A Red Robin restaurant is short one employee, and a country-Western bar is short two, after Sheriff Joe Arpaio's 78th and 79th workplace raids.
The so-called "criminal employment" operations that result in the arrests of undocumented immigrants don't seem to be as fruitful for the Sheriff's Office as they once were -- a grand total of six arrests have been made over the past four operations by the MCSO's Criminal Employment Unit.
See also:
-Arpaio's Workplace Busts Continue: One Employee Arrested at Chili's
-Joe Arpaio's Monitor in Melendres Appointed by Judge G. Murray Snow
Although Arpaio was on the losing end of the Melendres v. Arpaio civil rights case, the workplace raids were not at issue on that lawsuit. That lawsuit concerned a pattern of targeting Latinos in traffic stops.
As a result of another federal case, the MCSO also has been banned from arresting people on charges of smuggling themselves into the country -- another tactic Arpaio's office has utilized to use the Sheriff's Office as an immigration-enforcement agency. Again, the workplace busts weren't at issue.
So the MCSO's workplace raids continue. Hundreds of people -- mostly, if not all, Latino immigrants -- have been arrested for working with false or allegedly stolen identification, yet those who did the hiring have been arrested in only one case thus far.
In the first of these two new workplace busts, the former Red Robin worker, a 21-year-old man who worked at the location outside Chandler Fashion Center, was found out after allegedly using another person's identity. The man was told by the IRS that he had unpaid taxes on his earnings, according to the Sheriff's Office.
In a separate investigation, deputies arrested two workers at a Mesa country-Western bar, Thunder Pass. One employee's accused of using some else's Social Security Number, while the other's just accused of using a false identification.
Two of the three people arrested in these operations were booked into jail on identity theft and forgery charges, while the other was booked on a charge of criminal impersonation, which is still a felony.
In the two operations before this, carried out last month, two employees of Arizona Shower Door were arrested, as was one workers at a Chili's restaurant in Mesa.
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