If You're Brown... You're Going Downtown!
Frustrated by a steady flow of illegal Mexican immigrants into Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has decided to take matters into his own hands.
Arpaio dispatches teams of sheriff's deputies into Hispanic communities where they stop people and arrest anyone who cannot prove he or she is a legal U.S. resident.
Now he faces an onslaught of criticism from Hispanic activists, local lawmakers and the Phoenix mayor, who call his crackdown on immigrants a clear case of racial profiling in which only people who look Hispanic are targeted.
"What right does a mayor or a police chief, or anyone like that, have to tell me what my priorities are?" Arpaio said in a recent interview. "I'm the elected sheriff. I tell them what their priorities are."
But Mary Rose Wilcox, a county supervisor and longtime Hispanic activist says, "All he is doing is going after everybody with a brown face."
Under the U.S. Constitution, all citizens must be treated equally under the law and the government cannot conduct unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause.
"They just don't want me enforcing the illegal immigration laws. They think they can intimidate me. They can't," said Arpaio, a Republican, who is running for re-election in November.
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