Back to School

It’s a Thursday morning at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, and the halls are awash with a yellow flier exposing a popular professor’s extracurricular activities.

The yellow paper is scattered on tables in the ground-floor lounge, where students are grabbing free pieces of pizza. The crowd shuffling between classes is dotted with yellow, as students read the handout and stuff it into their thick casebooks.

Outside the 12:40 p.m. constitutional law class, students study the yellow sheet as though they’re cramming for a midterm. It takes aim at their professor: Kris Kobach.

“You’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding Kobach’s Immigration Law and Policy class scheduled for next semester,” the flier begins. It charges that the tenured professor crafted bad laws while working for the Department of Justice. It claims that Kobach inflated his credentials and misrepresented his scholarship in the area of immigration law. It suggests that, as a paid employee of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Kobach will inject anti-immigrant bias into his recently approved course on immigration policy.

“Tell Dean Suni and Chancellor Bailey that university resources should not be used for personal political gain,” the leaflet urges.

In the back of Kobach’s classroom, three students discuss the accusations.

“So what? Are they going to be standing outside with protest signs,” one student asks in a mocking tone.

“Maybe they’ll come in and try to heckle him,” another adds with a smirk.

“Dude, the guy ran for Congress,” the third says. “I don’t think he’s going to care about some flier.”

Kobach strides in a few minutes late. Wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt, he has a stack of papers in his left hand and his cell phone pressed to his right ear. As he erases the white board, finishes the call and snaps the phone shut, he barely glances down at his materials before launching into his lecture.

Kobach banters about landmark legal decisions as if he’s telling a barroom story; other times, he talks so fast he trips on his words. He annotates his speech with broad arm motions. He changes direction so quickly that his tie swings like a pendulum. Even as the majority of computer screens betray students checking their e-mail or surfing MySpace pages, the animated professor keeps his audience from tuning out completely.

And, as if out of respect, there isn’t a hint of yellow on the tables.

In fact, before Kobach has finished his lecture, e-mails in support of the conservative professor begin filling the in box of Ellen Suni, dean of the law school.

“I found the memo and its accusations a despicable and cowardly act of individuals who are so insecure in their own beliefs that they are intolerant of any challenge to them,” third-year student Fawzy Simon writes.

“I hear enough trash talk on the radio,” third-year student Ben Gatrost notes, “and I don’t need to get it at school, where I am paying to attend.”

Simon and Gatrost lash out first, but Suni will receive dozens more favoring Kobach.

Two days later, a third-year law student — a self-professed liberal and member of the UMKC chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union — posts his own flier backing Kobach.

“Tell Dean Suni and Chancellor Bailey that you believe Professor Kobach can teach a subject he is passionate about well, and that law students can tell when they’re being fed a line,” urges Steven Long.

Suni replies with a mass e-mail, assuring students that Kobach’s upcoming course — which is already full, with several students on a waiting list — will be taught as planned starting on January 9.

It’s been more than two years since Kobach grabbed national headlines. In May 2004, he sued the state of Kansas for granting in-state tuition to children of undocumented immigrants. That August, he was allowed 47 seconds to address the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. In November, he lost a congressional race to Democrat Dennis Moore by 11 percent after the incumbent accused him of ties to white supremacists.

Now Kobach keeps a lower profile. But to his supporters and critics, he has become the hardest-working activist in the anti-illegal-immigration movement.

“You know what I call him?” asks his secretary, Debra Banister, speaking in a hushed tone like a child about to give up a long-held secret.

“Superman.”

Kobach calls himself something else.
One night in October at the Northland’s Anita B. Gorman Park, Kobach gave a speech that fired up a small group of activists holding white candles and carrying homemade signs ordering illegal aliens to leave American soil.

Watch footage of a Kobach speech.

At this “Vigil to Save the American Worker,” Kobach worked the crowd like a motivational speaker.

He invoked Winston Churchill. “He said that his definition of a fanatic is ‘someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.’ And friends, if that’s what a fanatic is, then I guess I’m a fanatic. Because, when it comes to restoring the rule of law, I can’t change my mind and I won’t change the subject.”

