por Jonathan Higuera
PHOENIX, Arizona – As I sat through a recent meeting of Somos América, an immigrant rights group doing its best to confront the many hostile actions facing undocumented residents of this city, I had a distinct feeling of being in a time warp.
Is this what it felt like to be at a 1965 organizing session in Alabama as civil rights advocates planned a protest or discussed how to avoid harassment and arrest by Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor or getting chewed up by his dogs?
Only this isn’t 1965. It’s 2009. And the nemesis isn’t Bull Connor. It’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who for the last several years has made it his business to round up undocumented immigrants and find ways to dehumanize and humiliate them in his jails.
I wish I understood what drove Bull Connor so I could compare his motivation with that of Arpaio. I know enough about Arpaio to paint him as a political opportunist who never tires of grabbing the media spotlight.
In recent years, his goal has been to add to his reputation as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” Now it’s degenerated into capitalizing on the anti-immigrant sentiments sweeping Arizona and much of the rest of the country. With this state’s reactionary voter support, he has a blank check to run his office in whatever manner he sees fit.
It’s quite a spectacle from afar. But it’s a nightmare for anyone who dares challenge him. He’s had a publisher arrested for opposing him in print; numerous activists have been arrested and harassed for trying to expose his warped, self-serving ways, and he continues to terrorize the immigrant community through his raids and unconstitutional searches.
It’s no coincidence that his policies which single out undocumented residents surf on our national and local waves of nativism and xenophobia.
He can do this because he consistently wins election with a comfortable majority of votes. Never mind that’s he’s made metro Phoenix look like a backwater eddy, an ugly smudge on the nation’s conscience and the epicenter of anti-immigrant attitudes.
His latest stunt involved segregating undocumented prisoners from others in his jail, dressing them in chain-gang stripes, shackling their ankles, and staging a media circus as he marched them from one facility to another known as Tent City. He justified his action to the press by saying the move would make it easier to transport the mortified young men to their deportation hearings.
Arpaio’s vaudevillian performance would be laughable except that it inflicts excessive harm and humiliation on already desperate people from our poverty-pocked neighbor Mexico. The only “crime” the vast majority of them committed was to cross the border without papers in search of survival — a life for themselves and their children. Crimes for which any were doing jail time were relatively minor state offenses that merited no hard prison time.
A federal court ruled Feb. 11 that a class-action suit filed last summer by community-based Somos América and five individuals accusing Arpaio of profiling and mistreating Hispanics can proceed. The suit, with support from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, charges Arpaio with violating both the U.S. and Arizona constitutions.
Some national civil rights groups plan to visit here later this month to protest the sheriff’s segregation policy and raids. They will ask for an end to the 287 (g) agreement between the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Sheriff’s Office. The agreement essentially gives local law enforcement, with minimal training, the authority to act as immigration officers.
Without federal intervention, Arpaio’s terror campaign will likely continue unchecked until he feels a need to tap another critical mass of reactionary voters. Four leading Congressional Democrats who serve on the House Judiciary Committee (interestingly, none of them from Arizona) have now called for an investigation into his office for human and civil rights violations. Hopefully, that will send him another message. Ridiculing defenseless, undocumented residents doesn’t earn Arpaio an “America’s toughest sheriff” sobriquet. More realistically, it says “Coward.” Hispanic Link.
(Jonathan Higuera is an independent journalist based in Phoenix, Ariz.Email: jonathan.higuera@yahoo.com). ©2009
