Why Trump’s Arpaio Pardon Is a Nationwide Call to Political Arms

This article originally appeared on this site.

When Lydia Guzman, an immigrants-rights advocate in Arizona, heard the news that Donald Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff, last night, it felt to her like mourning the death of someone who’d long been ill. “I knew this was coming, yet I still wasn’t ready,” she told me.

When the fight against Arpaio began, a decade ago, Guzman was on the front lines. While Arpaio raided immigrant communities around Phoenix, arresting Latino residents en masse, she was one of dozens of community members who turned out with cameras and recorders to document what was happening. It took a few years for Guzman and other activists to gather evidence of the sheriff’s rampant racial profiling, and then several more for the courts to consider all the evidence. During that time, Guzman had to persuade Arpaio’s victims that sharing their stories was worth the trouble and the risk. “There were times when the community threw up its hands and said, ‘This is going nowhere,’ ” she told me. But last November, Arpaio was voted out of office, and then, earlier this summer, a court found him guilty of criminal contempt. Arpaio hadn’t just brutalized Latinos; he had flagrantly ignored a federal judge who’d ordered him to stop. The outcome was proof—belated but definitive—that the justice system could work. “Arpaio is no longer the sheriff, and his legacy is that he was a convicted criminal,” Guzman said. “Only criminals need pardons.”

That the pardon came from Trump—two weeks after backing white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and three days after staging a rally in Phoenix—only heightened the national stakes. “It’s a message to the country,” Carlos Garcia, the executive director of Puente, an Arizona-based human-rights organization, told me. “What Arpaio did—that’s coming to you, wherever you live.” Both Guzman and Garcia were angry but energized. “What we do now has to do with Trump,” Garcia said. Even before Arpaio was found to be in contempt of court, advocates and community members in Arizona beat him at the ballot box, which showed that Trump, too, could be defeated democratically. “When we started our fight against Arpaio he was the most popular official in Arizona. His approval rating was over seventy per cent,” Garcia said. “We took to the streets, took testimony, registered people to vote, and went to the courtroom. This is the fight we’ll bring to Trump.”

Puente was founded, in 2007, to fight Joe Arpaio. By then, he was nationally known for torturing inmates held at his jails, which he once described, boastfully, as “concentration camps.” But what ultimately mobilized the community against Arpaio was his decision to work formally and systematically with federal immigration authorities. The sheriff’s department began arresting Hispanic residents with little or no pretense at all, and if they happened to be undocumented Arpaio would turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation. “Before then, no one really had an official agreement with ICE; there was no police agency handing people over,” Garcia said. “Arpaio used to set up a perimeter around immigrant communities, and send out hundreds of officers who would arrest and detain anyone they wanted.”

The Trump Administration has spent the last six months trying to force local law-enforcement agencies to collaborate with ICE as Arpaio did, and many police chiefs and sheriffs across the country have resisted. Threats by the Justice Department to withdraw federal funding haven’t seemed to dim their resolve. Preserving the community’s trust is simply too important for public safety, and if residents are scared that local police agencies are working as de-facto immigration agents, then crimes will go unreported and leads will dry up.

Arpaio’s twenty-four-year career in Maricopa County was as a direct affront to the immigrant community. He gloated over the fear he caused. More than a hundred inmates died in his jails, and there were countless lawsuits filed against him. When local journalists wrote critical articles, he had them arrested. At one point, he launched an immigration raid in the town of a rival police chief apparently just to spite him. “Arpaio knows how to move the needle when it comes to appealing to the base,” George Gascón, a former police chief in the neighboring town of Mesa, told a reporter in 2012. “What he did very artfully is piggy-back on this fear of illegal immigration that was becoming so prevalent in border states like Arizona.” He was, in effect, a populist rabble-rouser, with a badge.

“Pardoning him encourages every other police office and sheriff to racially profile and to abuse their power, and there’ll be no consequences,” Garcia said. “This is just like when Trump mocked the ‘Mexican judge.’ ” Garcia was referring to Gonzalo Curiel, an American-born federal judge in Indiana whom Trump accused of harboring biases against him because of Curiel’s ethnicity. “The same monster that Arpaio was, is what Trump is,” Garcia told me. “He feels that he is above the law and that he can do what he wants to get rid of our community.”

Karina Ruiz de Diaz, a thirty-three-year-old immigrant who was born in Mexico but grew up in the Phoenix area, said, “Trump wants all the immigrants to follow the law, but then he decides which laws apply.” Ruiz de Diaz stopped driving in 2010 because she was scared of being pulled over and deported. The state had just institutionalized Arpaio’s practices by passing a law that allowed local law-enforcement officers to ask for the citizenship status of anyone they arrested. (It was eventually blocked in federal court.)

Two years later, President Barack Obama issued an executive order called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protected immigrants who had come to the U.S. as children, granting them a reprieve from deportation and enabling them to get driver’s licenses and work permits. Ruiz de Diaz is one of close to a million immigrants nationwide benefitting from DACA, which Trump is now threatening to end. In June, a group of Republican attorneys general from ten states said they’d sue the federal government to revoke the program if Trump didn’t act, and reports surfaced earlier this week suggesting that the President may dismantle the program himself.

“We have been fearless in the last few years, but pardoning Arpaio and cancelling DACA bring back the sentiment that we just don’t know what’s going to happen. Everything can be taken away from you—again,” Ruiz de Diaz said. Five years ago, she joined a group called the Arizona Dream Coalition, which defended the rights of young immigrants in the state. (Now she’s its president.) “Even though we’re full of fear, we’re just going to have to shake it up,” she said. “We’ve been fighting for so long, it’s the only option we have.”

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