The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil-rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office after months of mounting complaints that deputies are discriminating in their enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Officials from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division notified Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Tuesday that they had begun the investigation, which will focus on whether deputies are engaging in “patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures.”

An expert said it is the department’s first civil-rights probe related to immigration enforcement.

Arpaio vehemently denies that deputies are illegally profiling as part of his immigration crackdowns. He said Tuesday that he welcomes the investigation and intends to cooperate fully.

“We have nothing to hide,” he said.

Although Arpaio’s illegal-immigration crackdowns have broad public support, they also have led to calls for an examination of his tactics.

Last year, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon asked for a federal investigation of possible civil-rights abuses. Last month, four key Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asked Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate Arpaio.

The lawmakers said Arpaio had exceeded the limits of a federal program that gives local police federal immigration-enforcement powers by ordering deputies to “scour” Latino neighborhoods looking for illegal immigrants based on skin color.

Arpaio, who was easily re-elected to a fifth term in November, called the investigation politically motivated and vowed to continue to arrest illegal immigrants.

“I am not going to be intimidated by the politics and by the Justice Department,” Arpaio said. “I want the people of Arizona to know this: I will continue to enforce all the immigration laws.”

Arpaio uses the sweeps to enforce the state’s employer-sanctions and anti-smuggling laws. He also participates in a federal program that lets local officers enforce federal immigration laws. The sweeps have taken place in mostly Latino neighborhoods or near where day laborers congregate. They have sparked two racial-profiling lawsuits.

The Justice Department frequently receives racial-profiling complaints against police departments, but investigations are rare, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and racial-profiling expert.

“The fact that this has come to their attention and they have announced their intent to investigate is highly significant,” Harris said. “It says there is enough there to be investigated. It’s not an iffy case that (can be ignored).”

Harris said this is the first civil-rights investigation stemming from immigration enforcement. The probe could last several months.

In a two-page letter dated Tuesday, Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general, said that if the investigation uncovers violations, her office will work with Arpaio to find remedies.

But Arpaio said he will battle the Justice Department in court if he disagrees with any of the changes the department tries to impose.

In the 1990s, the department conducted similar civil-rights investigations and found patterns of police discrimination in about 20 cases, including in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. In those cases, law-enforcement agencies agreed to significant changes aimed at preventing discrimination or face a court injunction, Harris said.

“Once the Justice Department finds violations, the threat of going to court is usually enough to encourage them to agree to change,” Harris said. Changes have included increased supervision and changing policies, Harris said.

Investigations into patterns of police discrimination are “not about punishing individual officers; they are about changing the fundamental” way an agency operates, he said.

Gordon, who met with King and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Wodatch on Tuesday in Washington, praised the investigation.

“We should all be encouraged that our new attorney general is taking these issues seriously,” he said.

Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the board’s lone Democrat and most vocal critic of Arpaio’s immigration policies, had planned to help deliver a petition today with 35,000 Internet signatures calling for a Justice Department investigation.

“I think they’re going to find racial profiling, which is a civil-rights abuse,” said Wilcox, who was in Washington for a National Association of Counties conference. “It’s time to put a stop to them. It may cost us millions in lawsuits.”

Board Chairman Max Wilson, one of the board’s four Republicans, said he was surprised by the investigation.

“I know there’s been some accusations made,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s any merits to them. I’ve almost had my hands full of people making accusations without people having some solid, hard evidence to back it up.”

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

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.