When politicians and police across the United States want to crack down on illegal immigration, they often reach out to the same man, a little-known Kansas attorney with an Ivy League education who is the architect behind many of America's most contentious immigration laws.
Kris Kobach could not attend West Point because of diabetes, but he regards his efforts on immigration as a substitute for military service.
Kobach helps draft proposed laws and, after they are adopted, trains officers to enforce them. If the laws are challenged, he goes to court to defend them.
His most recent project was advising Arizona officials on a new law that empowers police to question anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally. Critics say it violates the Constitution's provisions against unreasonable search and seizure by allowing police to engage in racial profiling.
But Kobach insists an officer stopping a crowded van for a traffic violation has a reasonable suspicion its occupants are illegal immigrants if none of them has identification, the van is travelling a known smuggling route and the driver is evasive.
``I could not care less whether they come from Mexico or Germany or Japan or China,'' said Kobach. ``An alien who also is here with terrorist intentions can carry any passport.''
Before the law was passed last month, Kobach spent several years consulting its main sponsor. And he has a US$300-an-hour ($430) contract to teach police officers in Maricopa County to enforce immigration policies.
Detractors are not impressed by Kobach's degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, or the White House fellowship he served during George W. Bush's first term.
While at the White House, he created a post-9/11 Justice Department programme requiring immigrants from 25 mostly Muslim nations who were already in the US to re-register with the federal government. Civil libertarians argued that it led to unwarranted detentions of law-abiding immigrants.
``He promotes himself as absolutely, positively being a constitutional scholar on these issues, and he's just wrong,'' said Bill Brewer, a Dallas attorney who has faced Kobach in court over immigration laws in Farmers Branch, Texas.
Kobach, a 44-year-old lifelong Republican, learned as a Topeka teenager that diabetes would keep him from a desired appointment to West Point. His focus on immigration developed after September 11, 2001 when as an aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft, he and other Justice Department officials learned some of the 9/11 attackers had lived in the US illegally.
After leaving Washington, he returned to Kansas and to a job on the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school faculty that he'd had since 1996, then launched a campaign for Congress. He lost.
Kobach drew attention by challenging a Kansas law that reduced tuition rates for illegal immigrants. The law survived, but frustrated conservatives took notice.
Mayor Lou Barletta, of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, called Kobach in 2006 to discuss a proposal to fine landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and to deny permits to businesses hiring them. Kobach later defended the law in federal court.
The mayor said he contacted Kobach after a news report quoted him saying Hazleton had the authority to enact such an ordinance, contradicting other legal scholars.
``It really only took one conversation to realise that he truly knew what he was talking about,'' Barletta recalled.
Kobach also wrote sections of a 2008 Missouri law cracking down on illegal immigration and this year drafted an unsuccessful proposal in Idaho requiring employers to screen workers. Kobach said he's consulted legislators in at least six other states on various measures.
Kobach quit early last year to launch a campaign for secretary of state. His first proposal for legislators: require new voters to prove citizenship when they register and make all voters show photo IDs at the polls.
Critics suggest Kobach's immigration work is designed to boost his political career. Arizona state Representative Kyrsten Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat and attorney who voted against her state's new law, said Kobach is not to be underestimated.
``What I'm concerned about,'' she said, ``is there are all these legislators in all these states who think he's a good guy and want to take his advice.'' _AP
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