Joe Arpaio Is Running for Senate in Arizona

Maybe it’ll turn out better than his last election.

Jack Kurtz/ZUMA Wire

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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 Arpaioā€”who 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 ageā€”will 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 commonā€”the county was forced to pay tens of millions of dollars for wrongful death settlements during Arpaioā€™s tenure. When the Phoenix New-Times published a story documenting Arpaioā€™s 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 Obamaā€™s birth certificate.

But Arpaioā€™s singular legacy was his mistreatment of Hispanic residents of Maricopa County. Ultimately itā€™s what brought him down. A 2011 Department of Justice investigation found that Arpaioā€™s office ā€œengages 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 Arpaioā€™s office undertook ā€œdiscriminatory policing practicesā€ through racial profiling, including ā€œunlawfully stop[ping], detain[ing] and arrest[ing] Latinos.ā€ Perez also said that Arpaioā€™s office unlawfully retaliated against critics of the Maricopa County Sheriffā€™s 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 Sheriffā€™s Office as responding to reports of people with ā€œdark skinā€ or people who ā€œspoke 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 ā€œwetbacksā€ and ā€œMexican bitches.ā€ The report says Arpaioā€™s office ā€œimplemented 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 departmentā€™s racist practices. It was his refusal to do so that ultimately resulted in his conviction. Arpaioā€™s 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 territoryā€”Hillary Clinton lost by 3.5 points in 2016ā€”Arizona 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.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate