Order 1.4 was confusing and "written in a negative," Gordon said to New Times in January. It gave anti-immigration extremists "sort of a foundation to argue we are a sanctuary city. That we don't cooperate with the government."
The policy had to be changed, "but I knew everyone was going to be pissed at me," Gordon said, referring both to the aforementioned extremists and immigrant rights supporters.
Michael Ratcliff
DPS' immigrant booking room.
Michael Ratcliff
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The new policy, in which police ask the immigration status of everyone arrested, went into effect in May.
Mesa, the Valley's second-largest city, announced in July it would adopt similar changes.
To immigrants, the policy changes in combination with ICE's beefed-up deportation system have been a disaster.
At the Light and Life Day Labor Center in Chandler, undocumented workers say Arpaio is only one source of their troubles these days.
"Todo policía," says a man wearing a New York Yankees cap: "all the police."
Sergio Zelya, 56, a legal immigrant from El Salvador waiting for work with a group of undocumented Mexicans, says the increased deportations result in heartbreak and financial problems as family members become separated.
"It's different in L.A.," the California transplant says in English. "Here in Arizona is the problem. Everyone's scared."
Elias Bermudez, who runs the Centro de Ayuda immigrant-services company in Phoenix, says that whether it is the Sheriff's Office, DPS, or municipal police, "everybody is pushing hard to see how far they can go" with immigration enforcement.
"Truly, we have now created a police state in regard to undocumented people," Bermudez says. "And we are all going to suffer. We are losing clients, losing workers, losing friends, losing family."
Taxpayers will end up forking over big bucks from the inevitable lawsuits over civil rights abuses and, even though no police agency checks the status of crime victims or witnesses, the "chilling effect" on victims predicted by some in the Hispanic community has settled in, Bermudez says.
"All of our people right now mistrust every police department, regardless of what city it's from," he says.
Bermudez cynically notes that Phoenix's Chief Harris supposedly wants to hear from people who think they have been slighted by the system.
"Well, if they're in Mexico, how are they going to report?" he says.
Bermudez has a point, especially when it comes to possible abuses by county deputies who have been ordered by Joe Arpaio to go after illegal immigrants as aggressively as possible.
For example, take the case of Miguel Molina-Sepulveda, the man who was detained because he did not show ID after a deputy noticed he was not wearing a seat belt.
According to the September 4 report written by MCSO deputy R. Armendariz: "I saw the passenger sitting in the back bench seat sitting up towards the front and leaning on the passenger seat not wearing his seat belt."
He later writes that he charged Molina-Sepulveda with "non-driver failed to provide ID," based on the alleged seat belt violation.
But in Arizona, backseat passengers over the age of 16 are not required to wear seat belts.
When Captain Paul Chagolla, an Arpaio spokesman, was reminded of this, he responded by e-mail: "The records speak for themselves, and the individuals have the opportunity to face the court to determine guilt or innocence."
But it did not turn out that way. After Molina-Sepulveda spent four days in jail, the charges were dropped. Because of the ICE hold put on him, Molina-Sepulveda undoubtedly was deported. Odds are he will never file a complaint about the apparently invalid arrest.
A second report by Armendariz from the sheriff's Cave Creek sweep in early September details a similarly questionable arrest. About 6:30 a.m., an hour before Molina-Sepulveda's arrest, the deputy pulled over a white Ford "work truck" towing a generator on a trailer that had no registration or brake lights.
"During the traffic stop, I saw the backseat passenger sitting on the right side was not wearing his seat belt," Armendariz wrote. "I asked the rear passenger, a Hispanic male, for his identification and he told me he did not have one."
The man gave several names to the deputy, and a computer check turned up nothing under any of them. Armendariz listed him as "John Doe" in his report and arrested him. The Sheriff's Office put an ICE hold on the man — meaning he must have been later deported — and counted him in a press release as one of the 11 illegal immigrants busted that day.
John Doe will not be complaining, either.
Not that Arpaio or his supporters care about such troublesome details as the unfair arrest of an illegal immigrant. To them, the point is that he is out of here.
Though the tide has clearly turned toward more enforcement, most local police department officials believe the business of doing immigration work must be conducted with extreme caution to avoid bigoted behavior — and wasting time. The theory is, most of the effort should go toward targeting immigrants who commit egregious crimes or are members of organized crime syndicates.
Yet because it is average field officers who are collectively responsible for the most deportations, Phoenix's new policy is already under revision to deter crusading cops bent on hassling immigrants in lieu of normal police work.
