Arpaio’s Busts of Illegals at Popular Valley Water Parks Are All Wet

Russell Pearce, the powerful East Valley lawmaker, had this to say to the New York Times in June 2008:

"It's about time and it's great. It's kind of like the shot fired at Concord in the Revolutionary War, the shot heard around the world."

State Senator Pearce was referring to Maricopa County sheriff's deputies raiding two popular water parks, Waterworld Safari in Glendale and Golfland SunSplash in Mesa, a few days earlier.

Heavily armed deputies executed search and arrest warrants at the parks after an investigation that began with a tip from a former Waterworld manager.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio's P.R. team teased local media before the raids, hinting of something juicier than yet another high-profile haul of mobile corn vendors, gardeners, and car-wash employees.

Perhaps this would lead to the first case under Arizona's strict new employer-sanctions law, which had gone into effect that January. Going after local employers, especially in this crippled economy, would've made for a hot story.

Pearce, who once was Arpaio's chief deputy, had pushed the controversial Legal Arizona Workers Act through the 2007 Legislature. Then-Governor Janet Napolitano surprised many observers by signing the measure into law.

Considered the toughest statute of its kind in the nation, it allows the government to suspend or revoke the licenses of Arizona business owners who "knowingly" or "intentionally" hire undocumented immigrants.

Police agencies, legal scholars, and immigration experts nationwide were keeping close watch on Arizona (really, on Maricopa County) to see how and when the highly publicized sanctions law would first be used.

The raids, on June 10, 2008, ended with the arrests of just nine suspected aliens, on charges of identity theft and forgery. Deputies detained a few others suspected of being in this country illegally.

The arrested were taken to the Maricopa County Jail to await disposition of their criminal cases and, then, their seemingly inevitable deportation to Mexico.

Ordinarily, they would have been called good citizens — except they weren't legally in the United States.

None of the nine workers were "dangerous" to the community, and none had warrants on other charges (though one did have a drunken-driving history going back to the early 1990s). Most were raising families in the Valley and had worked for years without incident at Waterworld. A few even owned homes here.

None of that mattered to Joe Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. The duo, who have joined forces loudly and repeatedly on the illegal-immigrant issue, held a triumphant press conference a few hours after the raids.

"A new chapter in the enforcement of immigration law in Arizona has begun," Thomas said.

That chapter was to be the use of the new employer-sanctions law in tandem with toughened identity-theft statutes written, at least in part, with undocumented workers in mind. In this case, prosecutors would allege that the Waterworld employees used forged and stolen identities to get and keep their jobs.

Joe Arpaio claimed at the press conference that preliminary scanning of personnel records seized from Waterworld's Mesa-based parent company, Golfland Entertainment Inc., had revealed more than 100 "suspicious" Social Security numbers.

"We will continue to see if the owners of these [water-park] establishments have violated any of the employer-sanctions laws," the sheriff said, "or if they have conspired on these criminal violations."

So this wasn't at all the shot heard 'round the world that Russell Pearce had hoped for, but just another small-fry, Arpaio-generated immigration/ID theft case?

Thomas conceded that he wasn't ready to call it an employer-sanctions case but said his prosecutors were working on it.

Phoenix news that night showed a few forlorn Latinas in Waterworld golf shirts getting led away in handcuffs by deputies wearing sunglasses.

Within days, Thomas announced a 41-count grand jury indictment against the nine employees. But he remained evasive about seeking sanctions against Golfland Entertainment, which at the time owned three water parks in the Valley — the third was Big Surf in Tempe — and six in California.

(Golfland Entertainment sold Waterworld to an Australian firm late last year. Its new owners have renamed it Phoenix Wet 'N' Wild.)

Andrew Thomas never did make a case against parent company Golfland Entertainment. Despite the hullabaloo and expectations after the new law went into effect, his office still has not filed any sanctions in cases against employers, nor has any of Arizona's 14 other county attorneys.

One likely reason, according to University of Arizona researcher Judy Gans, is the depressed economic climate.

"Those industries that rely heavily on low-skilled, often illegal-immigrant, workers has been disproportionately impacted," she says. "There are very few hires who would be covered by the law, so it's not surprising that there hasn't been a lot of action around the law. All of that may change when the economy begins to recover."

Instead of the owners, prosecutors soon turned their attention to Waterworld's food-service and catering manager, Lessie Juanita Serrano, who had hired and supervised some of the arrested employees.

Last December 18, after some noteworthy legal twists and turns, a grand jury indicted Serrano on charges of aggravated identity theft (the equivalent under Arizona law of committing manslaughter) and hindering prosecution.

"[Serrano] actively encouraged, aided, and abetted the workers' identity theft as an accomplice," a prosecutor wrote in a later motion.