is far from a left-wing liberal.
A lifelong Republican, Lopez said it was "offensive that our Board president saw fit to waste limited taxpayer resources researching an issue we already know and one any educator should know."
Raul Grijalva, a Democrat and three-term member of the Board of Supervisors who also served three terms on the TUSD Board, says the issue was settled long ago.
"It's a good thing Lopez is on there or this would have sailed by everybody," Grijalva says. "They should know better. They should know the history. We dealt with this 20 years ago."
McCorkle backpeddled but received support from fellow Board members James Noel Christ, Joel Tracy Ireland and Carolyn Kemmeries.
But McCorkle continued to stumble. First, she said that she was just requesting a "routine" legal opinion to answer Humphries.
"It's anything but routine," Lopez says. "Since I've been on the Board, we've never sought a legal opinion for a TUSD constituent, yet here we are sprinting for a person outside TUSD and outside the county who has extremist anti-Mexican views."
And Jane Butler, head of TUSD's legal department, greatly inflated the number of requests her office receives from Board members wanting legal opinions. She told both daily papers that her office receives a dozen such requests each week.
However, records show that there have been only 23 legal opinions sought by Board members since January 1--about one request per week.
Near Elfrida, Humphries is not counting on an opinion that will make him happy--although he says the late Justice William Brennan, author of the 1982 Supreme Court opinion that struck down a Texas law that denied education to the children of illegal immigrants, relied on faulty logic.
And Humphries says he feels sorry for McCorkle for encountering what he and The Arizona Daily Star, in a May 29 editorial, say is unfair criticism of McCorkle.

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