PHOENIX — Eric’s Family BBQ is among seven Arizona restaurants to appear on Yelp’s Top 100 BBQ spots in the U.S.

The restaurant, located in Avondale at Indian School Road and El Mirage Road, ranks No. 3 on the list. It offers a menu ranging from brisket and pulled pork to burgers and chicken sandwiches with side selections of fries, baked Mac N’ Cheese potato salad, corn, etc. If customers want something sweet to end their meal, the restaurant has a slice of pecan pie and banana pudding as dessert options.

Little Miss BBQ – Sunnyslope

The 20th-ranked restaurant on the list, Little Miss BBQ’s, located at N. 7th St. and Townley Avenue in Phoenix, offers a menu with many BBQ-meats such as turkey, sliced brisket and pork ribs. They have a selection of sandwiches that includes pulled pork, brisket and others, all served on a noble bread roll. The menu also offers a selection of burritos such as the green chile burrito.

Caldwell County BBQ

Caldwell County BBQ, located at Nunnely Road and Power Road in Gilbert, made the list at No. 37. The Texas-inspired restaurant offers a selection of meats like their ‘El General Paton, a sandwich with one-third of a pound of brisket and pork, with sausage. The restaurant serves made-to-scratch like the Lemon Poppyseed coleslaw and Caldwell potato salad.

Smoky Mo

Smoky Mo in Tucson makes the list at No. 54. Opened since 2018, the BBQ place menu offers many sandwiches, burgers, wings, ribs, tacos, etc. Sides include fries, coleslaw, collard greens and more. The restaurant offers a rotating list of daily specials, which include brisket fries, Kansas City fried catfish and half-pound burnt ends.

Holy Smokin’ Butts BBQ

Another Tucson restaurant, Holy Smokin’ Butts BBQ makes it on the list at No. 64. This family-owned restaurant is also Texas-inspired, and it’s been open since 2016. Holy Smokin’ Butts offers wood fired beef brisket, pulled pork, pork ribs, sausage, turkey, tri-tip, along with a specialty blend hamburger.

Word of Mouth Grill

Word of Mouth Grill in Tempe ranks No. 71 on the Yelp list. Another family-owned joint, Word of Mouth Grill is located at the corner of McClintock Drive and Elliot Avenue. Meats are cooked on a double chamber smoker and an open flame Santa Maria grill with mesquite wood. While mesquite smoked meats are all popular on the menu at Word of Mouth Grill, the restaurant also features a unique vegan pulled pork.

Colt Grill

Colt Grill is the final Arizona restaurant to appear on the list, ranked at No. 80. Located at the heart of Sedona, it’s hard to beat the atmosphere at this popular BBQ joint. On top of an extensive menu of burgers and smoked meats, Colt Grill offers events such as whiskey tastings and meat smoking classes.

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ARIZONA — Former Arizona Cardinals RB Jonathan Ward is in the Steel City – for now.

Ward was invited to Pittsburgh Steelers camp on a tryout basis, according to All Steelers’ Noah Strackbein.

“The older you are, the less time you have in the league,” Ward told Strackbein. “At the same time, it’s just football. Coming out and sharing the gems that I’ve picked up over the years with the younger guys, it’s just a blessing. And that also gives me an advantage too because you get a little bit of a player and a coach in the same aspect.”

Ward – 26 – entered the NFL as an undrafted free agent in 2020 with the Cardinals. He remained with the team through November of 2022, where he was released after landing on injured reserve with a hamstring injury.

Ward eventually signed with the New York Jets’ practice squad a week after leaving Arizona, only to be released a week following that. Ward has since then bounced up and down off the Tennessee Titans’ practice squad. He was a free agent entering this offseason.

Ward has played in a combined 15 games the last two seasons, logging just ten total touches on the offensive side of the ball during that stretch. He’s primarily carved out a role on special teams, playing more than 40% of snaps on that side of the ball in each of his last three stops.

Strackbein noted Ward has “impressed” at camp, displaying burst, toughness and blocking abilities.

With Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren establishing a nice 1-2 punch in Pittsburgh’s backfield, Ward may again have to show value as a core special teams player to remain with the Steelers moving forward.

