“There absolutely are people the president should pardon in Arizona,” writes Noemi Romero, an undocumented immigrant and leader with local immigrant rights group Puente Arizona, “but it’s not the recently convicted Sheriff in Maricopa County. It’s victims of Sheriff Arpaio’s racial profiling like me who are still paying the price.”
In 2013, Romero was one of the countless Maricopa County immigrants to have been swept up in one of Joe Arpaio’s racist workplace raids. Despite the fact that she was not even a target, the raid nearly led to her deportation, and today Romero has a criminal record because she had been using her mother’s ID in order to be able to work and raise the nearly $500 she needed for her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application.
Because of the conviction, Romero is no longer eligible for the DACA program she had been working so hard to apply for. Meanwhile, Donald Trump may possibly pardon Arpaio for his criminal conviction for disobeying a federal judge’s order, something he not only has shown no remorse for, but a criminal act he continues to stand by. Romero writes that it’s not Arpaio who deserves the pardon—it’s the hard-working immigrants he terrorized that deserve a second chance:
When President Trump says Arpaio is a “great American patriot” who has “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration,” he’s talking about what he’s done to people like me. He’s talking about what he’s done to families like Katherine Figueroa who at age 9 watched her own parents arrested in a raid on a carwash on live television. He’s talking about Marty Atencio who Arpaio’s Sheriffs beat to death in a jail cell. Just like when he says there are “very fine people on both sides” of the protests in Charlottesville, he’s talking about nazis.
The previous Department of Justice said that Arpaio is the “most egregious case of racial profiling” investigators had ever witnessed. A judge found Arpaio guilty of continuing that profiling in contempt of court orders to stop. And he’s actually guilty of much worse.
Pardoning Arpaio would be a presidential endorsement of his racism and his flaunting of the law in pursuit of it. Whereas pardoning Arpaio’s victims would actually mean having a heart and correcting a wrong.
“Because of a local group, Puente Arizona, and the work of my community I’m still here,” writes Romero in her Daily Kos diary, which is a must-read here. “But because of Arpaio’s profiling and campaign against our families I have this extra mark against me now...where is my pardon?”
