Race/Civil Rights

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is something of a hero to the anti-immigrant Right. He was one of the most outspoken proponents of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law last year, in a large part because he had already been using the racial profiling tactics it authorized for years. He delighted in punishing prisoners –including protestors of his tactics – by making them wear pink underwear, a practice he commemorated last month by giving Sarah Palin her very own pair. He briefly had his own reality TV show. He was courted by the Tea Party. GOP presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain vied for his endorsement, which he ultimately gave to Rick Perry before joining the candidate on the campaign trail.

Arpaio’s reckless flair for self-promotion and disregard for civil rights have been well-known for as long as he has had national fame. But today, the Justice Department released a long and scathing report detailing the Sheriff’s record of civil rights violations, including his discrimination against Latinos and non-English speakers, “excessive use of force” and “unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices.”

The AP outlines some of the most shocking allegations in the report:

The civil rights report said Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos and that the agency's immigration policies treat Latinos as if they are all in the country illegally. Deputies on the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good cause, the investigation found.

A review done as part of the investigation found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio's immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops - almost all involving Latino drivers - that were done without reasonable suspicion. The squad's stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.

Deputies are encouraged to make high-volume traffic stops in targeted locations. There were Latinos who were in the U.S. legally who were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps, according to the report.

During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city - in some cases, heavily Latino areas - over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office.

Police supervisors, including at least one smuggling-squad supervisor, often used county accounts to send emails that demeaned Latinos to fellow sheriff's managers, deputies and volunteers in the sheriff's posse. One such email had a photo of a mock driver's license for a fictional state called "Mexifornia."

The report said that the sheriff's office launched an immigration operation two weeks after the sheriff received a letter in August 2009 letter about a person's dismay over employees of a McDonald's in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City who didn't speak English. The tip laid out no criminal allegations. The sheriff wrote back to thank the writer "for the info," said he would look into it and forwarded it to a top aide with a note of "for our operation."
 

Federal investigators focused heavily on the language barriers in Arpaio's jails.

Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day or keeping prisoners locked down in their jail pods for as long as 72 hours without a trip to the canteen area or making nonlegal phone calls.

The report said some jail officers used racial slurs for Latinos when talking among themselves and speaking to inmates.

Detention officers refused to accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when the documents were completed in Spanish and pressured Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms that implicate their legal rights without language assistance.

The agency pressures Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms by yelling at them and keeping them in uncomfortably cold cells for long periods of time.

These allegations are disturbing enough in themselves. But what’s even more troubling is that the person behind them has been not only held up as a hero by the Right, but has served as an inspiration for immigration legislation around the country. In a report last year, we examined the ways the anti-immigrant Right has worked to dehumanize immigrants in order “to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and build political opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.” It should come as no surprise that Sheriff Joe is the movement’s figurehead.
 

Cross-posted from PFAW Blog

A campaign worker for a Republican county legislator in Nassau County, New York was caught using racist and sexist slurs earlier this week against his opponent’s campaign and a family member. The sister of Democratic candidate Carrie Solages, who is black, was filming a campaign worker of legislator John Ciotti while he was trying to put the Republican legislator’s campaign signs on Solages’ office. In the video, the campaign worker calls her a “pig” and yells at her and another African American woman outside the office, “Call animal control so we can arrest ‘em.” Later in the video, he says to another Ciotti volunteer, “We will put them on the back of the bus where they belong.”

Two years ago, workers for the Ciotti campaign shouted down his Democratic challenger during her campaign kickoff speech. This time, Ciotti fired the campaign worker and denounced his remarks, but now a civil rights attorney has accused the Republican incumbent’s campaign of intimidation.

Watch:

Tea Party Nation is a major (for-profit) Tea Party organization that gained prominence after its convention last year hosted Republican leaders like Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, along with Religious Right figures Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough. TPN’s President Judson Phillips previously denounced the “Marxist” Methodist Church and suggested that President Obama’s campaign was funded by Hamas and China.

