Audio By Carbonatix
Reader support matters more than ever
We're in the final stretch of our summer campaign. Our goal is to raise $15,000 by August 9 to support the journalism our community relies on. Reader support is helping shape the future of local news.
See also: MCSO Sergeant Says Main Goal Is to Catch Illegal Immigrants
See also: Deputy Chief Brian Sands’ Testimony Contradicted by His Statements in 2010
See also: Joe Arpaio’s Deputy: Sheriff Is Misinformed About Illegal Immigration Patrols
See also: Joe Arpaio Struggles in Racial-Profiling Trial
See also: Joe Arpaio’s (ahem) Legal Scholar Brett Palmer and Brian Sands Under Oath
The purpose of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “crime suppression” sweeps seems to depend on which Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office employee you’re talking to.
Yesterday, MCSO Sergeant Manuel Madrid — a supervisor for the agency’s Human Smuggling Unit — said they’d pull off the sweeps in areas where there was reported human smuggling, but then they’d go after people committing simply traffic violations, like cracked windshields.
If they were Hispanic and their English was a little iffy, Madrid said it was “a totality at the end” for bringing up the possibility of the person being an undocumented immigrant.
Brian Sands, one of Arpaio’s deputy chiefs, has a few explanations of his own.
Last week, he said Arpaio didn’t really know what was going on with the deputies on the street, but explained that picking up people who are suspected of being in the country illegal just kind of…happens.
“[Snatching up undocumented immigrants is] not the goal or objective…but it’s the results that occur,” Sands told the judge. “If people are arrested and, subsequently, they’re in the country illegally, that’s the end result of stopping a certain amount of people.”
Sands is also the guy who said a few years back that Arpaio’s former chief deputy, Dave Hendershott, had instructed a lieutenant to “round up as many illegal aliens as he could arrest” during a saturation patrol.
“We got to a situation where the lieutenant was complying with (Hendershott’s) directives and called me and said, that, you know, they had like 50 people in custody,” Sands said. “My question was, ‘did we arrest people on the state charge of human smuggling? And he said that they had more or less looked at arresting VRs, in other words, volunteer removals, and I said, ‘no, we got to shut it down.'”
When Arpaio was asked whether his priority was to go after illegal immigrants, his explanation was, “That is not correct”
So, who’s got the most likely story here?
Cast your vote below:
