Who is Joe Arpaio?
He’s the Republican sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.—known to his fans (and to himself) as “America’s toughest sheriff.” But to his detractors, he’s “Sheriff Joke,” and his controversial tactics have landed him before a federal grand jury. Arpaio, 77, first gained national attention early in his tenure, in the 1990s, when he began dressing inmates in pink underwear to humiliate them, housing them outdoors in sweltering tents, and sweating them on chain gangs. He boasts of eliminating coffee, basketball, movies, and almost every comfort from his jails, which, he says, “should not be like the Ritz-Carlton.” More recently, Arpaio has become a champion of ridding his turf of illegal immigrants, and has dispatched hundreds of his deputies to conduct “sweeps’’ of Hispanic neighborhoods. He’s arrested more than 30,000 illegals, prompting Washington to charge that he was engaging in racial profiling and to demand he stop enforcing federal immigration law. “If Washington doesn’t like it,’’ he
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