Arpaio's Words Used Against Him at Racial-Profiling Case

ARIZONA REPUBLIC

By JJ Hensley

July 24, 2012

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/07/23/20120723arpaio-expected-testify-today-racial-profiling-case.html#ixzz21ZRNDpPe

Within minutes of Sheriff Joe Arpaio taking the witness stand in the racial-profiling case involving his office, attorneys for the plaintiffs began using the sheriff's own public statements, press releases and books to paint the five-term sheriff as a law-enforcement officer whose zeal on immigration enforcement is based on the requests of racist groups and rooted in discriminatory practices.

It was a tactic attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union telegraphed in court filings before the racial-profiling trial began last week -- to use the sheriff's statements to show the intent of Arpaio's immigration enforcement program, along with data and victims' anecdotes to show the impact.

Stanley Young, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said the sheriff's immigration-enforcement plan was conceived in November 2005 after Arpaio received a letter from the Minutemen group asking why law enforcement agencies in Arizona refused to question day laborers about their immigration status.

Arpaio's response, according to his handwritten note in the margins of the Minutemen letter, was to have a meeting within the Sheriff's Office to decide how to respond.

Young then played a video clip from a 2007 news conference where Arpaio described the sheriff's immigration-enforcement efforts as a "pure program" designed to target illegal immigrants regardless of whether they had violated Arizona law.

"I'm not afraid to say that, you go after them and you lock them up," Arpaio said during the news conference.

The sheriff tried to clarify his stance on the witness stand Tuesday.

"Under the 287g agreement (with Immigration and Customs Enforcement) when we enforce the laws and stop someone for violating the laws, under that agreement we have the authority to enforce the federal immigration laws even though they were not connected with any state crime," Arpaio explained.

Young quickly moved through other statements Arpaio made through the years regarding immigration enforcement, some of which were contained in the sheriff's press releases and others from his 2008 autobiography.

But Arpaio, as he had done in countless depositions and sworn statements through the years, attempted to deflect responsibility for some of those statements on to his staff members and the co-author of his autobiography.

Arpaio also told the court at the start of Tuesday's proceedings that he had a touch of the flu. He cited suffering a similar illness during testimony last year in disciplinary hearings involving former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, when Arpaio failed to recall certain key meetings with the former prosecutor.

Arpaio's recollection on Tuesday was sound, but he refused to take credit for some of the statements attributed to him, and claimed others were taken out of context.

"I don't get involved in those operations," Arpaio said when asked about one of the sheriff's immigration sweeps. "I'm not there on the street patrolling and making arrests."

Earlier in the morning, the judge in the case, U.S. district Judge Murray Snow, directed questions at one of Arpaio's deputies who participated in a 2007 traffic stop.

Snow focused in on the background, training and experience of Deputy Louis DiPietro, who stopped a car in Cave Creek that had just picked up a group of day laborers, including Manuel de Jesus Ortega-Melendres. Ortega-Melendres is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Of particular interest to Snow was a statement DiPietro made last week regarding his opinion that most day laborers are in the country illegally. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have long contended that the Sheriff's Office conflates being Hispanic and being a day laborer with being an undocumented immigrant.

DiPietro said he formed that opinion based on the stop he made in Cave Creek nearly five years ago.

"Is there any other basis other than that day on which you have now formed that opinion," Snow asked.

"The fact that that type of work doesn't require any type of, um, you don't have to show an ID, um, it would be easier, that type of work would be easier for, um, a person in this country illegally to, um, get because they wouldn't have the proper paperwork for other types of employment," DiPietro replied.

After a little more than an hour on the stand, DiPietro was excused and Arpaio took center stage.

The case alleges that the Sheriff's Office engaged in institutional discrimination against Latinos when it embarked on what has become the defining mission of Arpaio's 19-year tenure: immigration enforcement. His efforts have been met by accusations -- by citizens, activists and the U.S. Justice Department -- that his agency has engaged in racial profiling and treat Latinos differently than others.

With no jury in the case, Snow will decide whether the Sheriff's Office participated in widespread discrimination against Latino residents. The judge occasionally took moments to clarify testimony or ask questions from the bench during the trial's first day of hearings last week.

The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages. Instead, the plaintiffs want the kind of injunctive relief that the Sheriff's Office has resisted to date -- a declaration that spells out what deputies may or may not do when stopping potential suspects, and a court-appointed monitor to ensure the agency abides by those rules. The case is also distinct from a separate civil-rights lawsuit the Justice Department filed against the Sheriff's Office earlier this year, although the ruling in the ACLU's case will likely have a significant impact in that proceeding.

The trial is scheduled to end on Aug. 2.