Feds strip Sheriff Joe Arpaio authority to arrest undocumented immigrants

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security landed a devastating blow one of the most controversial figures in the anti-immigrant/pro 287g movement.

But Arpaio said Tuesday he plans to continue his controversial “crime suppression operations,” despite DHS’s decision to not renew an agreement that would allow the sheriff to continue immigration enforcement on the streets.

“It’s all politics,” said Arpaio, who spent much of an afternoon news conference Tuesday wagging his finger, waving his arms and snarling at reporters.

Arpaio will have some immigration powers under an agreement signed Friday. His 60 detention officers in the county jails will still have the authority to check the immigration status of people they book.

But the agreement that would allow street patrols was signed Sept. 21 and then rescinded, and a top-level DHS official from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs personally told him the federal agency wasn’t going to accept the agreement, but he “didn’t really give a good reason,” Arpaio said.

“We’re being looked at by the Justice Department and all that.”

Arpaio said he believes DHS made the changes to stop his “crime suppression operations,” which are saturation patrols in designated areas where deputies would find illegal immigrants by stopping them for traffic infractions and minor violations.

The Department of Justice and other federal agencies are investigating the sheriff’s office on accusations of racial profiling during the crime suppression operations.

In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series published in July 2008, the Tribune found the sheriff’s office’s illegal-immigration sweeps violated federal regulations intended to prevent racial profiling. The five-part series also found that the sweeps diverted resources from core law-enforcement functions, which in some cases caused response times to increase.

As pressure is being placed on the government to end the controversial 287G program, this announcement is a good first step in ending the practice of having local police enforcing federal law.