He Was the Most Notorious Sheriff in America. He Says the Supreme Court Vindicated Him.

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“Now, some people don’t like me. I’m very controversial,” former Sheriff Joe Arpaio told me on the phone recently. This would qualify as an understatement, coming from the so-called toughest sheriff in the nation who oversaw a reign of racialized terror^[2] in the most populous county in Arizona for more than two decades.

Now, years after his retirement following criminal contempt charges and a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, Sheriff Joe is claiming vindication for everything he did and thanking the Supreme Court. Tragically, he may have a point.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo^[3] on its shadow docket, a ruling that essentially legalizes racial profiling by immigration agents, the exact sort of race-based policing that Arpaio was penalized for. The complaint^[4] in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo described the weekslong siege in Los Angeles as one of rampant racial profiling and excessive violence by masked agents: “Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.” Some of the people cuffed and interrogated by immigration agents were U.S. citizens. Some have been assaulted and interrogated in this way multiple times.

While many lawyers and advocates for immigrants have decried SCOTUS’ implicit permission for continued racial profiling^[5], the 93-year-old retired lawman sees the 6–3 decision as a vindication of his aggressive and constitutionally questionable policing tactics in arresting Latinos. “I was just cleared by the Supreme Court,” Arpaio explained to me over the phone. “Obama and Biden went after me for racial profiling. … They went after me [and] the Supreme Court ruled in my favor last month.”

If it was not clear enough what Arpaio meant by this, he said it as directly as possible. “I was using race as the reason to determine whether somebody was here legally or illegally,” he said. Now, he says, the Supreme Court is just fine with that approach. “I was vindicated by the Supreme Court of all this shit.”

In case you don’t remember Arpaio, he was the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona—the state’s most populous county, which includes Phoenix—from 1993 to 2016. During his tenure, he became famous for his attacks on the immigrant community. Specifically, Arpaio used the federal program called 287(g)^[7] as a justification to conduct his own immigrant raids, which often included tactics like parading arrestees in front of cameras.

During his tenure, Arpaio prided himself on racially profiling Latinos, stopping cars, invading workplaces, and scoping out churches in an effort to find people who might be deportable. As he once said in court^[8], “My program, my philosophy is a pure program. You go after illegals. I’m not afraid to say that. And you go after them and you lock them up.”

In 2008, the Department of Justice opened an investigation^[9] into Arpaio’s rampant racial profiling. It was hardly a secret. Like the current presidential administration, Arpaio was boasting of his racial terror campaign frequently on television, once saying it was “an honor” to be compared to the Ku Klux Klan^[10]. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security^[11] stripped Arpaio’s deputies of their 287(g) authority, and the next year, the Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit^[12]. Unsurprisingly, Arpaio continued to push for the arrests of people who were potentially deportable^[13], going so far as to establish a hotline and to use “confidential informants^[14]” in his quest to find deportable immigrants.

In the period between Trump’s second election last November and his ascension into office in January, many advocates for immigrants, legal commentators, and people I knew through my work covering local law enforcement told me that they did not think Trump would revive 287(g) task force^[15] agreements because of the stench created by Joe Arpaio^[16]. 287(g) is shorthand for a federal law that permits local law enforcement to be deputized to do the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While the two other 287(g) programs^[17] mostly allow sheriffs to send people to ICE who have already been arrested, the “task force” model allows local police to hit the streets doing exactly what ICE agents do. The administration did it anyway, in another vindication for Sheriff Joe. With Trump back in office, there are now over 1,000 287(g) agreements^[18] across the country, the most in the history of the program.

At the end of the day, Arpaio’s prejudice and violence against immigrants was so conspicuous that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was found guilty^[19] at trial of racial profiling and had to submit to a court monitor and a series of benchmarks to remedy the racialized policing^[20]; the totality of Arpaio’s legal troubles have cost taxpayers over $100 million^[21]. Despite the expense, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has never hit those benchmarks^[22]. Even now, as the Department of Justice has turned away from worrying about corrupt or racist police departments, a recent report shows that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has inflated the costs of compliance with that order while not actually fully complying^[23].

After Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio^[24] during his first term in 2017—Arpaio was facing potential jail time for refusing to comply with a judge’s order—the relationship between the two was cemented and the redemption arc of Arpaio began. As Arpaio put it, “When he pardoned me, he let every cop know that he’s going to have their back.” Arpaio has run^[25] for office^[26] since then, but has been trounced every time. Despite all this, he remains the most stalwart supporter of the president. At one rally, Trump kissed Arpaio^[27] on the cheek.

For many people, the story of Arpaio showed how the courts successfully restrained a would-be tyrant. But the Supreme Court is very different now. While there is no majority opinion in Vasquez Perdomo because the case was not decided on the merits, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence^[32] in which he posited that it was perfectly constitutional and reasonable for immigration agents to stop people who appear to be immigrants based on a series of criteria like appearance, language spoken, and place of employment, which the justice determined to comply with “reasonable suspicion.” Kavanaugh tried to distinguish using race as a way to assess immigration status from racial profiling: “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.” This seems like a long way to say what Arpaio said: Race was a proxy for immigration status.

The so-called Kavanaugh stops^[33] are remarkably similar to what Arpaio did by his own admission. Despite the lack of unanimity and the uncertain legal posture, federal officials are perfectly comfortable claiming the law supports their blatantly racist policing. The Trump administration has claimed the decision as a victory^[34], and in a recent interview, Customs and Border Patrol “Commander Op at Large^[35]” Greg Bovino^[36] has said that his agents stop and detain people based on “how they look^[37].”

They aren’t called Arpaio stops, but maybe they should be.

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