person:joe arpaio

  • Poll finds U.S.-Mexico border residents overwhelmingly value mobility, oppose wall

    Residents who live along the U.S.-Mexico border overwhelmingly prefer bridges over fences and are dead set against building a new wall, according to a Cronkite News-Univision-Dallas Morning News poll.


    http://interactives.dallasnews.com/2016/border-poll

    #sondage #murs #opposition #résistance #USA #Mexique #frontières #barrières_frontalières

    • Vigilantes Not Welcome : A Border Town Pushes Back on Anti-Immigrant Extremists

      In late August last year, 39-year-old Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer exited La Gitana bar in Arivaca, Arizona, took out his phone, and started recording a video for his Facebook page: “So down here in Arivaca, if you like to traffic in children, if you like to make sure women and children have contraceptives before handing them off to the coyotes to be dragged through the desert, knowing they’re going to get raped along the way, if you’re involved in human trafficking or dope smuggling, these individuals have your back.”

      Meyer, who had a trim red beard, dark sunglasses, and a camouflage American flag hat, aimed his cellphone camera at a wooden awning on a small white bungalow across the street from La Gitana, panning between two signs with the words “Arivaca Humanitarian Aid Office” and “Oficina De Ayuda Humanitaria” in turquoise letters.

      The video went on for nine and a half minutes, as Meyer, the leader of a group called Veterans on Patrol, which had more than 70,000 followers on Facebook, talked about stopping border crossers and searching abandoned mineshafts for evidence of trafficked women and children. Every couple of minutes he would return to the aid office.

      “If you’re ever down here in Arivaca,” he told his audience, “if you want to know who helps child traffickers, if you want to know who helps dope smugglers, if you want to know who helps ISIS, if you want to know who helps La Raza, MS-13, any of ’em, any of the bad guys, these people help ’em.”

      The claims were false and outrageous. But Meyer had an audience, and people in town were well aware of how media-fueled anti-­immigrant vitriol and conspiracies could spill over into real-world violence. It had happened there before.

      Arivaca sits just 11 miles north of the Mexico border in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert. For about two decades, anti-immigrant vigilante groups have patrolled the region to try to remedy what they perceive as the federal government’s failure to secure the border. In 2009, the leader of one of these groups and two accomplices murdered two residents—a little girl and her father—during a home invasion and robbery planned to fund their activities. Meyer’s video brought that trauma back and was quickly followed by a series of incidents revolving around various vigilante groups, La Gitana, and the humanitarian aid office. When I visited in mid-September, the town was clearly on edge. “If we don’t do something about [the situation], we’re going to have bodies here again,” Arivaca’s unofficial mayor, Ken Buchanan, told me.

      Shortly before making his video, Meyer had been sitting in La Gitana with several volunteers from Veterans on Patrol. Megan Davern, a 30-year-old meat cutter with work-worn hands and long brown hair, was tending bar. She had heard that a rancher living along the border was having issues with a vigilante group trespassing and flying drones over his property.

      “I walked into the bar at four o’clock one day to start a shift, and I saw this big group of people in fatigues with empty gun holsters and a drone on the table, and I felt it was probably them,” Davern recalled.

      Davern had heard the group’s name before and quickly did some internet research, reading highlights as the men drank. The group was founded to provide support to homeless veterans. Then, in May 2018, Meyer—who is not a veteran and has a criminal history—claimed he had discovered a child sex trafficking camp at an abandoned cement factory in Tucson. The camp, he said, was part of a pedophilia ring, and on his Facebook page he shared posts linking it to the Clintons, George Soros, and Mexican drug cartels.

      Meyer, who showed up for rancher Cliven Bundy’s 2014 armed standoff with authorities in Nevada and was present during Bundy’s sons’ occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016, declined an interview request. But the story he was spreading mimicked right-wing conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon, and though Tucson police investigated and debunked his claims, Meyer gained tens of thousands of social-media followers. With donations of supplies and gift cards pouring in from supporters, he vowed to gather evidence and save the women and children he claimed were being victimized.

