Guadalupe made it clear that Joe Arpaio’s attacking anyone with brown skin

Post-Guadalupe, however, the controversial exercises ceased for four weeks. Despite the sheriff's bluster that there would soon be a sweep in Mesa, the MCSO gingerly returned to Hispanic-hunting with a low-profile operation on May 6 and 7 in the lily-white town of Fountain Hills, where Arpaio lives.

Maricopa County continues to await the sheriff's next move.

Guadalupe was where it became obvious that the MCSO was racially profiling. What happened in Guadalupe seemed so odious that it earned Arpaio's sweeps condemnation from a broad political spectrum.

Following up on his criticism of Arpaio during a César Chávez luncheon in March, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon addressed a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking for an investigation of the sheriff. The letter was dated April 4, the second day of the MCSO's Guadalupe sweep, and the MCSO's actions in Guadalupe figured prominently in the missive. Gordon cited TV news accounts from the day before that described Hispanics being stopped on sidewalks and asked to produce identification. The Arizona Legislature's Hispanic Caucus soon piled on with its own letter to the DOJ, seconding Gordon's call for a federal inquiry.

On April 9, the New York Times, citing Mayor Jimenez's confrontation with Arpaio, demanded a congressional investigation into the sheriff's anti-brown escapades, and suggested Arpaio himself be subpoenaed to testify before Congress. Normally reticent, fence-sitting pols such as Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox and Governor Janet Napolitano criticized the MCSO's patrols, and the governor stripped the MCSO of $1.6 million in state funds being used for the sweeps. Napolitano maintained the move was merely a budgetary shift, but most have read it as a swipe at the sheriff, including Arpaio himself. (Straight-faced, he denounced Napolitano's move as "dirty politics.")

Sources have informed New Times that the FBI has an agent investigating Arpaio and the MCSO for civil rights violations, though the FBI would neither confirm nor deny such reports.

Arpaio's self-inflicted wound in Guadalupe was made worse by his threat to exercise a quit clause in the Sheriff's Office's contract to provide law-enforcement services to the municipality, giving the town less than six months to find other police protection.

But Arpaio hasn't the power to exercise the blackmail on his own. Deanne Poulos, spokeswoman for the Board of Supervisors, said the board must authorize any such contract cancellation. Whatever the county does, Guadalupe is seeking alternatives to the MCSO, with which the town had been disappointed even before the sheriff came in and hassled practically anybody with brown skin.

According to Mayor Jimenez, Guadalupe Town Council members — and even former interim Town Manager Mark Johnson, who continues to be a vocal supporter of the Sheriff's Office — no one in city government requested the MCSO come into Guadalupe and do an anti-immigrant sweep. The town pays the Sheriff's Office almost $1.2 million a year for police protection, which, according to MCSO Lieutenant Ed Shepherd, who's in charge of the officers who work in Guadalupe, equals one deputy on the day shift and two at night (though he insists more are often on duty).

Much smaller crime-suppression patrols, incursions not obviously aimed at routing out immigrants at all costs, have been done "a couple of times a year," Shepherd said. When Shepherd advised the town on April 2 and 3 that such a patrol was to take place, Mayor Jimenez was skeptical, considering the recent anti-immigrant sweeps by the MCSO elsewhere in the Valley. But she accepted Shepherd's word in a conference call, sat in on by Johnson, that the MCSO was not after illegal immigrants.

"They told us they were doing a sweep because of recent graffiti," Jimenez stated on the night of April 3. "I asked them straight out, 'Lieutenant Shepherd, you are not coming to do an illegal alien search?' He said, 'I assure you we are not coming to do that.'"

For his part, Shepherd insists that no illegal-immigrant sweep took place on April 3 and 4 in Guadalupe. But an MCSO press release issued on the afternoon of April 3 screamed in bold typeface and capital letters about "illegal aliens," suggesting, spuriously, that illegal immigrants were responsible for recent violent crimes in Guadalupe, and that town officials had recently complained of illegal immigrants to the MCSO, thus prompting the April sweep.

Indeed, the sheriff's release was all about the subject of illegal immigration. It described the Guadalupe operation as part of the same effort that the MCSO had recently concluded at Cave Creek and Bell, and went on to denounce Hispanic activist and former state Senator Alfredo Gutierrez for remarks he'd supposedly made on Radio Campesina KNAI 88.3 FM. The release also excoriated Phoenix Mayor Gordon's speech at the César Chávez luncheon. Judging from the content of the release, the purpose of the massive Guadalupe operation, which involved more than 80 officers over the course of two days, was clear: a public show of force aimed at harassing the town's Hispanic population and scooping up as many undocumented individuals as possible.

The MCSO was more successful at the former than the latter. Out of 45 people arrested on Guadalupe's streets during those two days, only nine were supposedly in the country illegally, according to both the MCSO and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That's a paltry haul, considering the fact that there are spots in town where day laborers have been known to congregate. But then, with a press release and a press conference by the publicity-addicted Arpaio on April 3 and large MCSO vans parked in the Family Dollar lot, the sheriff had scared away most of the undocumented.