It’s speeches such as this one that anger Jessica Allen-Piedra, the person responsible for the yellow flier.

The third-year law student has had her eye on Kobach since she enrolled in law school at UMKC. It’s not that she thinks Kobach is a subpar professor. She took his constitutional law class in 2004 and says he’s “obviously brilliant.”

What upsets Allen-Piedra is that Kobach attends political rallies and appears on news programs, calling undocumented immigrants — such as her husband, Hector Piedra — aliens and criminals. Piedra illegally crossed the Arizona border in 1999; in Kansas City, he worked on a construction crew and eventually played in a Westport blues band. The “rule of law” Kobach wants restored is the system that required Piedra to return to Mexico, separating him from his two young children for the past year. Allen-Piedra spent all of 2006 trying to obtain a legal waiver that would override her husband’s automatic 10-year ban on re-entering the United States. After 11 months (the process normally takes four to six months), during which she argued that her husband’s absence would force her to abandon her career in law and therefore cause her extreme hardship, the government waived Piedra’s ban. Piedra returned to the United States at the end of December.

The yellow flier was unsigned, but most people in the law school knew that Allen-Piedra wrote it. She is a past president of the Hispanic Law Student Association and now leads the UMKC chapter of the liberal National Lawyers Guild. She’s also vocal about the law school’s low Latino enrollment — just four out of 175 incoming, first-year law students in 2006 were Hispanic.

She’s the first to admit that her campaign against Kobach is partly personal. She remembers becoming emotional when she confronted her former professor at a July hearing before the Missouri Senate’s Committee for Immigration Reform.

“I looked at him — and he knows my situation — and said, ‘You need to think about my family and the people you’re hurting.’ … In law school, we get so into this intellectual exchange of ideas, but, no, people are really being hurt by this.”

Kobach remembers the encounter.

“One thing she did say, out of the blue, in a militant and obsessive way, was that she would do what it takes to stop me,” he says.

But first she’ll have to get administrators to see past Kobach’s impressive Ivy League résumé and convince students that he doesn’t deserve his broad popularity.

At the end of a poorly lighted third-floor hallway, Kobach’s office is bright with sunlight.
An end table is topped with wooden elephants and other African objects. Gold-scripted diplomas and a signed photograph from President George W. Bush (“To Kris, Best Always”) give the office a stately feel. Standing sentinel on the file cabinet is a foot-tall George Washington doll that recites snippets of famous speeches, a gag gift from Kobach’s sister.

In soft-focus photographs lining the windowsill, Kobach isn’t a politician — he’s a smiling husband and the father of two young daughters.

Clutching manila folders to her chest, Banister brings him a legal motion that needs to be signed and sent this afternoon, then confirms a flight on Midwest Airlines for one of his many speaking engagements.

Kobach honed his rhetorical skills early. Growing up in Topeka, he was a debate geek whose team at Washburn Rural High School won the state championship. Kobach placed 12th at the national tournament in 1984.

“I was very competitive,” he says. “Probably still am, to be fair. If you were to analyze me, it’d say that.”

Jan Kobach says she hates to sound like the typical mom, but Kris was the kind of child who never got into trouble, rarely had to be badgered to do his homework, and got along well with his two younger sisters. “I used to say he was like a little man even when he was really young,” she says.

The family lived on a lake. As a kid, Kris won awards for water-skiing. But when the young athlete was diagnosed with diabetes at age 11, Jan says, she couldn’t help but worry about his health. Kris apparently didn’t, though — he was the type of kid who’d swim the length of the lake in his bid to become an Eagle Scout. In 1993, Kobach came close to capturing a spot on the U.S. national rowing team.

The Kobach family was known around town for owning the local Buick dealership rather than for any political activism. Once he hit high school, Jan says, her son’s politics and professional aspirations began to surface. The valedictorian set his mind on the Ivy League, was accepted to Harvard, and wasted no time taking a leadership role with the Harvard Republicans.

“It was a place where, for every controversy, there had to be a debate,” Kobach recalls. “So if some Harvard group was opposed to U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, it was: Let’s go to the Republican Club and get Kobach to debate.”

