In late July, immigration activists and the civil rights community breathed a sigh of relief when former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was held in criminal contempt of court for ignoring a court order. The order prohibited Arpaio's police department from detaining individuals based solely on the color of their skin. For years, groups like LULAC criticized the former sheriff’s assault on human and constitutional rights of undocumented people. After years of abuse at the hands of the Maricopa Sheriff’s Department, July’s conviction of Arpaio was a victory for the immigrant community and demonstrated the effectiveness of our judicial system. Upon hearing of his conviction, President Trump hailed Arpaio as a ‘great American patriot’ and announced a possible pardon of the former sheriff. We urge President Trump to respect the rule of law and allow Arpaio to pay for his crimes.
Arpaio is anything but patriotic, and in fact has built his career on criminalizing immigrants. Arpaio's antipathy toward Latinos manifested itself in horrific police practices and detainment policies. His sheriff’s department frequently stopped people who they suspected of being in the country illegally and indiscriminately threw them in jail. The overwhelming majority of these individuals were Latino and what happened to them under police custody is an affront to our basic civil rights. Many were sent to ‘Tent City’, an open-air prison in the Arizona desert that Arpaio himself referred to as a concentration camp. Detainees were sentenced to forced labor in temperatures that reached as high as 130 degrees, punished with solitary confinement for speaking Spanish, and subjected to other humiliating practices.
Arpaio has callously disregarded the civil rights of Maricopa County’s Latino residents and has exacerbated negative feelings between the police department and members of the community. This has created a climate of fear and mistrust between local law enforcement and the immigrant community that is antithetical to good police practices.
The courts have spoken: Sheriff Arpaio broke the law and should be made to pay for his crimes. A pardon from Trump will only reinforce what we’ve known from the very beginning: that Trump has no intention of being a president to all Americans. We need a leader who can unite, not divide; and we need a leader who can build bridges of understanding, not walls of isolation and division. If President Trump pardons Sheriff Arpaio, he will only embolden the racist, xenophobic behavior that carried him into office and further isolate Latinos from his administration.