Open Letter to Sheriff Joe (DRAFT)

Dear Sheriff Joe Arpaio,



I am writing this letter to you as a concerned voter and taxpayer asking you to end your broad based immigration sweeps across Maricopa County and the greater Phoenix area. In today’s troubled times these sweeps are an unneeded economic burden on our already troubled state government. The state budget deficit, currently at $1.2 billion, could rise by as much as $4.3 billion over the next fiscal year. Facing this extreme budget shortfall, all Arizonans need to do everything they can to help shrink this deficit, especially state funded agencies.

Enforcing these laws is the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the local sheriff’s office. By volunteering to enforce these laws you are creating an unnecessary burden on our already overcrowded jails and putting the cost of detaining these immigrants squarely on the backs of Maricopa County taxpayers. In other parts of the country these raids are conducted and paid for by federal agents. Why should we as taxpayers shoulder these costs when our state is being faced with severe budget cuts to necessary services?

These cuts have already begun with social workers losing their jobs of helping to keep families together. By laying these social workers off it will give CPS workers less leeway in regards to keeping a family together through family counseling. The CPS caseworkers will be putting more children in foster care, thus creating another burden on our system and costing us more money in the long term. There are even more devastating consequences than just the monetary cost. According to author Richard Barth in a report prepared by The League of Women Voters in California, “Studies of homeless young people in New York and Los Angeles in the 1980's found that 30- 40% of them had been in foster care.” Can we really afford to contribute to the epidemic of unemployment and homelessness to do a job the federal government is already willing to do?

The purpose of ICE in their own words is to address “serious crime…committed by removable aliens.” It is not meant to arrest illegal immigrants for minor traffic offenses, open alcohol containers or other petty crimes. In ICE’s own word’s this is “contrary to the objective of the program.” So basically you have ICE deputized Sheriff’s office employees conducting immigration sweeps contrary to ICE’s objectives. If you are going to enforce these laws, shouldn’t they be enforced the way ICE wants them to be? We shouldn’t be spending our tax money to interpret directives from ICE however we want to with mixed results at best.

The way we are enforcing this program is also leading us down a slippery slope. We can’t have hard working legal citizens of Hispanic descent afraid to live their lives for fear of racial profiling. It is not ok to pull somebody over and temporarily detain them to check the legality of their citizenship. This is racial profiling and has no place in a free democratic society. There are many hard working tax-paying Hispanics who deserve to be treated the same as everyone else regardless of skin color. Our state has worked hard to shed the racist label brought upon us by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day fiasco led by former Governor Evan Meacham. We do not need more national attention focused on us for racial profiling practices currently employed by the Sheriff’s Office. It took Arizona a long time to recover from all of the bad publicity associated with the MLK day fiasco, we don’t need to add another incident to cloud the view of this great state.

Now I don’t want you to get the opinion I am like all of the other anti Sheriff Joe Arpaio people here in the valley, quite to the contrary. The first election I ever voted in was in 1993. I researched all of the Propositions and the candidates and one of the first decisions I came to was to vote for you. I looked at your law enforcement experience, your years overseas working for the DEA and thought, this is the guy I want catching criminals in Maricopa County. I love that you are tough on crime and vigilant in your enforcement of the law. However I really think you are missing the boat with these immigration sweeps. I think that rather than target businesses and other venues you should be going after violent offenders, drug smugglers and other illegal immigrants who have made this the kidnapping capitol of the nation. Better yet let ICE conduct these raids at the federal government’s expense.




Respectfully Yours,
Kyle Nelson