LAugust 2017 was supposed to be a festive season for Joe Arpaio. The former Maricopa district sheriff has just received Donald Trump’s first presidential pardon after being found guilty of criminal contempt of court.
The apology meant Arpaio was spared a criminal sentence for a federal offense that could include up to six months in prison. At a family dinner at a local restaurant the night he received it, he could barely touch mussels and calamari to his linguine – he was too busy posting congratulatory calls and inquiries in the media.
But Trump’s pardon could not use the political brand of Arpaio, then 85, formerly known as ‘America’s toughest sheriff’, nor would it help the president’s own long-term popularity in Arizona. The voters in Arizona changed quickly. The state’s extreme immigration laws and the application of Arpaio – which in both cases found certain aspects unconstitutional by federal courts – inspired an energetic, grassroots resistance movement that reformed the state’s politics.
Instead of rebuilding his reputation with the Trump pardon, Arpaio suffered a severe setback. “I now have two new titles,” Arpaio told us after being pardoned. ” The shameful sheriff ‘, it’s everywhere,’ ‘shameful sheriff. ‘And the other one is’ racist’. … I lost my title ‘America’s toughest sheriff’. ‘
Elected sheriff of the province of Maricopa – which includes the most populous counties of Phoenix and Arizona – in 1992, Arpaio was once one of the state’s most popular politicians.
He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father, Ciro Arpaio, an Italian citizen, emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, a time when many Americans viewed Italian immigrants as criminals, spreading disease, stealing jobs, shifting, black-hearted intruders.
As a child, Arpaio said, he ingested the anti-immigrant tarts and pretended to ignore them. That’s what you did at the time, he said.
The son of the immigrant grew up to be an unapologetic immigration enforcer, delivering the tough policies that support a growing base of Republican voters in Arizona. His delegates helped transfer tens of thousands of immigrants to Ice for deportation. They gathered day laborers, raided businesses to beat unauthorized employees of immigrants who worked with fake papers, and neighborhoods swarmed where they arrested undocumented drivers and passengers after they stopped cars has due to minor traffic violations.
His tactics helped cultivate a climate of poisoning against Mexican immigrants in the province of Maricopa, not unlike the anti-immigrant hatred he experienced firsthand. Arpaio launched an immigration hotline in 2007 “for citizens to report illegal aliens.” Sheriff’s office records show that the move unleashed a tidal wave of tips.
Residents of the province wanted Arpaio to investigate their immigrant neighbors and investigate a local McDonald’s where the staff spoke Spanish suspiciously. An anonymous line-up expressed a desire to ‘shoot’ a native Mexican activist ‘from Arpaio’s vocal critics,’ if I could get away with it. ‘
Arizona’s bitter immigration wars, and Arpaio’s role in them, helped its political brand – for a time. He was re-elected to a fifth term, his last, in 2012 when he was 80. But his immigration position led the next election cycle to his political downfall.
In 2016, a Latino-led grassroots movement, which spent the past decade protesting the sheriff’s immigration enforcement tactics, gathering evidence for lawsuits, enabling immigrant communities to know their rights and registering new voters, focused their energy on their largest mobilization system for voters. train. Young people, coming of age for fear that Arpaio’s delegates might deport their immigrant relatives, became eligible to vote and registered others.
At the same time, moderate Republicans, irritated by Arpaio’s rising legal costs and controversy, supported his Democratic challenger. Although Maricopa Provincial voters helped Trump win the presidency, they rejected their longtime sheriff.
Meanwhile, Arpaio had a direct setback. Over the years, Arpaio has ignored the orders of a federal judge banning his law enforcement agency from detaining undocumented immigrants who have not been suspected or charged with crimes – and have singled them out for deportation.
In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice announced plans to prosecute Arpaio for criminal contempt of court.
Trump’s forgiveness in 2017 provided relief and hope for a political rebirth. “He’s loved in Arizona,” Trump told reporters at Arpaio days after the pardon. “Sheriff Joe has protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe has been treated very unfairly by the Obama administration, especially before an election – an election he would have won. ”
However, it was not long before lawyers, newspaper editors and historians punished the reprimand, calling the pardon an abuse of power, an unpredictable offense, unconstitutional, a dog whistle to white supremacists in Trump’s base, chronism, or any other combination of these.
