That’s my favorite quote from my interview with Tara Setmayer today.

I love interviewing Tara about her more than two-year-long struggle to get Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean out of prison because it’s so obviously personal to her. Those kinds of stories such as the one about the former border patrol agents who were convicted of shooting a drug smuggler and trying to cover it up often yield a lot of emotion, which makes for good writing. She promised “Nacho” Ramos she’d get him out of jail one day and she’s proud she was able to keep it. So it really helps that she’s such an ardent advocate — she goes out of her way to help me tell the tale.

Not that Tara, who is a media liaison for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, isn’t usually accessible and helpful. In fact, she’s one of the best I’ve worked with. But there’s a reason we often call a media rep for a congressman a flack. They don’t like it — it’s a really pejorative term — but it fits. Their job is to take flack from the Fourth Estate, protect their boss from us hacks (see? I don’t mind calling myself a hack, but then we reporters get told “no” so often we tend to be humble. Just kidding).

But when it came to Ramos and Compean, this was definitely personal for Tara. As I’ve written before she comes from a law-enforcement family and she thought these cops were railroaded. At the most they should have been subjected to administrative discipline, not 10 to 11 years in prison, in her opinion.

On Tuesday, as word got out that they were getting home confinement nearly a month before they were due to be released I scrambled to get in touch. My first attempt to contact Tara led me straight to voicemail. So I tried e-mail. Like me she’s tethered closer to the e-mail than the phone. She e-mailed me back that she was in the air flying back from Phoenix to El Paso where the Ramoses live. See what I mean? Not many in her position would have responded like that.

But later when I tried getting in touch we kept missing each other. She was very busy doing interviews with the media and one of the times I tried calling her I looked up and saw Nacho’s wife, Monica, on Lou Dobbs’ show. Oh, that’s why I can’t get her, I thought.

Unfortunately, I had to duck out of work early yesterday to get to a doctor’s appointment that I missed anyway, darn it. When I got back to my e-mail I saw that she had tried to contact me to no avail.

Well, I wasn’t going to let it go. This story’s just too good and I wanted to get it so I tried again Wednesday and when I got her she was about to board her flight home so we agreed to talk later in the afternoon.

The reason I was so persistent is because this is very much her story as well. On just her first week on the job working for Rohrabacher she heard about the plight of the agents and took it upon herself, with her boss’ hearty encouragement, to crusade for these two men, especially the emotional Nacho who apparently needed her help more than the cooler Compean.

The worst part of my job are all the goodies I have to leave out of a story because there’s not enough space in the paper. (The copy editors already should have shot me for the gynormous block of copy I just sent them for our print edition). But, hell, that’s why God invented blogs, right?

So here are some of the extra highlights from my interview with Tara:

Ramos apparently had his fill of prison food, that’s for sure. But he had to wait for good food. Part of the rules of his release called for him to literally get the hell out of Dodge. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly out of jail. Ramos, Setmayer, Monica and Ramos’ attorney weren’t allowed to make any stops after his release. They had to go straight to the airport. But when they got there the first order of business was getting to the terminal where there was a Wendy’s restaurant.

“The first thing he wanted was a Wendy’s double cheeseburger,” Setmayer said, laughing. “So there he is at 10:30 in the morning — there’s Nacho chomping down a nice Wendy’s double cheeseburger and a Frosty.” Now that’s the breakfast of, well, not champions… maybe Homer Simpson?

“You’d thought he was eating filet mignon,” Setmayer said, still laughing. “Little did I know at the time that was just the beginning of Nacho eating every kind of food he could get his hands on in the next eight hours.”

And there was plenty waiting for him when he finally got home.

Monica had refused to celebrate any holidays until her husband got home. So one room was set up for Christmas and another was decorated for the 40th birthday he marked in prison last week. After it took about 90 minutes for prison officials to outfit Ramos with his electronic ankle bracelet (I know, insert punchline here on how many bureaucrats it takes to fill out the paperwork to change the light bulb…), the family got down to serious barbecuing of steaks flown in by Edd Hendee, Ramos’ spiritual advisor and well-known Texas restaurateur. Meanwhile, Monica and their attorney did interviews for Lou Dobbs and others at Monica’s nearby sister’s house.

“Toward the end of the night, things started winding down and they had a birthday cake and sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ ” Setmayer recalled. “One of Ramos’ relatives can really sing so Monica wanted her to sing to Nacho. So they gathered around and she said, ‘This is a song Monica dedicated to Nacho.’ She sang ‘Hero’ by Mariah Carey and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.”

I can only imagine…

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