By The Editorial Board
New York Times
August 5, 2017
Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, for years a fearsome figure for Arizona’s Latinos, was convicted of criminal contempt this week for violating a court order to stop his dragnet harassment of immigrants for documentation.
The misdemeanor conviction, which could mean six months in jail, should be a warning against the kinds of abusive tactics used by Sheriff Arpaio in his self-appointed role as guardian and enforcer of federal immigration law — an effort the Justice Department called one of the worst examples of racial profiling it had ever seen. But so far the message appears to have fallen on deaf ears; unchastened, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to have little trouble finding local police departments willing to join President Trump’s aggressive national search for potential deportees.