Arpaio Awaits Justice as Election Looms

An incredulous judge challenged this romantic tale of law enforcement.

"The saturation patrols we have discussed in this lawsuit are not ones that involved targeting a drop house?" the judge asked Sands.

Chris Whetzel

www.msco.org

Joe Arpaio: "Well, you know, they call you KKK. They did me. I think it's an honor."

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More About

• Joe Arpaio
• Lorena Escamilla
• Brian Sands
• Immigration
• Illegal Immigration and Deportation

The chief responded that he did not recall details.

Which is not to say that there were no details.

In sworn testimony spread out over three weeks, there was not a single example of a drop house liberated in any sweep.

With good reason.

New Times investigated the ransoms and terror of drop houses, from law enforcement's perspective ("Seized," Monica Alonzo, August 12, 2010). Sheriff Arpaio's office simply wasn't a factor, then, now, or ever in the busting of drop houses. One Phoenix police officer actually assigned to investigating drop houses referred to Arpaio's deputies as "scrappers." They cleaned up whatever scraps they ran across, meaning they took only cases that required no investigation.

In the deluge of exhibits that accompanied the case, there was a piece of paper that captured the reality.

According to the sheriff's own file, "Enforcement Support Division, Operation Intel," from January 2008 to June 2009 (18 months of data from the Southeast Valley), Arpaio's men identified just four drop houses. In the same time frame, ICE eliminated 158 drop houses in the same corridor.

The courthouse fiction went beyond the obvious record.

Sheriff's deputies maintained that their dragnets could rescue those held in drop houses who were let out for the day to pay off their ransom debts by working as lawn workers.

In other words, instead of extorting several thousands of dollars from an immigrant's family in Mexico, the deputies alleged the smugglers let their victims out to work for less than minimum wage. And then, the poor Mexicans returned to their vicious captors after a long day of mowing Bermuda grass.

The deputies simply made it up.

Sal Reza, an immigrant rights activist with Puente, once oversaw Macehuallis, an umbrella group that worked on behalf of day laborers. Reza spent every day for nine years with day laborers and simply did not see kidnapped men showing up for odd jobs.

"It's not common at all," was his skeptical observation.

As the trial unfolded, police officers throughout Arizona began enforcing 1070 as a result of rulings in other courtrooms. The law mandates that any officer having any contact with any person suspiciously brown must inquire about his or her immigration status.

It smells of something unripe that Sheriff Arpaio stands accused of offending this statute's apartheid sensibility.

The Sheriff's Office, top to bottom, embraced the cultural contempt of immigrants.

Sergeant Brett Palmer, a supervisor in the Human Smuggling Unit, pulled together research for his boss.

In June 2009, he e-mailed up the chain of command data that he claimed was from the Los Angeles Times: "Forty percent of all workers in Los Angeles County are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card. Over two-thirds of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages. In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish."

Sergeant Palmer explained in court that he sent this data out for "training purposes."

This "data" wasn't published in the Los Angeles Times. This race-baiting data was concocted, pure and simple.

And even if the data wasn't made up — which it was — how is it the least bit relevant to immigration enforcement?

Palmer circulated wildly exaggerated anti-Mexican propaganda that could only fuel racial animus in the Sheriff's Office.

In fact, the Los Angeles Times already had debunked this "data" as a chain-letter-style hoax before Palmer distributed it.

This wasn't the end of the sergeant's peculiar management style.

Palmer believed, erroneously, that being in the country illegally was a federal crime. He also believed that overstaying a visa is a federal crime. It isn't. Palmer just copied Internet gibberish and passed it along to his bosses so that they could better understand the law. Palmer cited a federal statute that did not exist. The sheriff then quoted Palmer.

Nor was Palmer the only miscreant in management spreading this bilious hate.

In fact, Sheriff Arpaio himself circulated the same sort of Internet nonsense. He distributed to his command staff racist "analysis" purporting to be from the Immigration and Naturalization Service/FBI.

Under the official heading: "2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants" ran a full page of outrageous venom.

The sheriff's "FBI" memo blamed illegal aliens for virtually all murders in Los Angeles and Phoenix. The memo listed various categories in which illegal aliens ruined American life: "Crime, births, housing, TV and radio stations, schools, social services, population, employer profits, taxes, and jobs."

It did not take a rocket scientist to see through the statistics generated by an Internet sock puppet. For a media hound like the sheriff, it would have been obvious that the number of radio and television stations cited as Spanish-only in Phoenix was wildly exaggerated.

"You thought that this document was also relevant to Chief Sands' duties, correct?" Arpaio was asked in court.