A Nationwide Call to Political Arms

By Jonathan Blitzer
4:09 P.M.

... When the fight against Arpaio began, a decade ago, Guzman was on the front lines. While Arpaio raided immigrant communities around Phoenix, arresting Latino residents en masse, she was one of dozens of community members who turned out with cameras and recorders to document what was happening. It took a few years for Guzman and other activists to gather evidence of the sheriff’s rampant racial profiling, and then several more for the courts to consider all the evidence. During that time, Guzman had to persuade Arpaio’s victims that sharing their stories was worth the trouble and the risk. "There were times when the community threw up its hands and said, 'This is going nowhere,' " she told me. But last November, Arpaio was voted out of office, and then, earlier this summer, a court found him guilty of criminal contempt. Arpaio hadn’t just brutalized Latinos; he had flagrantly ignored a federal judge who’d ordered him to stop. The outcome was proof—belated but definitive—that the justice system could work. "Arpaio is no longer the sheriff, and his legacy is that he was a convicted criminal," Guzman said. "Only criminals need pardons."

That the pardon came from Trump — two weeks after backing white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and three days after staging a rally in Phoenix — only heightened the national stakes. "It’s a message to the country," Carlos Garcia, the executive director of Puente, an Arizona-based human-rights organization, told me. "What Arpaio did — that’s coming to you, wherever you live." Both Guzman and Garcia were angry but energized. "What we do now has to do with Trump," Garcia said. Even before Arpaio was found to be in contempt of court, advocates and community members in Arizona beat him at the ballot box, which showed that Trump, too, could be defeated democratically. "When we started our fight against Arpaio he was the most popular official in Arizona. His approval rating was over seventy per cent," Garcia said. "We took to the streets, took testimony, registered people to vote, and went to the courtroom. This is the fight we’ll bring to Trump."

The Trump Administration has spent the last six months trying to force local law-enforcement agencies to collaborate with ice as Arpaio did, and many police chiefs and sheriffs across the country have resisted. Threats by the Justice Department to withdraw federal funding haven’t seemed to dim their resolve. Preserving the community’s trust is simply too important for public safety ...

Arpaio’s twenty-four-year career in Maricopa County was as a direct affront to the immigrant community. He gloated over the fear he caused. More than a hundred inmates died in his jails, and there were countless lawsuits filed against him. When local journalists wrote critical articles, he had them arrested. At one point, he launched an immigration raid in the town of a rival police chief apparently just to spite him ...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-trumps-arpaio-pardon-is-a-nationwide-call-to-political-arms