Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been having some serious trouble explaining his policies on immigration. Who should he deport, and when? How can he manage to round them all up? What the legality of that wall thing?
It’s been a mess. So the fact that Trump has turned to a law enforcement expert to advise him on these thorny issues could have been a good move.
Except that it wasn’t.
RawStory reports that Trump has turned for advice to the worst possible person in the entire field of law enforcement.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix, Arizona will be advising the Republican candidate on immigration law. Like many other thoughtful people, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry.
CNN’s Democratic consultant and Clinton surrogate Maria Cardona agrees with me. Cardona obviously knows Arpaio’s history.
The boorish lawman has made a name for himself as a cruel, racist, anti-immigrant bigot. He holds up to 2,000 prisoners in tents in the Arizona desert, where he forces them to wear pink underwear under their prison uniforms. They break rocks all day in the desert heat as part of his “hard labor” regime.
You can see why he appeals to Donald Trump.
Arpaio has been an outspoken “birther”, claiming to have proof that President Obama was born outside of the U.S. He ignores laws that he doesn’t like, enforcing his own rules about immigration in his county.
CNN's Maria Cardona Calls Trump Supporter Sheriff Joe Arpaio A "National Disgrace" https://t.co/mwRROBbi8v #p2 pic.twitter.com/dys0RufSCb
— #VoteBlue ? (@ZaibatsuNews) August 29, 2016
Maria Cardona put the whole sordid situation into perspective with her observations on CNN. She said:
“The man is a national disgrace. And that’s not just me talking, today The Washington Post had a scathing editorial about this man who has continually flouted the law. He has been found in contempt of court repeatedly and has now been referred for criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice because he refuses to stop racial profiling to keep his deputies from harassing Latinos, who are U.S. citizens, by the way, simply because of the color of their skin and how they look and sound.”
The Sheriff is under federal investigation for racial profiling, and may end up in jail, according to reports. U.S. District Court judge G. Murray Snow found that Arpaio had engaged in “multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty and bad faith” in the course of the case.
Too bad Trump isn’t smart enough to use Judge Snow as his advisor.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Available through Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Generic license 2.0.