Opinion: Arizona lawmakers pushing a ballot measure to crack down on illegal immigration aren’t telling the truth on what it does.

The Arizona lawmakers pushing for a Texas-style law authorizing local officers to go after illegal border crossers insist nobody will be racially profiled because of it.

That’s a myth and they know it.

There’s no such thing as an immigration crackdown without racial profiling — not in Arizona or any place else in America.

Reality is that most asylum seekers and border crossers fleeing poverty and other calamities come from countries where darker skins predominate.

What the ballot measure would do

Until a few years ago, most people crossing the southern border came from Mexico.

Now they’re mainly from elsewhere, including Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Turkey and other war-zone countries like Ukraine.

Thus, putting a target on these immigrants is a target on anyone with dark skin, unless enforcement is geographically limited to the borderline, which the Arizona proposal doesn’t do.  

The Republican-sponsored House Concurrent Resolution 2060 is largely similar to the legislation that Gov. Katie Hobbs recently vetoed. They now want to skip the governor and send it directly to the November ballot to rally voters against Democrats whom they blame for the uptick of border crossers.

The Arizona proposal, which mimics Texas’ immigration law being litigated in federal court, would make it a state crime to enter the country illegally, punishable with jail time and longer prison sentences for repeat offenders.

It’s also stacked with a range of penalties designed to crack down on illegal immigration anywhere in the state — not just at the border, as proponents maintain.

Those include:

• Making it a state crime to submit false documents in applying for federal, state or local benefits,
• Requiring agencies to use the federal E-Verify program to determine public benefits eligibility, and
• Imposing a minimum 10-year prison sentence on adults caught selling fentanyl that results in a death.

Supporters insist it’s about border security

“This is truly a border security bill,” Republican Sen. President Warren Petersen told Fox News, insisting that it is different than the infamous Senate Bill 1070 that led to racial profiling of Latinos and which cost Arizona hundreds of millions of tourism dollars and legal fees.

What Petersen says and what the proposal spells out don’t entirely match.

“It allows law enforcement to, if they see somebody crossing the border illegally, they’re able to arrest them, detain them and put them through the judicial process,” Petersen said.

GOP looks for job security: In fake border bill

That’s right. But a crucial detail he and others leave out of their media soundbites is the fact that the proposal doesn’t specifically limit law enforcement along Arizona’s 370-mile shared border with Mexico.

Technically, any law enforcement officer anywhere in the state could turn “any traffic stop into an immigration interrogation,” as Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz puts it.

Republican Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes admitted as much during this week’s legislative hearing, saying there’s a lot of questions to be answered.

Speaking on behalf of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, Rhodes said border counties would bear the brunt of arresting undocumented immigrants but still wouldn’t say enforcement is strictly limited to the border.

This is important because border enforcement — at the border — is Republicans’ selling point to voters, leaving out the sweeping ramifications this kind of law would inflict on Arizona’s labor market, immigrant families of mixed-immigration status and Latinos in general.

These provisions would target brown people

Nobody can deny that SB 1070 put a target on brown people. Police data and court documents prove it.

Anecdotally, countless U.S. citizens were targeted under the “show me your papers” provision of SB 1070. Some of them told lawmakers as much, yet Republicans dismissed the narrative as nothing more than politicking.

Yet, proponents can’t admit the fact that the legislation as written gives local enforcement anywhere in the state the authority to enforce immigration law and that it would be up to them to carry it out — and how.

No word yet on how much of taxpayers’ money it would take to enforce any of the provisions.

Or on how local law enforcement would differentiate illegal border crossers from legal residents and U.S. citizens making a wrong turn in traffic.

What would give local cops the “probable cause” to question the immigration status of somebody they encounter other the initial suspicions because of their skin color?      

Presumably, none of the supporters have ever been racially profiled and truly believe the practice doesn’t exist. But these people are smart enough to know exactly what has happened under SB 1070.

They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re counting on Arizonans to merely take their word for what they say the ballot measure would do — whether that’s true or not.

Elvia Díaz is editorial page editor for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Reach her at 602-444-8606 or elvia.diaz@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter, @elviadiaz1.