A “Sheriff” of the Old West

For Sheriff Joe Arpaio it won’t be long before he reaches 80, an age at which very few people think to continue to fight. He is an old man, but a contentious old man. He likes that they call him “America’s toughest sheriff,” like something from old western movies. His jurisdiction includes Maricopa County, a name that seems like a joke — or a ghost town from the same Old West — but covers nothing less than the Phoenix metropolitan area. This is the most populated area in Arizona and the destination point for thousands of Latino immigrants that cross the Mexican border undercover through the Sonora Desert, searching for the elusive American Dream.

Joe Arpaio’s family arrived in the U.S. from Naples, and therefore the old sheriff — who likes to adorn his shirt collar with general’s stars — is descended from the thousands of Italian immigrants who traveled since the 19th century, anxious to benefit from the famous phrase inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

He is proud to be a descendent of immigrants, but by paradox he pursues other immigrants — only the sad, poor and homeless Latin-Americans swept by the torment of misery. He despises them and prematurely considers them to be criminals. It shows poor character that he grants himself powers; immigration is a federal affair, and he is a local official. Instead of lifting the lamp beside the golden door, he is a sheriff that shields the lamp from whoever looks for that door in the darkness.

He is an official elected no less than five times since he presented himself as a candidate for sheriff of Maricopa in 1992. He enjoys immense popularity, precisely accredited to his authoritarian insolence and his proclamations of “I am the law” here, in the best style of John Wayne. He is so popular that if he decided to be governor of the state of Arizona, he would easily defeat Jan Brewer, the one who occupies this position at present, in spite of her having been the promoter of the famous SB 1070 law that authorizes the indiscriminate persecution against immigrants.

In an article published in Harper’s Magazine 10 years ago, the well-known Barry Graham describes Sheriff Joe: “He is a loving husband, proud father, idealist, megalomaniac, liar and bully. … A cheerful, garrulous man who enjoys watching executions. … Some call him a murderer. Some call him insane. Amnesty International calls him a human rights violator. … He is the most popular politician in the state of Arizona, and with an 85 percent approval rating, perhaps the most popular in the history of the state.” In 1991 when this report was published, Sheriff Joe had not yet pursued immigrants — rather thieves, drug traffickers, juvenile gang members and barroom brawlers — in a city where the crime was growing like wildfire. Ever since then, he has used the same methods that cemented his popularity among the staunchest supporters of law and order at any price, even of the law itself: Walking through the streets of tent city, [he has] the prisoners chained from the ankles and the wrists; dressed in striped pants and pink shirts and socks; overcrowding them in tents from temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius; feeding them slop, costing no more than 30 cents per meal; giving them a choice within the jail of two television channels: Disney, because it’s harmless, and the weather channel, so that they will know what awaits them — sun or rain — when they leave in gangs to ditch.

In Sheriff Joe’s tents, where he puts up to 2,000 prisoners each, it is prohibited to drink coffee or add salt or pepper to food. It is a Puritan diet, and above all, cruel. The prisoners are not rehabilitated; rather, they suffer real punishment, one so hard that whoever experiences it may never want to return to delinquency again.

These measures take police brutality to ignominy, and that includes a live television channel broadcast from the moment the prisoners are booked to the moment they are put in jail — even for those who have not been charged with any crime up until that point. These measures have never contributed to reducing the crimes in Phoenix. Rather, they increase, but this failure does not detract from the continuing popularity of Sheriff Joe. Today, for him, the worst criminals are immigrants.

Like a character from a comic book or from a Western movie, [he] feeds the wild imagination of the redneck; his fellow redneck citizens wildly applaud the use of his methods against the Latinos, and now he redoubles his displays of toughness. His popularity grows in deteriorating times, even after rising up in defiance against U.S. Federal Judge Susan Bolton’s decision to issue a temporary injunction that blocks key parts of SB 1070. It prevents Sheriff Joe from detaining or questioning undocumented immigrants, a detail to which he pays no attention.

Like in the days of the Old West, he continues to be the law — the toughest guardian of white supremacy.