At Harvard, Kobach found a mentor: Samuel Huntington, a professor of political science. Huntington’s latest book, 2004’s Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, argues that immigration trends, most notably among Hispanics, could endanger American culture.

With Huntington as his adviser, Kobach earned the Harvard prize for the best student thesis in 1989; he analyzed how the South African business community functioned within apartheid. (Kobach continues to visit Africa, working as a missionary with Christ Church in Overland Park. He has distributed Bibles to, he says, “people who live in huts, who have no written material whatsoever” and used his university experience to teach men “Christian and universal values.”)

After Harvard, Kobach completed a Ph.D. program at Oxford University in England and, in 1992, returned to the United States to attend law school at Yale. He spent a year as a judicial clerk in the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. In 1996, when UMKC was looking for a constitutional law professor, Kobach applied. Suni says his résumé and his ability to provide political diversity with his conservative views made him immediately attractive.

“In those days, it was much harder for us to attract the kind of people we really wanted,” Suni says. “Here’s someone with big-name schools and a great thinker and someone who’s very likely to come.”

When he arrived, students took notice. The young professor began auctioning rides on his motorcycle in the annual fund-raiser for the Black Law Students Association. A quick excursion to lunch on his Daytona 1200 sports bike has drawn as much as $200.

Kobach has also become a favorite character in the $1.98 Law Review, an annual production that satirizes campus personalities and current events. Last year, the show included a skit called “Kobach’s Garage Sale” that played on his propensity for answering his cell phone during class, his constant appearances on national news programs, and his Brad Pitt status among female students.

A more-distant figure also found him attractive: former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

On September 1, 2001, Kobach arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin a White House fellowship in Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Ten days later, his plans took a drastic turn.

As a fellow, the professor had already been tapped to advise the attorney general on immigration issues. But two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Ashcroft issued a challenge to his staff.

“He had us in the attorney general’s dining room for a brown-bag lunch, and he basically related to the group that, when he spoke to President Bush on 9/11, the president told him, ‘John, do not let this happen again,'” Kobach recalls. “So he basically issued an invitation: ‘If any of you have ideas on what we can be doing differently, I want to know them personally, and I want to know them now.'”

Kobach says he’d already been considering the basics of a program that would come to be known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. NSEERS mandated that men from certain Arab and Muslim nations be photographed and fingerprinted when they arrived in the United States. Men from these countries who were already U.S. residents had to register. NSEERS also required that they be interviewed 30 days after they entered the country, that they notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service if they changed their address, and that they present themselves for an annual interview while they remained on American soil.

Ashcroft, Kobach says, “was immediately receptive of the idea and said, ‘Kris, go ahead and pursue it.'”

In his new book, Never Again, Ashcroft refers to Kobach as “a sharp new White House Fellow,” and includes him in a short list of acknowledgments — right after FBI Director Robert Mueller and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Kobach says Ashcroft isn’t as grave as his press-conference persona implied. When the wives were back in Missouri, Kobach says, Ashcroft would often organize weekend trips with his staff to outdoor destinations such as Assateague Island in Maryland.

“We were hiking along the beach, and he said, ‘OK, who wants to go body surfing?’ and charged into the water,” Kobach recalls. “He’s not a stuffed shirt. He’s not so dour and serious that he doesn’t let loose.”

Kobach spent months in discussions with high-level State Department and INS officials. But NSEERS was not well-received.

Ashcroft admits in Never Again that the program faced immediate criticism. Civil liberties organizations called the efforts racial profiling, universities objected to intrusions into their student records, and Middle East allies took issue with the fact that Muslim men were singled out. The major provisions were dropped less than a year after their inception.

The NSEERS program wasn’t Kobach’s only foray into federal policy. In 2002, he led a reform effort that reduced the number of judges who heard immigration appeals from 23 to 11. To keep up with the increasing number of cases, the smaller cadre of judges began issuing one-line opinions in response to complex legal decisions.

Mira Mdivani, an Overland Park immigration lawyer, says the attempt to streamline the system had the opposite effect. For example, she recently had a client from Somalia who got a one-liner from the Board of Immigration Appeals that would have sent him back to a war zone. Sensing that the opinion did not reflect a full analysis of his case, Mdivani appealed.

