LAugust 2017 was supposed to be a time of celebration for Joe Arpaio. The former Maricopa County sheriff had just received Donald Trump’s first presidential pardon after being found guilty of criminal contempt in court.
The pardon meant Arpaio was spared a criminal sentence for a federal offense that could have included up to six months in prison. At a family dinner at a local restaurant the night he received him, he could barely touch his tongue with clams and squid; he had been too busy preparing congratulatory calls and media inquiries.
But Trump’s pardon could not redeem Arpaio’s then-85-year-old political brand, formerly known as America’s “toughest sheriff,” nor would it help the president’s long-term popularity in Arizona. The Arizona electorate was changing rapidly. The state’s extreme immigration laws and Arpaio’s style of enforcement (which in both cases the federal courts had found unconstitutional) had inspired a vigorous grassroots resistance movement that was reforming politics. of the state.
Instead of regaining his reputation with Trump’s pardon, Arpaio received a fierce reaction. “I now have two new titles,” Arpaio told us weeks after he was pardoned. “” The dishonored sheriff, “who is everywhere,” dishonored sheriff. “And the other is” racist. “… I lost the title of” America’s toughest sheriff. “
Elected sheriff of Maricopa County – which includes the most populous county in Phoenix and Arizona – in 1992, Arpaio was one of the most popular politicians in the state.
He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father, Ciro Arpaio, an Italian citizen, had immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, a time when many Americans viewed Italian immigrants as criminally invading, spreading disease, stealing jobs, and brown skin invaders.
As a child, Arpaio said, he took the taunts against immigrants and pretended to ignore them. That’s what you did then, he said.
The immigrant’s son grew up to become an unapologetic immigration applicator, who gave support policies that a growing base of Republican voters in Arizona supported. His deputies helped convert tens of thousands of immigrants to Ice for deportation. They rounded up day laborers, raided companies to arrest unauthorized immigrant employees working with fake papers, and surrounded neighborhoods where they arrested undocumented drivers and passengers found after stopping cars for minor traffic violations.
His tactics had helped foster a vitriol climate against Mexican immigrants in Maricopa County, unlike the anti-immigrant hatred he had experienced first-hand. Arpaio launched a direct immigration line in 2007 “for citizens to report illegal aliens.” Sheriff’s office records show the move triggered a flood of tips.
County residents wanted Arpaio to investigate his immigrant neighbors and take a look at a local McDonald’s where staff suspected he spoke Spanish. A person who called the anonymous hotline expressed his desire to “shoot” an activist of Mexican descent who was one of Arpaio’s vocal critics, “if I could get away with it.”
Arizona’s bitter immigration wars and Arpaio’s role in them, helped his political brand for a time. He had been re-elected for a fifth term, the last in 2012, when he was 80 years old. But his immigration stance caused his political downfall the next election cycle.
In 2016, a grassroots movement led by Latinos that had spent the previous decade protesting the sheriff’s immigration enforcement tactics, gathering evidence for lawsuits, empowering immigrant communities to learn about their rights, and registering new ones voters, had focused their energy on their greater electoral mobilization. yet. The young people, who had reached the age of majority fearing that Arpaio’s deputies might deport their immigrant relatives, had become eligible voters and had registered others.
At the same time, moderate Republicans, irritated by Arpaio’s rising taxes and controversies, had backed his defiant Democrat. While Maricopa County voters helped Trump win the presidency, they rejected his longtime sheriff.
Meanwhile, Arpaio was facing a legal backlash. Over the years, Arpaio had ignored the order of a federal judge banning his police agency from detaining undocumented immigrants who had not been suspected or charged with crimes, and gave them deportation.
In 2016, the Obama administration’s justice department had announced plans to prosecute Arpaio for criminal contempt in court.
The 2017 Trump pardon provided relief and hope for a political renaissance. “He is loved in Arizona,” Trump told Arpaio reporters days after the pardon. “Sheriff Joe protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe was treated very unfairly by the Obama administration, especially just before an election, an election he would have won. “
However, it did not take long for legal scholars, newspaper editorial boards, and historians to rebuke, labeling the pardon as an abuse of power, a contested, unconstitutional crime, a dog whistle to white supremacists at the base Trump, friend combination of these.
“Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great,” an Arizona Republican editorial said.
The same piece called a federal judge’s guilty verdict against Arpaio “a hard-earned dose of justice for an overly extravagant sheriff who showed little respect for the constitution while making national news as an immigration advocate – and let the real crimes remain uninvestigated. “
The media reviewed years of negative coverage about Arpaio, including a class-action federal lawsuit filed a decade earlier, in which Maricopa County Latino motorists had shown that Arpaio’s immigration tactics had violated their civil rights and provoked a racial profile.
In September 2017, it seemed that the controversy had left Arpaio surprised, angry and baffled.
“I’m not racist,” he told us. “You know it. Everyone knows it.”
When Arpaio checked his email, he said, he found a message saying “Sicko. Sadist. Depraved vile criminal,” and expressed cruel and violent wishes. Another letter used anti-Italian insults to address him as a “Dag of Fats and Fats,” and referred to the author’s desire for a day to “pee in your WOP grave.”
In January 2018, Arpaio announced he would run for an open seat in the U.S. Senate in this year’s election. But he had lost his former loyal Republican base. He came in third out of every three candidates in the Republican Party primaries.
Although Arpaio was out of the game in the 2018 elections, his legacy continued to energize activists and voters. From 2014 to 2018, Latino voter turnout in Arizona went from 32% to 49%. In those four years, a number of Latino activists who had organized against the rain of extreme immigration laws in Arpaio and Arizona, won seats as Democrats in the Arizona State House, eliminating Republican majorities. . The Latin vote helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeat Republican Martha McSally for the Senate seat Arpaio had wanted.
Some ground organizers credited the increase in Latino turnout in part to voters who saw Arpaio’s defeat two years earlier.
Alejandra Gómez, a Mexican-American activist for Living United for Change in Arizona who helped mobilize voters in 2016 and 2018, said seeing Arpaio lose and that a voting initiative to raise the minimum wage had helped convince some voters for the first time the next election cycle that the act of voting could make a difference.
“Every step of the way we have been saying that we will fight for our community. At that moment, we really delivered, “Gomez said dit.
That same impetus, Gomez predicted at the time, would reach the next presidential cycle in 2020.
“We’ve shown that it’s possible to defeat someone like Arpaio, so it’s also possible to defeat someone like Trump,” he said.
However, Arpaio’s political ambitions were not over. In 2020 he ran for his former job as a sheriff in the Republican primaries. He toured the county in a campaign bus chalked up with a photo of himself with Trump and the slogan: “Make Maricopa County safe again.” The race was close, but he lost again.
Meanwhile, grassroots organizers who had learned to inspire voters in their fight against Arpaio channeled their energy toward mobilizing black voters.
Narrow-margin Arizona voters chose a Democrat for the presidency for the second time since 1952, helping consolidate Joe Biden’s victory and Trump’s defeat. Democrat Mark Kelly won his race for a seat in the United States Senate.
Maria Castro, a 27-year-old Mexican-American activist who began registering new Latino voters in Maricopa County as a high school student in 2011, realized that the people she knocked on in 2020 were eager to vote.
“This time, people were saying, ‘Yeah, we’re ready to get rid of Trump,'” Castro said. “I think Arpaio’s defeat made it tangible that we could defeat the bad guys who chase our dreams.”
Arpaio, now 88, may have lost his last three careers, but he holds out hope that the same will not be met with the man he calls his hero, Trump. “I was beaten, I came and I ran again,” Arpaio told us. “So I’d like to see him run again.”
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Jude Joffe-Block and Terry Greene Sterling are the authors of DRIVING WHILE BROWN: Sheriff Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance, a new book that tells the story of Arpaio’s rise and fall as sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county and the certain Latin resistance he fought. its unconstitutional police. Driving While Brown is published by the University of California Press and is available April 20.