Dear Editor,
In last week’s issue, sophomore Sean Hyaduck argued that President Donald Trump was justified in pardoning Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona.
As a lifelong resident of the county, I have long been aware of Arpaio’s impact in my community and the causes of the charges leveled against him. Readers unfamiliar with the details of Arpaio’s actions, however, may be misled by Hyaduck’s picture of events.
Hyaduck devotes the bulk of his argument to justifying Trump’s constitutional authority to pardon Arpaio, claiming that there were issues with the court handling of his case. But both of these arguments have nothing to do with the supposed claim that Trump was morally right to pardon Arpaio.
Where Hyaduck does address Arpaio’s actions, he says that the former sheriff “took uncommon initiative” and was “prohibited from delivering on [the] promise” to uphold federal immigration laws. So, what exactly was Arpaio’s “uncommon initiative?”
In his own words, Arpaio commanded officers to detain people because of “their speech, what they look like, if they look like they came from another country,” authorizing police to profile anyone who seemed Latino in order to check their immigration status. As a result of this order, a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice report found that Latinos were stopped on roadways at at least four times the rate of non-Latinos and that officers conducted sweeps in Latino neighborhoods without warrants or probable cause.
Defenders of the Constitution should recognize racial profiling without probable cause as a clear violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, but the only unlawfulness Hyaduck mentions is on behalf of those prosecuting Arpaio with an “order to compromise his duty.” Here, duty apparently involves ignoring the authority of the judicial branch. Even after a 2011 court ruling ordered Arpaio to cease this abuse of power, his office continued to enforce the policies and later admitted to violating court orders.
If these flagrant instances of unlawfulness are not enough to discount Hyaduck’s positive portrayal of Arpaio, they actually just scratch the surface of the ways in which Arpaio failed his county. The sheriff ran an outdoor prison in scorching Arizona summers, which he described as a “concentration camp.” He cost taxpayers over $146 million in court fees and settlements, and he targeted his political opponents with unfounded investigations.
Perhaps most egregiously, in its preoccupation with pursuing illegal immigrants, Arpaio’s office left more than 400 cases of sex crimes including child molestation either inadequately investigated or uninvestigated entirely. If Arpaio cared so much about the “safety of his county,” as Hyaduck suggests, what about the safety of its women and children?
Perhaps Hyaduck was unfamiliar with all the details of Arpaio’s actions. Regardless, Hyaduck should present all the facts before he attempts to defend a man as unworthy as Joe Arpaio.
Haley Hauprich is a junior studying English.
