The Selma of Immigrants' Rights

By Andrew Stelzer, In These Times. Posted November 25, 2008.

Anti-immigrant cowboy

"Sheriff Joe" first gained fame after he created a tent-city prison in 1993 to prove that he could always find room for criminals, rather than release them early because of a lack of space.

In 110-degree heat, prisoners wear county-issued pink underwear, are allowed only a handful of educational TV channels, and are denied access to coffee, cigarettes, salt and pepper, and other vices that cost taxpayer money.

In 1995, Arpaio started a male chain gang, and an all-female chain gang soon followed. Sheriff Joe's prison philosophy -- "If you don't like it, don't come back" -- made him a hero with the tough-on-crime crowd.

When Arpaio decided to make immigrants his new target in 2005, he adopted some of the more extreme views of the anti-immigrant movement. Press releases from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office refer to people smuggled into the country as "co-conspirators." It's a charge the office has levied on undocumented immigrants since 2005, when Arizona's human smuggling law, the toughest in the country, went into effect.

The MCSO has arrested more than 1,000 people under the law, which allows for Class 4 (two and a half years in prison for the first offense) felony charges to be filed against both the coyote -- who smuggles people in -- and those who are being transported.

In 2006, Arpaio had 160 of his deputies trained by ICE. The training, conducted under a federal agreement called 287-G, allowed deputies to arrest anyone they think is illegal and then refer them to ICE. If the deputy who pulls over a suspect isn't trained under 287-G, he or she can call for backup, so that a qualified officer comes to the scene.

Maricopa County isn't the only local U.S. agency training under 287-G -- there are 63 active agreements with state and local agencies nationwide -- but it's certainly the one most aggressively using it. Out of the 840 officers nationwide who have undergone 287-G training, nearly 20 percent are from Maricopa County.

Chief among Arpaio's enemies is Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who wrote the FBI and Justice Department in April, asking them to investigate the sheriff for racial profiling and other civil rights abuses. (Arpaio told In These Times that the letter was "garbage.")

In response, anti-immigrant forces launched an effort in May to recall Gordon, but they failed to collect enough signatures to make the November ballot.

Gordon says Arpaio's consistent re-election over the past 16 years and high approval ratings are irrelevant.

"Whether the majority of the people support that individual is not the question with respect to whether the actions are legal," Gordon says. "The sheriff shouldn't be measuring what he's doing on the basis of polls."

Gordon says that a third of his community is Latino, and "if [the people are so] terrorized, legal or not legal, that they are afraid to come out and testify because the sheriff is going to arrest them, it is counterproductive to the safety of this community."

Magdalena Schwartz, assistant pastor at Iglesia Communidad de Vida church in Mesa, recounts stories about her parishners, many of whom are undocumented. There's the mother of six honor-roll students who was held in detention for three days, unable to call and tell her family where she was. There's the 17-year-old son of a permanent U.S. resident, ready to graduate high school, who was sent back to Guatemala, where he hadn't been since he was 3.

Worst of all was the girl who called the police to report that her boyfriend was abusing her. The police arrested her undocumented boyfriend -- and also the girl.

"They asked [her] for ID, and she showed a Mexican ID, and they immediately said 'You are illegal here. OK, let's go,' " Schwartz recalls. "So what kind of confidence [can] we have now to call the police or the sheriff to report a crime?"

Operation Endgame

Compounding the sheriff's sweeps is that the MCSO hasn't collected any data about the detained. Sheriff's office spokesman Paul Chagalla told In These Times that the department doesn't keep data on the ethnicity of arrestees.

It wasn't until the fifth "crime suppression operation" that the MCSO began compiling arrest logs from each operation -- a move that came only after repeated demands for information by the press and the public. That lack of hard numbers presents obstacles for legal tactics like a class-action lawsuit filed in July by the ACLU, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and others that charges the MCSO with racial profiling.

"We have to be really smart about collecting the data that we need in order to put a stop to this," says Lydia Guzman, who founded Respect/Respeto -- an organization with a 24-hour hotline for immigrants. Since its founding in January, Guzman's group has been receiving up to 50 calls per day.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, arizona, arpaio, maricopa county

Andrew Stelzer, a freelance journalist in Oakland, Calif., is a producer at “Making Contact,” a weekly public affairs radio program.

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