Immigration lawyers nationwide have done the same. Appeals increased sevenfold between 2001 and 2005. Overburdened federal judges began criticizing the changes; effectively reversing Kobach’s reforms, the Justice Department is now proposing to boost the number of judges and mandate full opinions instead of one-line decisions.

Despite the criticism, Kobach says he had an open invitation to stay on in the Justice Department after most of his responsibilities were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. Instead, he decided to take his expertise to a different branch of government and entered the race for the Kansas 3rd District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004.

After a tight Republican primary, Democratic incumbent Dennis Moore took aim at Kobach’s hard-line stances on immigration policy and his connection to groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose political action committee had donated $10,000 to Kobach’s campaign.

Organizations that monitor white-supremacy groups count FAIR as having thinly veiled racist motives. The organization’s founder, John Tanton, asked in a 1986 study, “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining ,will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” More recently, FAIR has lobbied for an immigration moratorium and for reversing parts of the 14th Amendment that grant automatic citizenship to all U.S.-born children.

Kobach lost the race by more than 36,000 votes. He still bristles at what he calls deceptive allegations of ties to white supremacists. “I never got to a point where I said never again, but I certainly wasn’t in any hurry to run again in 2006,” he says.

Kobach has been encouraged to run for public office again, says Doug Patterson, former chair of the Johnson County Republican Party, though Patterson has some advice when it comes to heated issues such as immigration.

“It’s dangerous to break it down to small issues because you can look like a radical,” Patterson says. “For Kris to focus on in-state tuition or driver’s licenses, it can take a regular voter back to ‘Gosh, Kris is extreme’ where the big message is, ‘We have an immigration problem.'”

Now, two years after he went down to electoral defeat, Kobach has taken a central role with FAIR.

After 9/11, a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Mike Hethmon took over FAIR’s legal department. Ashcroft’s young immigration counsel caught Hethmon’s attention as a potential ally.

In the past two years, Hethmon and Kobach have become a legal team working to shift the federal immigration debate to states and cities. Hethmon is director and general counsel of FAIR’s Immigration Reform Law Institute; Kobach, a senior counsel on paid retainer, is second-in-command.

The partnership started in 2004 when Kansas passed a law granting in-state tuition to those children of illegal immigrants who had attended a state high school for three years and graduated. Kobach says his interest in the issue dates back to his time at the Justice Department. He and his colleagues were appalled when states such as California and Texas circumvented federal law by granting in-state tuition to children of illegal immigrants while charging higher rates for kids from other states and international students with legal visas.

“It just seemed like an incredibly perverse set of incentives — to punish people who follow the law and benefit those who break the law,” Kobach says.

Their Kansas challenge was booted last year, and a similar case in California — argued by Kobach — was dismissed in October. FAIR is appealing both cases.

But Kobach is a hot property because of his work on another case, too.

Last summer, the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, population 30,000, passed a controversial ordinance that financially penalizes landlords and businesses that house or employ undocumented immigrants.

In November, Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta told CBS’ 60 Minutes that the aim of the ordinance was simple: “I’m going to eliminate illegal aliens from the city of Hazleton.”

Kobach is helping him do it.

“We looked at the Hazleton ordinance and said, ‘Uh oh,'” Hethmon recalls. “The idea was great, the concept was absolutely valid, but it was clearly drafted by some average folks sitting around a table. So we brought the issue up with Kris immediately.”

Hethmon and Kobach quickly created a model ordinance. By the end of 2006, about 50 municipalities had passed or were considering similar legislation.

One such city is Valley Park, Missouri. Defending the ordinance in that St. Louis suburb, Kobach faces a team of nearly two dozen lawyers, including university professors, the ACLU and the St. Louis-based law firm Bryan Cave LLP.

During a mid-December broadcast of his Sunday-evening call-in show on KMBZ 980 (it kicks off with the Mission: Impossible theme and an introduction that boasts, “Kris is a constitutional lawyer, conservative and proud“), Kobach asked listeners to contribute funds to the Valley Park and Hazelton cases.

