Pablo Robles
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In 2013, a federal judge found that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had racially profiled Latino residents as part of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s brutal campaign to crack down on unauthorized immigration. Now, after a September Supreme Court ruling that essentially greenlit that same racial profiling, the 93-year-old Arpaio is feeling righteous.
In an interview with Slate that was published Wednesday, Arpaio said he was “vindicated by the Supreme Court” for engaging in racial profiling while he was sheriff.
“I was using race as the reason to determine whether somebody was here legally or illegally,” Arpaio told the outlet, saying the quiet part out loud. That’s OK now, though, because “the Supreme Court ruled in my favor last month.”
It’s not quite true that the high court ruled in Arpaio’s favor, but it did basically approve the same tactics that landed Arpaio in federal court and that have saddled the sheriff’s office with independent oversight for more than a decade.
In early September, in a 6-3 shadow docket ruling in the case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the court lifted a lower court’s ruling that restricted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from carrying out raids and stopping people in the Los Angeles area based on factors that included speaking Spanish or gathering in Home Depot parking lots, where day laborers tend to be. Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown in L.A., several people with legal status and even citizenship were arrested by ICE, seemingly based only on their ethnicity.
No majority opinion was issued, but in a concurring opinion, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that language and appearance are acceptable pretenses for making a stop. That essentially legalized racial profiling in immigration enforcement, and such stops have since come to be known as “Kavanaugh stops.”
“I was vindicated by the Supreme Court of all this shit,” Arpaio told Slate.
Not quite. The 2013 ruling by federal Judge G. Murray Snow that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office under Arpaio violated the rights of Latino residents is still in effect, and the sheriff’s office is still not in compliance with Snow’s mandated reforms. The case has weighed down the sheriff’s office long after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016, with successive sheriffs from both major parties struggling to bring the agency into compliance and end court-ordered oversight.
Most recently, a court-mandated audit of the sheriff’s office’s compliance expenses found that the agency had overstated its compliance costs by $163 million over the last decade-plus, meaning 72% of its supposed compliance costs had nothing to do with the underlying case, Melendres v. Arpaio. That audit came as Republican officials had complained about the ongoing costs of following Snow’s orders.
That’s not Arpaio’s problem anymore, though. After President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2017 on contempt of court charges — also stemming from the Melendres case — Arpaio has been living comfortably as a pariah in Fountain Hills, where he’s run unsuccessfully for mayor multiple times. There, he can watch the news and relive the glory days he spent terrorizing Latino communities, secure in the knowledge that the highest court in the land says his tactics were kosher after all.
