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DOJ Launches Investigation of Sheriff Joe Arpaio: Advocates Call for Immediate Termination of 287g Contract with DHS

Press Conference on Capitol Hill, 1 pm, March 11.

Contact:  Chris Newman, 323-717-5310, newman@ndlon.org

Date:  March 10, 2009

On March 10, Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King sent a letter to Sheriff Joe Arpaio announcing a Department of Justice investigation of  alleged “discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures conducted by the MCSO,” among other alleged violations of federal law.  A copy of the letter is available here.  The formal investigation follows a request by Congressman Conyers that the DOJ take action to respond to myriad complaints of racial profiling in Maricopa County.    Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon first requested a DOJ investigation nearly a year ago.   And on February 28, over 5,000 people marched four miles through Phoenix to ask the the federal government to immediately  terminate its 287g(g) contract with Joe Arpaio.

On March 11, at 1 pm,  advocates from across the country and civil rights leaders will join elected officials, including Congressman Conyers and Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox,  to discuss the investigation in a press conference on Capitol Hill.

“We are very hopeful a Department of Justice investigation will vindicate the rights of people who have been terrorized by Sheriff Arpaio,” said Salvador Reza of the PUENTE movement in Phoenix, AZ.  “We also hope the Obama administration will immediately terminate the US government’s 287(g) contract with Maricopa County while the judicial process takes its course.”

“The federal government has the obligation to reform immigration laws and to uphold the Constitution,” said Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.  “Its failure to act has resulted in an emerging civil and human rights crisis.”

Video footage from Maricopa County is available here.

 

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Chris Newman, Esq

Legal Director

National Day Laborer Organizing Network

675 South Park View Street, Suite B

Los Angeles, CA 90057 

newman@ndlon.org

(213) 380-2785

(213) 353-1344 [fax]

www.ndlon.org

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Revisions could prompt Arpaio’s ICE-program exit

Homeland Security officials will make it clear in newly written guidelines that a federal program that lets local police enforce federal immigration laws is primarily for going after immigrants who commit serious crimes.

But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Thursday that he would likely drop out of the program if immigration officials attempt to curtail his enforcement powers, including his ability to arrest immigrants for merely being in the country illegally.

That wouldn’t be the end of Arpaio’s controversial immigration crackdowns, which have led to allegations of racial profiling. Arpaio said that even if he drops out of the federal program he will continue arresting illegal immigrants under the state’shuman smuggling law and employer sanctions laws. He said he also would turn over any suspected illegal immigrants his deputies encounter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement even if they haven’t committed any offense other than being in the country illegally.

“If the (federal) program gets too strict, then I am going to have to seriously reconsider,” Arpaio said. “But I’m still going to enforce state laws, and when we come across illegal immigrants, we are going to take action.”

ICE officials are rewriting the rules of the program, known as 287(g), in response to a federal report that found the program lacks clear goals about what kinds of criminals should be targeted. The report by the Government Accountability Office also found that the program fails to supervise local officers and does not detail what kind of crime and arrest data local agencies should be collecting.

The new rules and agreements will clarify that program participants are to focus on undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes, such as assault, rape or murder.

“I like it the way it is now,” Arpaio said of the two-year-old agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The two-pronged agreement allows sheriff’s deputies to identify and arrest illegal immigrants they encounter on the street while investigating other crimes. It also allows jail officials to place immigration holds on inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

“I signed up not for the jail (portion of the agreement), I signed up to enforce the laws on the street. That is where the action is,” Arpaio said.

Arpaio does not need the ICE agreement to continue his immigration raids. He has classified all of his neighborhood crime sweeps and worksite raids as an enforcement of state laws, not federal immigration laws. He says, and ICE has agreed in the past, that the agreement doesn’t apply to those raids, even though deputies cross-trained as immigration agents frequently arrest people on immigration violations during those operations.

Michael Keegan, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to respond to Arpaio’s comments. He said that while the rewritten agreements will continue to allow local police trained to enforce immigration laws to arrest any illegal immigrants they encounter, the agreements will emphasize a focus on those who commit serious crimes.

Keegan said the rewritten agreements also will call for better supervision and data collection of local police enforcing immigration laws.

With 160 deputies and jail officers trained to enforce immigration laws, Arpaio is the largest participant in the rapidly growing program. His officers have arrested about 1,500 illegal immigrants under the program, and placed immigration holds on more then 22,000 inmates. Four Democratic senators have called for an investigation of Arpaio’s sweeps, concerned about accusations that deputies are unconstitutionally looking for illegal immigrants based on race and primarily target immigrants for traffic violations and other minor offenses.

DHS does not have data that shows whether the majority of immigrants arrested by Arpaio’s deputies committed serious or minor crimes but the department plans to request that data from ICE, Keegan said.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/03/06/20090306immig0306.html

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De La Rocha Rages Against Arpaio


Rage Against The Machine and One Day As A Lion frontman Zack De La Rocha was one of the leaders of a Phoenix, check Ariz. protest against Maricopa County Sheriff (and DMX nemesis) Joe Arpaio and his enforcement of federal immigration laws against Latinos on Saturday.

“Without the proper warrants, he raids the homes and workplaces of janitors and gardeners,” De La Rocha told demonstrators at the end of the rally. “At routine traffic stops, he detains and deports mothers, violently separating them from their children, who are left abandoned.”

The controversial Arpaio was criticized after he recently invited the media to watch as he led undocumented Hispanic inmates who were shackled together by their hands and feet into the infamous Tent City prison, where detainees are forced to wear pink underwear and are subjected to Arizona’s sizzling summer heat. 