“Trump’s apology once again elevates Arpaio to the pantheon of those who view institutional racism as something that makes America great,” reads an editorial in the Republic of Arizona.
The same piece calls the conviction of a federal judge against Arpaio “a dose of hard-won justice for a too flamboyant sheriff who shows little respect for the constitution when he makes national news as an immigration hardliner – and leaves real crimes unresolved.”
Newspapers reported negative coverage of Arpaio years ago, including a federal lawsuit filed a decade earlier in which Latino motorists in Maricopa province showed that Arpaio’s immigration tactics violated their civil rights and resulted in racial profiling. has.
By September 2017, the controversy seemed to have left Arpaio surprised, angry and confused.
“I’m not a racist,” he told us. “You know what. Everyone knows that.”
When Arpaio now checks his email, he said, he finds a message calling him ‘Sicko’. Sadis. Corrupt bad criminal, ”and expressed cruel, violent wishes. In another letter, anti-Italian insults are used to address him as a “fat, Greaseball Dago piece of shit”, referring to the author’s desire to one day ‘piss on your WOP grave’ .
In January 2018, Arpaio has announced that he will run for an open U.S. Senate seat this year. But he lost his once loyal Republican base. He finished third out of three candidates in the IDP primary.
Although Arpaio was ousted during the 2018 election, his legacy continued to galvanize activists and voters. From 2014 to 2018, Latino voters in Arizona rose from 32% to 49%. In those four years, some Latino activists who organized against Arpaio and Arizona’s wave of extreme immigration laws won seats as Democrats in the Arizona State House and Republican majority won. The Latin vote helped Democrat Kyrsten Cinema defeat Republican Martha McSally for the Senate seat that Arpaio wanted.
Some organizers on the ground attributed the increase in Latino turnout, in part because voters had seen Arpaio’s defeat two years earlier.
Alejandra Gomez, a Mexican-American activist at Living United for Change in Arizona who helped mobilize voters in 2016 and 2018, said Arpaio lost and an initiative to raise the minimum wage pass helped for the first time to convince the voters the next election cycle that the a vote can make a difference.
‘Every step of the way we said we were going to fight for our community. At that point – we actually delivered, ‘Gomez said.
The same momentum, as Gomez predicted at the time, will spill over into the next presidential cycle in 2020.
“We have shown that it is possible to defeat someone like Arpaio, so it is also possible to defeat someone like Trump,” she said.
The political ambitions of Arpaio were not over yet. In 2020, he ran for his old post as sheriff in the Republican election. He traversed the province in a campaign bus with a photo of him with Trump and the slogan: “Make Maricopa Province safe again.” The race was close, but again he lost.
Meanwhile, grassroots organizers who have learned how to inspire voters in their fight against Arpaio have chosen their energy to mobilize colored voters.
Arizona voters elected a Democratic president by a narrow margin for the second time since 1952, aiding Joe Biden’s victory and Trump’s defeat. Democrat Mark Kelly won his race for a U.S. Senate seat.
Maria Castro, a 27-year-old Mexican American activist who first started registering new Latin voters in Maricopa province as a high schooler in 2011, noted that the people whose doors were knocked on in 2020 were extraordinarily eager to voice.
“This time, people were like, ‘Yeah, we’m ready to get rid of Trump,'” Castro told us. “I think the defeat of Arpaio made it tangible that we could defeat the villains who haunt our dreams.”
Arpaio, now 88, may have lost his last three races, but he hopes the same will not apply to the man he calls his hero, Trump. “I hit, got straight and ran again,” Arpaio told us. “So I want to see him run again.”
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Jude Joffe-Block and Terry Greene Sterling are the authors of DRIVING WHILE BROWN: Sheriff Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance, a new book that tells the story of Arpaio’s rise and fall as the sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county and the determined Latino resistance that fought its unconstitutional policing. Driving While Brown is published by the University of California Press and is available on April 20th.