Joe Arpaio, the infamous former sheriff who was convicted of violating a court order on racial profiling and then was pardoned by President Trump, will be running for senate in Arizona for the open seat currently held by Sen. Jeff Flake, the Washington Examiner reported this morning.
Before Trump pardoned Arpaio, People For the American Way and other civil rights groups wrote the president a letter laying out the former sheriff’s atrocious record:
During his 24 year tenure as a sheriff in Arizona, Joe Arpaio used his position of authority to drive a personal agenda of hate and racism through a brutal assault on Maricopa County’s Latino population. In the name of cracking down on undocumented immigrants, Arpaio brutalized and terrorized thousands of Latinos. His tactics included racial profiling of children, tourists, legal residents, and U.S. citizens – often detaining them for hours at a time without a criminal charge or warrant. He inflicted inhumane punishments that involved torture, humiliation, and degradation of Latino inmates.
Arpaio is also a committed birther. His “Cold Case Posse,” conducted in partnership with the far-right website WorldNetDaily, spent much of the Obama administration “investigating” the authenticity of the president’s birth certificate.
While he was sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Arpaio staged any number of bizarre publicity stunts, from “making prisoners pay for salt and pepper” to framing an innocent man for a phony assassination attempt.
Arpaio, who is beloved of anti-immigration hardliners, told the Examiner that he has a “far-out plan” to deport Dreamers while making "everybody” happy:
“I have a far-out plan, which may look stupid,” he said. “When they come to your attention that they’re here illegally, these young people, deport them back to Mexico — or whatever — and then try to put them on a fast track to come back into the United States legally with special permits. What’s wrong with that? They’d say they don’t know where their home country is, so let them go there and spend six months, because it might take that long to do paperwork to get them here legally and let them see their home country and see what it's really like. They ought to be proud where they came from. I’m proud being an Italian American. I’m proud of Italy. I’m proud my father, mother came over, proud of it. So, you could kill two birds with one stone.”
“That would be no amnesty, everybody would be happy, you deport them and then let them come back with all their education here. I’m sure they could find a temporary job or help the foreign countries and build up relations and come back. That’s just a big picture that I have. People may say I’m crazy. What am I crazy about? It just makes sense.”
Arpaio tweeted that he is making his latest run for office to “support the agenda and policies of President Donald Trump in his mission to Make America Great Again”:
I am running for the U.S. Senate from the Great State of Arizona, for one unwavering reason: to support the agenda and policies of President Donald Trump in his mission to Make America Great Again. https://t.co/ANppBdDOtp
— Sheriff Joe Arpaio (@RealSheriffJoe) January 9, 2018
