Arpaio Faces Federal Law Suit: Not Good Enough
By Hector Chavana Jr., blogger at OurNewAnahuac.net
The USJustice Department is set to release a report which is highly critical of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. As Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Arpaio has garnered international attention for his high-profile raids in which suspects are paraded in public in their underwear, among other civil rights violations. The report will say that Latinos were forty nine times more likely to be stopped for traffic violations than non-Latinos.
Arpaio has until January 4 to settle an agreement with the feds, or he will face a law suit, and a judge will decide the fate of his department.
A few hours after the report was leaked, it was announced that the Department of Homeland Security cut offMaricopaCounty’s access to the Secure Communities program and terminated the agreement which allowed deputies to detain people due to their immigration status. According to DHS:
“The Department of Homeland Security is troubled by the Department of Justice’s findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office …Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program.”
It is prudent that the federal government is finally taking action, but I also look at the timing, and have a hard time believing that it is much beyond an election-year ploy. The Obama administration has deported more people than even Bush.
Obama himself has done nothing to move toward an agreement in which families are no longer separated. Instead, more than half of all federal inmates will be so-called Latinos this year, and the vast majority of these new inmates are facing prison for nonviolent immigration offenses. In effect, his policies are criminalizing our community for very mild offenses. The effects of this criminalization will be felt for generations to come.
Obama is nothing if not a master of the media. Keep in mind that even though these two programs, Secure Communities and 287(g), are being withdrawn from Maricopa County, all over the county, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will continue to be subjected to the same programs that enabled Arpaio to act in this way. By withdrawing from this particular county, the Obama administration throws Latinos a bone, while he can continue to brag about the historic deportation numbers that his administration has processed.
The media picks up on his gesture and this provides him a little good faith among so-called Latino voters…or so he hopes. I don’t think that Obama will be able to drive an ample amount of Latino voters to the polls. Among issues most important to us, his performance has just been too shoddy.
Right here inHarrisCounty, we have felt the effects of these programs. I remember marching inWashingtonDCover a decade ago in support of immigration reform. I could have never imagined a scenario, in which a Chicano sheriff inHarrisCountywould be a proponent of these policies, but this is what we have in Adrian Garcia. It is true that Garcia did not decide on his own to implement these immigration policies, but he did recommend it to theCounty Commissioners Court.
It appears that aHoustonman, Luis Alberto Delgado, was deported in 2010 due to one of these programs, or at least policies that encourage participation between local law enforcement and ICE.
The actions against Joe Arpaio are welcomed by Latinos in Maricopa County, Arizona, I am sure. This small gesture, however, does not make up for Obama’s general inaction on the issue of immigration. All of this speaks nothing of the bill that Obama intends to sign that will include “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world,” according to a legal group.
I have often wondered how or why Obama ended up the way he has. Whatever the reasons, tokens won’t pay the bill owed to Latinos.
