This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
Reporting Highlights
- Early Adopter: The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was among the first agencies to participate in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to do immigration enforcement.
- Legal Troubles: The office’s immigration raids and traffic stops under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio led to racial profiling and the violation of Latinos’ constitutional rights.
- Parallels Today: As the Trump administration urges police departments to again join the ICE program, some Arizonans expect participating communities will face similar troubles.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Manuel Nieto Jr. and his sister had just pulled into a gas station to buy cigarettes and Gatorade when he noticed a sheriff’s deputy standing over two Latino men on the ground.
Their north Phoenix neighborhood was on alert. Sheriff’s deputies had been targeting day-labor centers in the area and making traffic stops — arresting people who couldn’t prove their immigration status. They had one thing in common: They looked Latino.
“No diga nada. Pídale un abogado,” Nieto’s sister, Velia Meraz, yelled to the detained men, according to court testimony. (“Don’t say anything. Ask for an attorney.”)
The deputy warned Nieto and Meraz: “You need to get out of here, now.”
Nieto drove around the corner to his dad’s auto repair shop as another deputy on a motorcycle followed him, siren and lights on, and patrol vehicles swarmed. Deputies approached — guns drawn.
Nieto dialed 911 for help: Officers were harassing him, he would later testify in court. One pulled Nieto from his vehicle. Others pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him.
Nieto’s father came running from his shop.
“Let my children go,” Manuel Nieto Sr. said. “They’re U.S. citizens. What did they do wrong?”
The raid that ensnared Nieto Jr. and Meraz 17 years ago was carried out under a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that grants local police powers to check immigration status during traffic stops and other routine encounters. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was among the first in the nation to test out ICE’s 287(g) task force program.
Since President Donald Trump retook office in January, similar scenes of local officers joining in aggressive immigration arrests have multiplied as ICE has rapidly expanded the 287(g) task force program to deputize local police officers as de facto deportation agents.
Moments after Manuel Nieto Sr. stormed out of his north Phoenix auto shop, the deputies left without arresting or citing his children. But Nieto Jr. and Meraz didn’t move on. They joined three other county residents in suing the sheriff’s office, accusing deputies of targeting them solely because they were Latino.
A federal judge agreed that the task force’s traffic stops and raids on Hispanic neighborhoods, day-labor centers and other businesses had violated Latinos’ civil and constitutional rights. Even after the ruling, the judge found Arpaio continued to detain people based solely on suspected civil immigration violations.
The U.S. Department of Justice also conducted a civil rights investigation into the sheriff’s office’s discriminatory practices, and ICE ended Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement. In 2012, ICE suspended all local police deportation task forces nationwide, only restarting them after Trump began his second term in January.
Many Arizonans who lived through Arpaio’s 287(g)-fueled immigration-enforcement campaign see parallels between what happened in Maricopa County and what’s now playing out across the country as local officers join forces with ICE. They also foresee costly troubles for local agencies that follow in Maricopa County’s footsteps, including difficulty regaining the trust of Latino residents whose constitutional rights are violated by local officers.
The White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions.
Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he became a target of political persecution for helping enforce immigration laws, which he saw as part of his job.
“I’d do it over again,” Arpaio said. “I tell everybody: I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a federal court who was biased against me. And all they could get me out on was a contempt of court? Think of that.”
Meanwhile, Maricopa County continues to reckon with its time allowing deputies to act as immigration officers.
Under a settlement agreement, the court mandated broad oversight of the sheriff’s office and appointed a monitor to track its compliance. Since then, the law enforcement agency has been required to meticulously document all interactions with the public. In the 12 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct.
Salvador Reza is a longtime community organizer who advocates for day laborers in Phoenix. He said his work put him in the crosshairs of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, leading to his arrest for obstruction during a protest. (The county declined to pursue charges against him.) Because of what happened in Maricopa County, he believes Latinos, including in the communities whose police departments have joined forces with ICE, are now more likely to be racially profiled.
“At that time, we were a laboratory,” Reza said. “They did the experiment, and basically now they’re implementing it at the national level.”
