Photo by Kathy McCraine
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office said October 19 that it snagged thirty “suspected”undocumented immigrants and thirty-six others in its two-day “crime suppression operation” in the western burbs of Phoenix. You can read the actual press release here. We don’t know what, exactly, happened to the thirty-six folks whose immigration status was not in question. The people with papers do not concern the sheriff as much as the people without papers.
The raids aren’t about people with papers. The raids, instead, are intended to assure Sheriff Joe’s conservative base, through the evening news, that he’s on the job and sending the Mexicans back home.
But is he?
I attended the first day of the raid, on Friday October 16, and live-tweeted it.
It was easy to tweet this event.
Nothing happened.
I walked around town looking for freaked out people, like the ones in the Guadalupe Raid months ago. I didn’t find any. Instead, I met a lot of undocumented people who were laying low. They were cautious. But they weren’t afraid. This was Sheriff Joe’s twelfth raid. These expensive displays of shock and awe, with all the guys in storm trooper outfits driving in black sedans and SUV’s with tinted windows, had lost their punch. Most undocumented people I talked to understood the raids were publicity stunts. After all, less than three hundred people had been apprehended for being in the country illegally during the previous eleven raids. You can read about that here.
During the well-attended press conference on October 16, Sheriff Joe admitted not a single immigrant had been caught in the “Crime Suppression Operation” at that point.
But the night was young, he said.
The next day, the deputies et.al. raided the On Your Way Car Wash and Quick Lube in Peoria, a Phoenix suburb. The sheriff’s office announced that nine suspected undocumented people had been arrested for “identity theft,” which means they used fake IDs in order to work in a state that does not allow them to work. Nabbing people for “identity theft” falls under the state Employer Sanctions Act, which I wrote about here. What’s key here is that this is a state law, which the sheriff can use to catch undocumented people regardless of what the feds tell him to do.
Sheriff Joe’s deputies took these nine suspected undocumented ID-thieves, plus two more, to the slammer.
In other words, it took two hundred sheriff officials forty-eight hours to jail a total of eleven suspected undocumented migrants.
The other nineteen suspected undocumented immigrants were turned over to ICE, because the agency recently reined in the sheriff and told him he couldn’t pick up law-abiding folks just because they were undocumented.
To repeat: Of thirty alleged undocumented immigrants caught in the two-day raid by two hundred officials, eleven went to jail. That’s eleven people out of an estimated five hundred thousand undocumented immigrants thought to live in Arizona, with the heaviest population in the Phoenix area.
No wonder I didn’t have much to tweet.
Still, as I tapped all those boring tweets on my iPhone, I sensed I was witnessing an important shift: undocumented immigrants in Arizona have been through so much they just aren’t afraid any more.
And when undocumented people lose their fear, Sheriff Joe loses his power.
Isn’t that the way it works?
I am documented and I am a teacher. I am afraid because this nation has raised a generation of Anne and Andy Franks. Politicians, on both ends, are holding our youth hostage. I am frightened because I know how incredibly intelligent, talented and hard working they are and because I know how vulnerable they are. The DREAM Act, is a long overdue piece of bipartisan legislation that came within a handful of votes under the Bush administration. It should have been a shoe-in with Obama. The DREAM Act needs to be unbundled, passed, and the kids need to be processed now. Do not allow these children to be criminalized.
One out of every 671 people in AZ is the victim of identity theft. In AZ, the most prominent use of these stolen IDs is employment fraud (33%).
You can see the numbers for yourself on FTC.gov:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/downloads/CY2008/Arizona%20CY-2008.pdf
Until we have a workable visa program for illegal aliens, the incentive to steal the IDs of US citizens will remain. And until the law is changed, any crime-fighting effort that catches ID thieves would appear to have a legitimate focus.
Questions: Why does Arpaio continue to win elections by such a wide margin? If he has been illegally arresting people, why haven’t the Feds gone after him for “hate crimes”?
The “press” seems to take him to task (not much positive is written or reported about him), so I’m confused about why he is still the Sheriff.
But then, Phoenix, Maricopa County and the State of Arizona all suffer from political schizophrenia.