He went on to assert that states and cities should pass laws requiring government services and information to be offered only in English. He predicted that such measures would pop up in Missouri and Kansas statehouses during the next legislative session.

And if anyone has insider information on upcoming legislation, it’s Kobach.

His students help write it.

Last year, Missouri Rep. Jerry Nolte, a Gladstone Republican, sponsored a bill requiring public universities to certify that they had not admitted any illegal aliens before they could receive funds from the state. The idea for that measure, he says, came from Kobach, and the language came from students in Kobach’s legislation class at UMKC.

Hethmon believes that Kobach could be remembered as a legal advocate who blazed a new civil rights movement.

“Some folks have compared this issue of citizens’ rights to where the NAACP was in the 1920s, where the ability of a few very smart, very principled lawyers to marshal and advocate issues that were both unpopular and, in a certain sense, unfamiliar to the judiciary was essential,” Hethmon says. “Without that intellectual and legal foundation, that kind of civil rights reform couldn’t have gone forward. So I think Kris’ talent and commitment are essential. I wish I had a dozen of him.”

A week after Allen-Piedra distributed the yellow flier, Kobach still has a copy on his desk. He handles the page as if it’s toxic.

“Apparently, she has some emotional investment,” he says of Allen-Piedra. “Her husband was removed from this country, and for whatever reason, she’s taking her frustration out on me. It’s really bizarre how she’s throwing all this angry rhetoric on this little paper. She doesn’t even know me.”

But Allen-Piedra has watched him closely.

When Kobach used his university address on papers filed in the tuition lawsuit — making it appear as if the university were involved in the case — she brought it to Suni’s attention. When Kobach introduced himself at a congressional committee in September as a professor of immigration law — even though he’d never taught a class on the subject — she again went to the dean. And since she found out last spring that the school was considering a Kobach-taught immigration class, she’s been lobbying Suni against the idea.

Now she’s riding a new wave of support from outside UMKC.

“They can try to dismiss it as one law student who doesn’t like his teaching, but it’s more than one law student,” says Conn Felix Sanchez, a Kansas City, Kansas, immigration lawyer. “It’s a whole community.”

The Hispanic Bar Association of Greater Kansas City and the MoKan chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association are drafting letters to UMKC. The local Coalition of Hispanic Organizations has written to the university, citing fears that Kobach will be “allowed to use university resources to propagandize his anti-immigrant sentiments.”

In October, Kansas Rep. Sue Storm, a Democrat from Overland Park, wrote to Suni expressing her “grave concerns” about the course. “I have heard Mr. Kobach provide misleading testimony in Kansas legislative committee hearings, playing to the most extremist and hateful anti-immigrant views,” she wrote.

Allen-Piedra has received supportive e-mails from students at universities as distant as Rutgers in New Jersey and the University of California-Los Angeles.

In virtually all correspondence, opposition to the class has been tempered with support for academic freedom and Kobach’s right to hold his conservative views.

More than complaining about his political work, lawyers such as Mdivani and Sanchez charge that Kobach is simply unqualified for the position.

By Kobach’s count, he has participated in a dozen immigration cases as a consultant and has personally argued five cases of national significance. He hasn’t, however, worked as a front-line attorney who helps clients navigate the complex immigration system.

“He may not understand the real world rather than the ivory tower theory,” Sanchez says.

Jim Austin, a local immigration lawyer and adjunct professor at UMKC’s law school who teaches a class on immigration procedure, calls Kobach “a sideshow.”

“He’s seen as someone who tries very hard to justify bad immigration policy with weak legal arguments,” Austin says.

Suni says legislation classes such as Kobach’s are common. But Austin says Kobach’s class has an extra attribute that makes the UMKC course distinct: “The difference is, Kobach goes around testifying on its behalf.”

Judgment among his colleagues isn’t always in Kobach’s favor, though.

In a five-page letter to Suni, Roger McCrummen of the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association notes that both NSEERS and the BIA reforms were failures. “These disastrous policy decisions result, I believe, either from bias or a serious misunderstanding of the U.S. immigration system,” he writes.

McCrummen also cites Kobach’s legislative testimony on the in-state tuition issue, when Kobach argued that illegal immigrants should go back to their home countries and apply for F-1 visas to attend U.S. colleges. McCrummen and Mdivani say an F-1 visa doesn’t apply to those who want to stay in this country permanently — if they leave the country, F-1 students who are older than 18 have a hard time returning. “As an immigration attorney, if I gave that advice to my clients, I’d be disbarred,” Mdivani says.

“Everything he does has been a failure, except for looking very good and sounding very good and having an amazing résumé,” Mdivani says.

What most bothers Allen-Piedra is that once he has the immigration course on his résumé, he’ll look even better.

“If he’s able to say he’s a professor of immigration law, it gives him a lot more ammunition,” she says. “It’s not about academic freedom. It’s about an unqualified professor teaching an unnecessary class. I don’t care if 20 people are swayed [by his political opinions]. It’s going to be 75 percent his fan club, anyway. What I care about is him being able to call himself an immigration law professor and use public resources to hurt my community.”

Suni has heard all the arguments and remains adamant that the school has a responsibility to uphold academic freedom and encourage intellectual diversity. She’s emphatic that Kobach’s student evaluations are without fault and, aside from a small contingent of student activists, she’s never received a complaint about his classroom conduct.

But the dean admits that she has mixed feelings about Kobach’s activities. She calls Kobach “less engaged” than other faculty members. She is aware that Kobach may have political aspirations that could draw him away from campus, and she fears Kobach’s political engagement could cause Hispanic and other minority students to look elsewhere when they’re applying to law school.

“But I don’t have any authority to say, ‘Kris, you can’t say what you choose to say.’ I may disagree with him, but I think his positions are supported by the work he’s done.”

Reading through the accusations on the yellow flier in his office, Kobach at first is lost for words. Then he counters the flier’s accusations one by one.

He defends the NSEERS program as a proven deterrent to terrorists — the program did result in the arrest of more than 12,000 violators of immigration law, according to the 9/11 Commission — and the BIA reform as having streamlined a hopelessly backlogged process. He scoffs at the argument that he’s underqualified. He may not have “years of experience practicing garden-variety law on behalf of aliens,” he says, but he has represented the government in high-profile immigration cases.

“That I, personally, have had some impact and am making some impact on immigration law bothers her, and she decided to lash out,” Kobach says of Allen-Piedra. “But I don’t think the law school is the appropriate place to do that. And if you’re going to say something, at least get the facts right.

“So when I read that, I just had to laugh,” he adds.

But today, that would be difficult. His voice is raspy. His eyes are tired. “I don’t get enough sleep,” he says, “and I’m swamped with all these requests.”

He will spend a week taking depositions in the Hazleton case in mid-December and also has an upcoming speaking engagement at a law school in Colorado. His in box is clogged with unread e-mails, and, at any moment, he could get a call from Fox News to appear on The O’Reilly Factor, as he has done more than a dozen times in the past 18 months.

He admits that he has a hard time saying no.

On January 9, 20 third-year law students will crowd into a small seminar room.

They will arrive with two 1,200-page casebooks on immigration process and nationality laws. Those who have researched their first-day assignment will have poured through more than 50 pages of the thick texts and digested a 10,000-word article from Time magazine titled “Who Left the Door Open?”

At 3:30 p.m. — or, perhaps, a few moments late, with his cell phone pressed to his ear — Kobach will stride into a full immigration law and policy class.

As he reviews the five-page syllabus, he may point out that the excerpts from “Who Are We?” were written by his former mentor at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. In the state legislation section, he might explain his work with Hethmon to formulate the Hazleton case briefs. Under the “Illegal Aliens and Education” section, he might update the class on his case against the state of Kansas.

He might explain that, “as opposed to a course that studies the trees of immigration law, this steps back and studies the whole forest.” At least that’s what he told the Pitch in December, while he was vacationing at his family’s condo in Vail, Colorado.

He might tell his students, as he told the Pitch, that the class will “explore the big legal issues that a typical immigration attorney would probably not come into contact with, but are the issues that will determine the future direction of the U.S.”

Then they’ll dive into the material.