This morning, Tea Party Nation sent out an email to its members with the headline “Destroy the Family, You Destroy the Country!” from an article by Dr. Rich Swier, a contributing editor to the anti-Muslim group Family Security Matters. Writing for Tea Part Nation, Swier says that “The title of this column is a direct quote from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the first leader of the former Soviet Union. Lenin's vision was for the state (Communism) to replace the family as the provider of all things necessary for life and happiness. What Lenin did not foresee was his political policies leading to the eventual extinction of Russian civilization.” Swier goes on to lament the falling birthrate of native-born Americans compared to immigrants, and warns that “American culture” will soon perish since the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction”:

What is keeping America's fertility rate up are immigrants - both legal and illegal.

There are those in America who are continuously attacking the family, bent on redefining marriage and have established anti-family government programs. This has led to downward pressure on our national total fertility rate. All of these actions are done in the name of various causes such as: reducing unwanted pregnancies, delaying child bearing to further career goals and even promoting childlessness and promoting adoption as a better option.

Child bearing has become something distasteful to many women, an unwanted and painful experience to be avoided rather than embraced.

All of these programs, ideals and ideologies are doing one thing and one thing only - reducing America core TFR to the point of no return. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population in America is headed for extinction and with it our economy, well-being and survival as a uniquely America culture.

This county is dying not because it is aging, it is dying because of infertility as public policy.

The far-right student group Youth for Western Civilization, which hosted a panel at CPAC on immigration featuring Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) and former Reps. Tom Tancredo and Virgil Goode, is now promoting the Confederacy’s 150th Anniversary and “Anglo-Celtic” pride. William L. Houston of YWC attended a ceremony commemorating Jefferson Davis’s inauguration, and discussed the need for ethnic and historical pride among the “native Anglo-Celtic population of the American South.” He went on to say that the federal government both under Lincoln and Obama are rightly “perceived as being out of control, hostile toward, and oppressive of the people of the states,” and concludes that the “common soldier of the Union Army could have only seen what has become of the Union in our own times, quite assuredly he would have laid down his arms and deserted to the other side.” Houston writes:

As far as heritage and ethnic pride events tend to go, they don't come more politically incorrect than the Southern Rights parade held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Montgomery on Saturday.

Before a cheering throng of hundreds of Anglo-Celtic Southerners, an actor portraying Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America on the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol.

Confederate flags flapped in the Southern breeze. Dixie was played. Cannons were fired. There were speeches of defiance and rebellion - about events both historical and modern.

The purpose of this event was to remember and celebrate the birth of the Confederacy a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet everyone who gathered there left with the sense that there was more to the story.

This was a direct assault on the double standard of multiculturalism by "the wrong sort" of people - the only people in the United States who are denied a sense of pride and identity in their heritage - the native Anglo-Celtic population of the American South - who are told that every group in the world can come to the South and celebrate their heritage but the people who were born and raised here.

"What is it in a man that would cause him to deny his fellow man the pride and dignity of his heritage," said Chuck Rand, an adjutant in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

…

The crowd in attendence [sic] in Montgomery didn't hesitate to draw parallels between the Confederacy and contemporary America. Then as now, the federal government was perceived as being out of control, hostile toward, and oppressive of the people of the states.

In 1861, it was Southerners who felt this way. In 2011, it is the majority of Americans who live in the South, West, and Midwest.

In their worst nightmare scenarios, even the secessionists couldn't have imagined anything like the President of the United States attacking the State of Arizona for defending itself from a Mexican invasion, celebrating Kwanzaa and Cinco de Mayo in the White House, Obamacare, affirmative action, abortion, gay marriage, or Barack Obama's $3.7 trillion dollar proposed federal budget.

Even Abraham Lincoln would be flabbergasted at his modern heirs who have declared war on traditional marriage and Christmas celebrations. Nothing is more pointless than arguing over the causes of the Civil War.

If the common soldier of the Union Army could have only seen what has become of the Union in our own times, quite assuredly he would have laid down his arms and deserted to the other side.