DmMic

FOX viewers do not believe immigration enforcement uses racial profiling of hispanics. Here is another article  that challenges that belief.  "Your papers please", should be America's new national motto.  
 ------------------------------------------------------
------------------

Does crackdown cross line?

Arizona efforts stir racial profiling claims

By Howard Witt | Tribune correspondent

    12:26 AM CDT, May 26, 2008

 

PHOENIX - The newest tactic in America's quickening effort to gain control of its porous southern border starts with a cracked windshield, a broken taillight or even a failure to signal a right or left turn.

That's all the probable cause sheriff's deputies here in sprawling Maricopa County say they need to pull over a vehicle they suspect might be carrying illegal immigrants.

If the driver or the passengers fail to produce a U.S. driver's license or a proper Immigration visa, if they speak only Spanish, or if they can't otherwise convince the officer they are in the country legally, they are likely to be arrested, jailed and handed off to federal Immigration authorities for deportation.

To Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, these zero-tolerance traffic sweeps, which he recently stepped up in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods across the Phoenix metropolitan area, are a successful tool to root out the undocumented workers that many conservative leaders say have overwhelmed America's fifth-most-populous city just a three-hour drive north of the Mexican border. Arpaio's deputies have arrested more than 500 illegal immigrants so far this year.

   RACE IN AMERICA

"We're hitting this illegal Immigration on all aspects of it," said Arpaio, the elected Republican sheriff for the last 16 years. "We know how to determine whether these guys are illegal, the way the situation looks, how they are dressed, where they are coming from."

But to a growing chorus of Hispanic activists, civil rights leaders and Democratic politicians, Arpaio's policy represents a blatant case of racial profiling. It is an extreme example, they say, of anecdotes that have begun surfacing across the country in which local police agencies respond to the national backlash against illegal immigrants by aggressively targeting Spanish-speakers for the offense of "driving while brown."

As a result, Phoenix has surfaced as the latest fault line scarring America's long-troubled racial map.

"We're absolutely seeing a rise in racial profiling," said Cynthia Valenzuela, litigation director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "It's simply not legal to use a minor traffic offense as a pretext for investigating Immigration status."

Indiscriminate sweeps

Arpaio's critics allege that both U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent and Mexican visitors with valid visas have been caught up in the sheriff's sweeps and held for hours in special jails until they could prove their right to be in the country. And they say the sheriff's tactics are provoking fear throughout Phoenix's Hispanic community, as well as reluctance on the part of Spanish-speaking crime victims or witnesses to cooperate with police.

One class-action lawsuit already has been filed against the sheriff, and civil rights groups say they are collecting evidence for more.

"If you are of Mexican-American heritage, if you have brown skin, there is nothing you can do not to be stopped," said Mary Rose Wilcox, the only member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who has criticized Arpaio's Immigration sweeps and the only Hispanic on the board.

"Deputies are asking for birth certificates. Do you carry a birth certificate with you? Should you have to?" she added.

Arizona's Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, pulled $1.6 million in state funding for Arpaio's office this month because she said the sheriff's actions "were causing trepidation in the Immigration community."

Last month, Phil Gordon, the Democratic mayor of Phoenix, formally asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation into Arpaio's tactics, which Gordon said included "discriminatory harassment, improper stops, searches and arrests."

"I understand these are serious allegations," Gordon wrote to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey. "As mayor of the city of Phoenix, I must speak out when the rights of our residents are violated and the safety of our neighborhoods threatened."

Under a new city policy, Phoenix police also question anyone they arrest about their Immigration status and refer suspected illegal immigrants to federal authorities, but Gordon has expressly prohibited such questioning during routine traffic stops.

Arpaio, who styles himself as "America's toughest sheriff" and is famous for confining criminals in tented prisons and issuing them pink underwear, scoffs at all the criticism, which he dismisses as politically inspired.

"We don't racial-profile. That's all garbage. Everything [Gordon] has said is a lie," Arpaio said during an interview last week. "The politicians fear the Hispanic vote. They want to stay right on that fence; they don't want to aggravate the Hispanic community."

read the rest of the article at:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-pro
filing_wittmay26,0,4678882.story?page=2