Obama Justice Department Sues Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona

U.S. Sues Arizona Sheriff Over Policing Probe

The Wall Street Journal
The Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit Thursday against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, accusing him and his agency of stonewalling a probe into policing practices that some call discriminatory against Hispanics.

The suit is the latest move in months of legal sniping between the two sides. They are also fighting over whether federal prosecutors improperly contacted employees of the sheriff’s office directly to seek testimony, instead of going through lawyers.

Robert Driscoll, a lawyer representing Mr. Arpaio and the Maricopa Sheriff’s Office, didn’t have an immediate response to the suit.

Mr. Arpaio is the elected sheriff for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. He has become a vocal critic of illegal immigration and has carried out operations aimed at detaining immigrants and turning them over to federal law enforcement for deportation.

Civil-rights groups have long called Mr. Arpaio’s policies discriminatory. Soon after Attorney General Eric Holder took office last year, the Justice Department said it was investigating those complaints and looking into possible violations of Hispanics’ civil rights.

The Justice Department suit, filed in federal court in Phoenix, said the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office receives millions of dollars in federal funding and is required to cooperate with federal investigations as a condition of receiving those funds.

"The actions of the sheriff's office are unprecedented," said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the department's civil rights division. "It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities."

Robert Driscoll, a lawyer for Mr. Arpaio and the sheriff's office, said, "I think they're just trying to distract from the fact they have no underlying case. What they don't want to do is to allege that there is any discrimination by the Maricopa sheriff's office, because if they have to prove that they can't."

The two sides met last week to try to work out a deal and evidently emerged with differing views of what occurred. A U.S. official said Justice Department lawyers believed Mr. Driscoll had agreed to the department's document request. But after the Justice Department sent him a letter outlining terms of agreement, Mr. Driscoll responded with a letter laying out certain conditions for cooperation, the official said.

Mr. Driscoll didn't dispute that description of events. "We are never going to agree on everything, but I thought we could go a long way to meeting their requests," he said.

Mr. Arpaio blamed the breakdown on the Justice Department, saying his lawyers tried to cooperate with Washington at last week's meeting.

"They smiled in our faces and then stabbed us in the back with this lawsuit," he said. "The Obama administration intended to sue us all along, no matter what we did to try to avert it."

By Theodore's World