Arpaio: Pardon Me for Doing My Job

Shockwaves erupted Friday night as President Trump issued a Presidential Pardon for Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio; also known as “America’s toughest sheriff.”  President Trump issued the pardon on Twitter, saying “I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  He kept Arizona safe!”  In addition, the White House released a statement saying “Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio continued his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration.  Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is a worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon.”  While his loyal base absolutely loved it, the mainstream media angrily accused the President of trying to hide his pardon behind the media’s extensive coverage of Hurricane Harvey; which has brought catastrophic flooding to the Texas gulf coast and the Houston Metropolitan area.  The President had hinted that he may pardon Arpaio at a rally in Phoenix last week, telling the enthusiastic crowd “I’ll make a prediction.  I think he’s going to be just fine.  Okay?”  Earlier this year, Judge Susan Bolton held Arpaio in criminal contempt of court for refusing to follow a court order asking that he stop conducting “immigration roundups.”  Had Hillary Clinton won the election, Arpaio would probably have had to serve a prison sentence up to six months in length.  Arpaio thanked the President on Twitter and called his conviction “a political witch hunt by holdovers in the Obama justice department.”  Arpaio plans on holding a press conference today where he hopes to “speak out and tell the real story.”    

 

Needless to say, liberals are not impressed with the President’s decision.  Bette Midler called the President a “motherf***er” and condemned his pardon of “a vicious racial profiler who has caused death and misery for years.”  At least she didn’t threaten to blow up The White House. Univision’s Jorge Ramos, who got into this dustup with the President early in his campaign, said that “By pardoning Arpaio, President Trump is defending racism.”  The outcry about the Arpaio pardon is not limited to the left.  Even the state’s “Republican” Senators expressed disapproval at the President’s decision.  Senator John McCain issued a statement on Twitter, saying “@POTUS’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, who illegally profiled Latinos, undermines his claim for the respect for rule of law.”  Senator Jeff Flake, who has a rocky relationship with POTUS, issued his own Twitter statement; saying he wished that the President would “honor the judicial process and let it take its course.”  On the other hand, Flake’s primary challenger Kelli Ward, who previously challenged McCain in last year’s senate election, praised President Trump for his pardon; saying “Thank you @RealDonaldTrump so glad you pardoned @RealSheriffJoe-a patriot who did the job the Feds refused to do.  #StopIllegalImmigration.” Earlier this month, POTUS praised Ward in an early morning tweet, saying “Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime, and a non-factor in Senate.  He’s toxic!”    

 

Arpaio’s tough-as-nails enforcement of America’s immigration laws has earned him enemies on both sides of the political aisle.  Arpaio spent nearly a quarter century as the Sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county before losing re-election this past fall.  Arpaio enthusiastically supported SB 1070; also known as the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”  Passed by the Arizona State Legislature in 2010, this law allowed local law enforcement officials to take a proactive approach to combating the problem of illegal immigration; which the Federal government had failed to respond to with the same sense of urgency.  Opinion polling found that more than 60 percent of Americans, including a majority of Arizona residents, supported the law.  It did not take long for the left to challenge the law in Court, arguing that it encouraged racial profiling.  Eventually, the Department of Justice, led by Eric Holder, filed a lawsuit against the State of Arizona.  The case eventually went to the Supreme Court; where the Justices ruled 5-3 that three provisions of the law violated the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, which states that Federal laws trump state laws.  The Justices left in place Section 2B; perhaps the part of the law that liberals hate most. This provision requires police officers to ask about the immigration status of individuals they stop or arrest if there is reasonable suspicion that that person is in the country illegally.  Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2012, the legal challenges to the law did not end.  In 2015, G. Murray Snow, a District judge of the United States District Court of Arizona, found that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had engaged in unconstitutional racial profiling.  His decision effectively scrapped Section 2B of SB 1070.  To no one’s surprise, a three-judge panel on the ultra-liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the lower court’s decision. 

 

Just a decade after many Democrats voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized the construction of a fence on the Southern border, the Democrats have fully embraced the open borders philosophy; which argues that anyone interested in enforcing immigration law or building a wall on the southern border is a xenophobic racist.  Unfortunately, the media and the judicial branch tend to sympathize with that philosophy.  These groups do not have to deal with the consequences of illegal immigration; considering the fact that they mostly live in gated communities.  If anything, they benefit from lax border enforcement; it allows them to employ illegal immigrant laborers at a lower cost than native born laborers.  Even if a poll came out tomorrow showing that the majority of the American public supported tougher enforcement of existing immigration laws, the mainstream media would probably never report on it.  They desperately want to see this President and his policies fail.  They will do everything in their power to make sure that happens.  

 

To paraphrase a former segment on “The O’Reilly Factor”, whether you view Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a Pinhead or a Patriot depends on how you feel about President Trump.  Those who hate the President hate him even more after this decision.  Those who support the President feel reassured that he has not become a swamp monster. As for the humble correspondent himself, a recent tweet suggests that he views the former Maricopa County Sheriff as a patriot.  In my opinion, Sheriff Arpaio was just trying to do his job and keep the more than four million residents of Maricopa County safe.  Arpaio’s pardon illustrates that the heated debate surrounding the enforcement of immigration laws has no signs of cooling off anytime soon.