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

On a strip of earth just outside the Family Dollar's fenced-in lot, angry residents, pro-immigrant activists, and the curious gathered. They held homemade signs that read "Arpaio go home" and "Arpaio is the only illegal here" and "Leave us alone, MCSO."

As the night wore on, word circulated that large numbers of ordinary residents were being harassed, as those who were stopped by deputies joined the protest and explained what had happened to them.

"They're targeting all of us who have brown skin. Period," complained Elena Osuna, who identified herself as a full-blooded Yaqui Indian. Osuna said she had been stopped by sheriff's deputies and asked for identification as she walked toward the Family Dollar.

"I was minding my own business coming over here," she explained. "What are they going to give me a ticket for? For walking?"

Asked if she thought the deputies knew the difference between Mexican Americans and members of the Pascua Yaqui tribe, Osuna shrugged, "Apparently not. They stopped me."

Andrew Sanchez, a member of the community-based Guadalupe Public Safety Committee, which had been looking into getting rid of the MCSO as Guadalupe's police force before the April 3 sweep, showed reporters his ticket for "improper use of horn." What was happening was, the MCSO was stopping and citing anybody who drove by the protest and honked an automobile horn in solidarity.

"I actually own my own property, and I live right here," said Sanchez, pointing to his home. "I'm not annoying anyone."

More people told of being ticketed for the same reason. Weeks later, when Guadalupe's chief magistrate, Robert Melton, was asked about tickets for horn-honking, he acknowledged that he'd never seen such citations before. The 120 tickets issued that night went through Valley Justice Courts outside of Guadalupe, though Melton told New Times he had requested that the tickets be transferred to his court.

Up on Avenue del Yaqui, unmarked SUVs and sedans pulled over vehicles so frequently that observers who were there to videotape the stops didn't even need to follow in their cars. They only had to wait on a corner for the next one to occur. The mostly volunteer videographers came from local civil rights organizations, such as Copwatch. Though a few individuals, like Phoenix activist Dennis Gilman, were independent.

The idea was to document as many stops as possible and, by their mere presence, force the MCSO to do everything by the book. The watchers also interviewed drivers after they were stopped and ticketed. Later, their footage was turned over to lawyers working for Respect/Respeto or other immigrant rights organizations.

"The cases that are documented are far different than what the sheriff reports," said Respect/Respeto spokeswoman Lydia Guzman. "These are people who are either citizens or legal permanent residents stopped for some petty reason. As an example, the deputies would say there were kids bouncing up and down in the back seat, when in fact the person had no kids in the car. Or [they'd] say tail lights didn't work when, in fact, they worked great. You know, made-up reasons."

Another person watching was longtime community activist Socorro Bernasconi, whose husband, Santino Bernasconi, is a deacon at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church and the president/CEO of Centro de Amistad, a nonprofit drug-and-alcohol-treatment center.

In an April 14 letter to Mayor Gordon, thanking him for asking the Justice Department to investigate Arpaio's sweeps, Socorro Bernasconi listed several incidents she witnessed that night, along with the names and phone numbers of those detained. She also described how one deputy ordered her away from a scene, threatened to arrest her, then grabbed her arm and led her from the area.

The letter told of an older Hispanic resident so frightened by the MCSO officers who'd stopped him that he couldn't stop shaking. Another Hispanic man was stopped by the MCSO and (just as Guzman also described) was told his brake lights weren't working. After the stop, Bernasconi said, she watched as the man stepped on his brakes to test the lights.

"They were working just fine!" she wrote. "If this isn't harassment, I don't know what is!"

Bernasconi detailed how her nephew, also an American citizen, was pulled over by an "unmarked Ford blazer" and threatened with $1,200 in fines by a deputy. Clearly, it was a case of racial profiling, she fumed.

Under the cover of such petty traffic stops, the MCSO sought to question detainees about their immigration status. As Phoenix Mayor Gordon said in an interview with New Times after the Guadalupe operation, the parts of the Valley picked for MCSO sweeps have been where folks' complexions are closer in color to copper than ivory. (This, of course, was before Arpaio tried to save face by conducting a sweep in Fountain Hills.)

"Arpaio's chosen these areas because that's where the illegal immigrants are," insisted Gordon. "That's where the Hispanic community is — 36th Street and Thomas, Cave Creek and Bell, Guadalupe. Those are predominantly minority, predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods."

Gordon is correct in his assessment of the MCSO's strategy in terrorizing these communities. But one reason the strategy backfired in Guadalupe is that nearly everybody in the town is either Mexican-American or Native American, specifically Yaqui. In the 2000 census, only 13.9 percent of Guadalupe residents identified themselves as foreign-born. Many in Guadalupe can trace their families back several generations to the city's founders, and the town's denizens are, in general, less transient than other residents of Maricopa County. It is not uncommon, for instance, to hear of Guadalupanos who still reside in the same house where they grew up.