The fate of the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County now rests with a federal judge, after attorneys made their closing arguments in the criminal trial of Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant strong man who was finally ousted from office by Arizona voters last November. After years of terrorizing Latino and immigrant communities through workplace raids and traffic stops, Arpaio is on trial for violating a court order to not racially profile brown drivers in order to turn them over to ICE.
If convicted, "America's toughest sheriff" faces up to six months in prison. Quite a change for someone who once proclaimed that “nobody's higher than me”:
Nine witnesses took the stand during the eight-day trial, including Arpaio's former attorney, Tim Casey, who was questioned by the defense during the occasionally contentious testimony.
During his closing argument, [John] Keller, deputy chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity section, said Arpaio told the court he "understood the exact situation of how the preliminary injunction applied," but made false statements to his attorneys and federal immigration officials to defy the Obama administration.
Further damning Arpaio’s claim that he was unclear about the judge’s order—funny how so many of these anti-immigrant Trump allies get so fuzzy when faced with incriminating facts—were years of footage of Arpaio boasting about his anti-immigrant stance in order to fundraise and boost his re-election chances despite a court-mandated order to stop pretending he’s a federal immigration agent.
"The defendant thought this day was never coming," Keller said. "But nobody gets to defy a federal judge's order."
Arpaio’s victims, dating back years to the time he set up a hotline so that people could turn in anyone they suspected of being undocumented, have certainly been waiting for this day:
Arpaio continued his sweeps in Guadalupe, and across the county, even after the federal government took away his legal ability to do so in 2010, and even after a federal judge issued an injunction in 2012 that forbade him from doing so. This is what landed him in court. It began in 2007 when Arpaio’s deputies pulled over a car in which Manuel Ortega Melendres, a Mexican citizen in the country on a valid visa, was a passenger. Deputies said they stopped the car for speeding, but they never issued a citation. Even though Ortega had proper identification, deputies arrested him and sent him to county jail so an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official could look over his papers. He was eventually let go. Then in 2008 deputies stopped a brother and sister, both U.S. citizens, checked their IDs, released them. But other deputies stopped them further down the road and held them at gunpoint. These became two cases in a class-action suit against the sheriff’s department brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, cases that eventually gained the attention of federal investigators.
US District Judge Susan Bolton is expected to issue her ruling within the next few weeks. According to Phoenix attorney and activist Antonio Bustamante, there’s a good chance that if Arpaio is convicted, due to his age he’ll likely get probation “for an ‘outrageous’ crime that would send a regular person to prison.” But if he does end up going to the slammer, it’ll be due to a case that started under the Obama DOJ and stretched out over to the DOJ under the very man Arpaio eagerly supported for president.