Obama Aims against the Sheriff

The Obama administration has run out of patience. It started a judicial offensive to stop America’s most racist sheriff, but the struggle won’t be easy. Joe Arpaio, a police chief from Phoenix, Arizona, announced that he will fight with every weapon available to him, which are many, and that Obama will have to keep on file this assault, which is “for the Latino vote, showing that they’re doing something, taking on the sheriff over an alleged racial profiling.”*

Arpaio, the self-appointed “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” has been the head of police in Maricopa County since 1993, where his main aim is to stop undocumented immigrants from arriving from Latin America because they are, according to him, “the cause of all crimes in Arizona.”* For that purpose he erected a series of open air jails, where all of the imprisoned must remain in tents under a sun that reaches up to 150 degrees. And to humiliate them further, he forces them to wear a pale pink uniform.

Now, the Department of Justice has made public some documents that show that Arpaio’s 900 sheriffs arrested nine times more Latinos than Whites or African Americans in their raids. And they did it for causes such as not being able to speak English or driving when “[…] it was deemed that too many people were in the back seat.”* Arpaio is backed by an Arizona state law that allows for people to be arrested if they are suspected of having crossed the border illegally — a measure that is still being reviewed by the Supreme Court, but that has already made thousands of Latino families leave the state.

Amongst those forced migrants, one finds hundreds of Argentines.

At the bottom of all this there is a political struggle between the government and the ultra-conservative tea party movement, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party that tries to take Obama, considered a true devil, out of the way. With this move, the White House has made the political struggle a judicial issue. Arpaio promises to fight back until the very last consequence. He has even threatened to make a scene right out of the cowboy movies. He said he would circle the wagons, just as they did to defend themselves from the Indians 150 years ago.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.