Since the Trump administration unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there’s also been a number of communities all across the U.S. that have gone to the ballot box to end local ties to the mass deportation agency, including voting out sheriffs who’ve colluded with federal immigration agents for years.
Among those sheriffs voted out was convicted criminal Joe Arpaio, defeated in 2016 by Paul Penzone, who had pledged to close Arpaio’s notorious Tent City (referred to as a “concentration camp” by the noted racist himself). In the year following Penzone taking office, Tent City, like Arpaio’s reign of terror, was no more. But what hasn’t changed is that Penzone’s sheriff’s department has continued to collaborate with ICE.
“The past three fiscal years, Maricopa County Fourth Avenue Jail ranked second nationally for ICE detainers or holds—requesting transfer of custody to immigration detention—totaling 9,448, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University,” Dianna M. Náñez reports in Arizona Republic. “In 2016, when Arpaio was still in office, it ranked fifth for detainers and from fiscal years 2014 to 2106 detainers totaled 8,343.”
Náñez reports that Penzone campaigned for Latino votes and had initially announced an end to the department’s collaboration with ICE soon after taking office, but then reversed. “[A] backlash brewed when, about a week later, Penzone released at least 33 people who under Arpaio would have been held for ICE,” she reports. One would think that acting differently from Arpaio was maybe the whole point of replacing Arpaio.
Not doing something different, Náñez continues, also resulted in the detention of a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who actually helped get out the vote in 2016. Máxima Guerrero was arrested and turned over to ICE as she was leaving a protest against the police killing of George Floyd this past summer. She faced a baseless felony rioting charge and a threat of being sent to a notorious detention facility in the state, but fought both with the help of the community and advocates.
”Máxima's arrest is a prime example of why immigration officials shouldn’t be inside local jails, transferring them to detention centers before they’ve had a trial or due process, [attorney] Ybarra Maldonado said,” Náñez continued in her report. Maldonado told her “[w]e have an amazing young woman who has accomplished so much in her life and who was falsely arrested. If it wasn’t for a tremendous amount of community support … she would be sitting in a COVID-filled detention center.”
“Cases like this, they happen every single day in jurisdictions where ICE is in local jails, you just don’t hear about them,” she continued.
More than a quarter of a million immigrants were deported by the Trump administration last year, Mother Jones reported last month—and many were deported with the eager assistance of sheriffs who shouldn’t be involved in federal law enforcement in the first place. “70 percent of ICE arrests originate in the criminal justice system, mostly in jails,” the report said. “And as President Trump’s war on immigrants has expanded, sheriffs have become some of its most enthusiastic foot soldiers.”
Guerrero told Náñez that she and others have faced some backlash of their own from others within the Democratic Party for demanding accountability from Penzone, basically told that things could be worse, and to "back the new sheriff or you'll get another Arpaio,” the report said. But they’ve probably also never faced possibly being uprooted and deported from their home and family for exercising their First Amendment right. Can we do better for immigrants like Máxima Guerrero? We—and Penzone—must.
