America’s most notorious racist sheriff is running for Senate. The Washington Examiner‘s David Drucker reported Tuesday that 85-year-old former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaioāwho lost his job to a Democrat in 2016, was convicted of contempt for refusing to comply with a court order instructing his department to stop racial profiling, and was pardoned last fall by President Donald Trump in part because of his advanced ageāwill join the Republican primary to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake.
The Republican primary was already shaping up to be a bitter contest. The field includes former state Sen. Kelli Ward, an ER doctor who once held a public hearing on the theory that the government was poisoning citizens via airplane exhaust, and will likely include US Rep. Martha McSally. The winner will likely take on Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema this fall.
Although Arpaio is exalted as an icon of law and order on the right, his two decades in power were defined by a pervasive lawlessness and authoritarian tendencies. Inmate jail deaths were commonāthe county was forced to pay tens of millions of dollars for wrongful death settlements during Arpaioās tenure. When the Phoenix New-Times published a story documenting Arpaioās personal wealth, the sheriff had the reporters arrested on a false charge. (The county was forced to pay a $3.75 million settlement.) Arpaio famously convened a cold-case posse to investigate President Barack Obamaās birth certificate.
But Arpaioās singular legacy was his mistreatment of Hispanic residents of Maricopa County. Ultimately itās what brought him down. A 2011 Department of Justice investigation found that Arpaioās office āengages in a a systemic disregard for basic constitutional protections.ā As Mother Jones reported at the time:
The report issued by the Justice Department says Arpaioās office undertook ādiscriminatory policing practicesā through racial profiling, including āunlawfully stop[ping], detain[ing] and arrest[ing] Latinos.ā Perez also said that Arpaioās office unlawfully retaliated against critics of the Maricopa County Sheriffās office by arresting or suing them, and punished Latino jail inmates for being unable to speak English by denying them basic services. The report also describes the Sheriffās Office as responding to reports of people with ādark skinā or people who āspoke Spanishā rather than people actually committing crimes, and says officials exchanged racist jokes over email. Detention officers in Maricopa jails are described in the report as referring to Latinos as āwetbacksā and āMexican bitches.ā The report says Arpaioās office āimplemented practices that treat Latinos as if they are all undocumented, regardless of whether a legitimate factual basis exists to suspect that a person is undocumented.ā
Arpaio was eventually ordered to halt his departmentās racist practices. It was his refusal to do so that ultimately resulted in his conviction. Arpaioās efforts to round up immigrants came at the expense of other law-enforcement duties. His office ignored more than 400 sex crime cases during his tenure. Some of the victims were undocumented immigrants.
With Flake’s retirement and the state trending toward toss-up territoryāHillary Clinton lost by 3.5 points in 2016āArizona will be one of Democrats’ top opportunities to pick up a seat in the Senate this fall. Democrats would love another shot at Arpaio, who underperformed Trump by 16 points in Maricopa County (and underperformed Sen. John McCain by even more) and whose presence in public office has been a boon for Latino political organizing in the state.