The policies and practices of the 76-year-old Arpaio, who describes himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” have been criticized by Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Arizona Ecumenical Council, the American Jewish Committee and the Arizona chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, among others.

Arpaio’s alleged mis of prison inmates made him the target of 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts from 2004 through November 2007, 50 times as many prison-condition lawsuits as the New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston jail systems combined.

“I don’t know why they have to have signs calling me illiterate and a Nazi and every other name in the book,” Arpaio told the Los Angeles Times newspaper. “I’m not concerned about them or some elected officials, they all seem to be Democrats. 

“Nothing changes. They are not going to deter me.”

De La Rocha performed a free show and addressed the issue of alleged racial profiling used against Latinos the night before the protest.

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Who’s Running Immigration?

NY Times
Published: March 3, price 2009

Immigration enforcement ran off the rails in the Bush era, case when federal agents stormed factories to shackle workers and local authorities staged their own crackdowns with little or no oversight from Washington. It was a war without a plan, and it solved nothing.

President Obama has repeatedly promised to take a smarter path. But if he and the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, are making a clean break with the Bush way on immigration, we haven’t seen it yet. That shambling machinery lurches on.

Two recent examples tell the story.

The first was a large, peaceful protest in Phoenix on Saturday. Thousands stood up to the feared sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, who has brutally misused his powers under a program called 287(g). It enlists local police as immigration enforcers. He has terrorized Latino neighborhoods with relentless sweeps and has paraded shackled immigrants through the streets.

When she was the Arizona governor, Ms. Napolitano was an outspoken supporter of delegating neglected federal immigration duties to local authorities. Sheriff Arpaio is an example of that concept run amok. He has seldom been challenged as forcefully as he was on Saturday — not by government but by a dogged organizer, Salvador Reza, a few clergy members and politicians and thousands of people who dared to say: Enough.

The other example was the first workplace immigration raid of the Obama administration, late last month in Bellingham, Wash. More than two dozen people were arrested at a family-run company that rebuilds car engines. They were charged with the usual paperwork offenses. The company said it was blindsided, and so was Ms. Napolitano. She said she had not known about the raid in advance and promised an investigation.

Americans who might applaud any crackdown on illegal immigrants, particularly in a recession, should know that scattershot raids and rampaging sheriffs are not the answer. The idea that enforcement alone will eliminate the underground economy is a great delusion. It runs up against the impossible arithmetic of mass expulsion — no conceivable regime of raids will wrench 12 million illegal immigrants from their jobs and homes.

The country is not a safer or better place because one more business and two dozen more families are torn apart outside Seattle or because Sheriff Arpaio has much of Maricopa County terrified. The system under which illegal immigrants labor, without hope of assimilation, is not any less broken. A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that federal oversight of the 287(g) program has been sorely lacking.

So, a question: Are Mr. Obama and Ms. Napolitano in charge or not? Let them show it by ending the raids and Sheriff Arpaio’s abuses. Something has to be done about immigration, but it has to be smarter than this.

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Thousands march against Arpaio in Phoenix

Thousands march against Arpaio in Phoenix

The Arizona Republic

Thousands of opponents of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s illegal-immigration policies held their “March to Stop the Hate” in downtown Phoenix on Saturday..

As of 1:30 p.m., order the speeches were still being made at the march’s destination, the federal building. According to initial reports, the march was peaceful, with no major incidents as of early Saturday afternoon.

Crowd estimates from organizers and law enforcement were not immediately available, but at least one estimate put it at about 3,000.

Along the march route, between 100 and 200 Arpaio supporters gathered at the Wells Fargo Tower. Many carried “We Support Sheriff Joe” signs, among others.

The event was being led by the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and El Puente Arizona, and feature Zach de la Rocha, former lead singer of Rage Against the Machine. De la Rocha arrived at about 10:30 a.m., just before the march began at Steele Indian School Park.

Organizers marched south on Central Avenue past the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. The route also passed Wells Fargo Tower – where Arpaio has his headquarters – and ended at the federal building on Washington Street.

Astrid Galvan and Jeffrey Javier contributed to this report.

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Protesters Take On America’s Toughest Sheriff

Huffington Post

On Saturday, thousands of protesters walked the streets of Phoenix to air their displeasure with America’s toughest sheriff, whose crackdown on the city’s immigrant population has won him consistently high approval ratings from his constituents in Maricopa County.

The anger of local residents came across in one image that depicted Sheriff Joe in a white Ku Klux Klan robe. Latino protesters held signs stating, “We Are Humans,” while the most popular sign read, “Stop Racial Profiling NOW!” Supporters of the sheriff took up residence on two street corners and held signs that read, “We Support Joe,” as protesters walked by.

In mid-February, Democrats in Congress, including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called for an investigation into Sheriff Arpaio’s activities around immigrant arrests due to allegations of racial profiling and other civil rights abuses.

The Huffington Post received exclusive video of the protest from Amie Williams at Bal Maiden Films

Arpaio has also been denounced for using volunteer “chain gangs” and housing inmates in tent cities. These severe tactics led Fox to give Arpaio his own reality show entitled, “Smile… You’re Under Arrest!”

The backbone of Sheriff Arpaio’s vast influence stems from an agreement between the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The 287(g) provision allows federally-trained and supervised state and local law enforcement officials to investigate, apprehend, transport, and detain people who are living and working in the country without authorization. Protesters hope their demonstration will lead to further investigations into alleged crimes committed under the 287(g) provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/02/protesters-take-on-americ_n_171091.html

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