Credit:
Jesse Rieser for ProPublica
368 Paragraphs on Required Reforms
The lawsuit brought by Nieto Jr., Meraz and the other county residents became known as Melendres v. Arpaio — for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in one of Arpaio’s sweeps.
When U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow certified it as a class-action suit in December 2011, he indicated racial profiling by the sheriff’s office had been so widespread it could have violated the constitutional rights of any Latino in Maricopa County, one-third of the population.
The settlement contains 368 paragraphs outlining reforms. They range from creating a policy that bars racial profiling to developing a system that collects data on traffic stops to identify disparities in the race of motorists who are pulled over.
To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in “full and effective compliance” with the reforms continuously for three years. The department currently complies with more than 90% of the requirements, according to the monitor, but falls short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.
Snow found that traffic stops involving Latino drivers and passengers dragged on “beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop.”
Ricardo Reyes said he repeatedly endured traffic stops as a young Latino growing up in the Maryvale neighborhood of west Phoenix, where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino. He drove a nice car and believes deputies under Arpaio racially profiled him.
“They would ask me for my license, they take it and then, ‘You’re free to go,’” recalled Reyes, who leads an advocacy group for military veterans. “Why was I stopped? I never got an answer.”
Snow’s order requires deputies to document 13 data points for every traffic interaction, including when a stop began and ended, the reason for the stop, the driver’s perceived race and whether the deputy inquired about immigration status.
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
In a preliminary injunction, Snow wrote that sheriff’s deputies, “including officers associated with the special operations, circulated emails that compared Mexicans to dogs, ridiculed stereotypical Mexican accents, and portrayed Mexicans as drunks.”
He singled out two of the deputies Nieto Jr. and Meraz encountered in north Phoenix for making arrests based on race during 287(g) operations. Roughly 77% of all arrests by the first deputy the siblings saw at the gas station had Hispanic surnames, the judge found. The deputy who pulled over Nieto Jr. arrested only Latinos during the operations he participated in.
Even more concerning to Snow was that Arpaio continued such operations as a matter of policy after ICE pulled its 287(g) agreement in 2009. In other words, deputies continued making immigration arrests without authority from the federal government. The judge said that violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures.
After Arpaio defied the order and refused to implement many of the reforms, Snow issued additional mandates in 2016. He also found Arpaio and three of his aides in civil contempt of court and referred all four to face criminal contempt charges, a misdemeanor. Another federal judge convicted only Arpaio of criminal contempt in 2017 and was set to sentence him to up to six months in jail. Two months before sentencing, Trump pardoned Arpaio. However, voters had already voted Arpaio out of office.
His successors have faced the same oversight and have not fully complied with the court’s orders, according to the monitor’s reports.
Kevin Johnson, an immigration law author and professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law who runs the Immigration Professor’s Blog, said settlements related to discrimination and civil rights violations often take a long time to resolve. He pointed to the 28-year-old Flores settlement, which still dictates the federal government’s treatment of children in border and immigration custody. “There may be complaints about the court monitoring, but the burden is on the leaders and the agencies to show that monitoring is no longer necessary,” he said.
This January, newly elected Sheriff Jerry Sheridan, a Republican who had worked as Arpaio’s second-in-command, inherited the Melendres settlement. He argues the department has made enough progress to end the judge’s oversight.
Snow acknowledged recently in court that Sheridan and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had made significant gains. “But the areas where he’s not in compliance are pretty important areas,” he said.
The sheriff’s office analyzes traffic stop data quarterly to identify deputies with notable disparities in who they stop. An outside auditor evaluates annually any departmentwide disparities.
The latest annual report shows improvements over the past decade, but also that deputies still arrest Latino drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Data from this past year also show that Black drivers, who are not covered by the Melendres settlement, face longer stop times and higher arrest rates. And all drivers of color are more likely to be searched than white drivers.
In addition, the sheriff’s office acknowledged it has not investigated 640 deputy misconduct claims, some dating to 2015, according to the department’s most recent court filing. Snow had ordered that the backlog be cleared to hold the sheriff’s office more accountable after he found that Arpaio refused to implement many reforms.
