Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted his 51st illegal immigrant roundup (under the guise of an "employer sanctions" operation. Per usual, no employers were arrested) this morning. It netted precisely one arrest.
So, how many deputies did it take to bring this criminal to justice? Your guess is as good as ours -- the MCSO won't say.
We've contacted an spokesman, asking for an estimate of how many deputies were used in this morning's raid of a Days Inn hotel in downtown Phoenix. However, Officer Chris Hegstrom says he doesn't have that information at the moment.
We called the Days Inn to see if they would give us a rough estimate of
the number of deputies used to nab the immigrant, but the woman we spoke
to didn't want to talk about it.
We even reached out to an Arizona Republic reporter who was apparently on the scene. She didn't get back to us.
We'll take a stab at it and estimate that Arpaio rolled into the Days
Inn this morning with at least 10 deputies -- and that's our
conservative estimate. Again, the operation netted one arrest.
"The sheriff once again displayed his inept, attention seeking,
ineffective brand of what he thinks is law enforcement this morning,"
Scottsdale Lieutenant Mike Stauffer, who is looking to unseat Arpaio as
the Republican nominee for sheriff, tells New Times. "He
crowed that the investigation took only two months and yet he had no
idea that worker schedules had been changed and was able to arrest only
one person. I am also not surprised that the employers were not
sanctioned."
Nine of the 10 suspected illegal immigrants didn't show up for work today, according to the Republic's account of the raid.
We asked the MCSO if it appears those employees were tipped off about the raid (the MCSO does have a history of criminals who've infiltrated the agency's anti human-smuggling task force).
The MCSO's response: crickets.