      Davern watched as Meyer and the other Veterans on Patrol volunteers left La Gitana and started filming the first video. Toward the end of the video, she stepped out of the bar to confront them. “We’ve been hearing about you for a long time,” she said, as Meyer turned the camera on her. “I’d appreciate if you don’t come in anymore.”

      Banning Veterans on Patrol, Davern told me, was an easy decision: “We have a strict no-militia policy at the bar because of the history of militia violence in this town.”

      Arivaca is a quirky place. To start with, it’s unincorporated, which means there’s no official mayor, no town council, no police force. The 700 or so residents are an unlikely mix of miners, ranchers, aging hippies, artists, and other folks who stumbled across the odd little community, became enchanted, and decided to make it home. A single road runs through it, linking an interstate highway to the east and a state highway to the west. The next town is 30 minutes away; Tucson is 60 miles north.

      There’s no official mayor, no town council, no police force…The next town is 30 minutes away.

      Jagged hills covered in scraggly mesquite spread in every direction until they meet towering mountains at the distant southern horizon. The vast landscape swallows up the dividing line with Mexico, but the presence of the border looms large.

      By the early 2000s, a federal policy called Prevention Through Deterrence had pushed border crossers from urban areas to more hostile terrain like the desert around Arivaca. Migrant deaths skyrocketed, and Arivaca eventually became a staging ground for volunteers caching water and food in the desert. Some settled down, and residents opened the humanitarian aid office in 2012.

      The border crossers also caught the attention of vigilante groups, many of which had formed in the late ’90s in Texas and California, and which ranged from heavily armed paramilitary-type organizations to gangs of middle-aged men sitting on lawn chairs with binoculars. “They realized that ground zero was really on the Arizona border,” said Mark Pitcavage, who researches right-wing extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

      One group known as the Minutemen started organizing Arizona border watches in 2005. “It was a big deal in the press,” said Heidi Beirich, a hate group expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Beirich credits the Minutemen with helping mainstream the demonization of undocumented migrants, calling the media-savvy group “probably the thing that started off what ultimately becomes Donald Trump’s anti-­immigrant politics.”

      But by 2007, the organization was splintering. One spinoff, Minutemen American Defense (MAD), was led by a woman named Shawna Forde, a name that no one in Arivaca would soon forget.
      “The whole town has those emotional scars.”

      Just before 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Forde and two accomplices murdered nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her 29-year-old father, Raul, in their home. They also injured Brisenia’s mother, Gina Gonzales, before she drove them away by grabbing her husband’s gun and returning fire.

      Raul Flores was rumored to be involved in the drug trade, and Forde, a woman with a long criminal history, had devised a plan to rob his home and use the money to finance MAD.

      The murders shook Arivaca. “The whole town has those emotional scars,” Alan Wallen, whose daughter was friends with Brisenia, told me.

      The day that Meyer filmed that first Facebook video in Arivaca, Terry Sayles, 69, a retired schoolteacher with a long-standing research interest in far-right groups, was at his home in Green Valley, some 45 minutes away. Sayles had been following Veterans on Patrol since the cement plant conspiracy theory first surfaced. When he saw Meyer’s video outside La Gitana, he called the bar with a warning. “You guys know that you’re on Facebook?” he asked.

      “Oh, great,” Davern remembered thinking. Until then, she hadn’t realized Meyer’s video was online. “I didn’t know what the ramifications would be. Were people going to come into my work and harass me? Threaten me with violence? Were they going to find out where I live?”

      Around the time of Davern’s confrontation outside the bar, La Gitana put up a sign saying that members of border vigilante groups were not welcome inside. It didn’t mention Veterans on Patrol but instead singled out another group: Arizona Border Recon (AZBR).

      Tim Foley, the leader of AZBR, had moved to Arivaca in the summer of 2017. Before starting the group in 2011, Foley, who has piercing blue eyes and leathery skin from long hours in the sun, worked construction jobs in Phoenix until 2008, when the financial crisis hit. “Everything fell apart,” he told me over the phone.

      Foley said that after years of seeing immigration violations on work sites go unpunished, he went down to the border and decided to dedicate himself to stopping undocumented crossers. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers AZBR a nativist extremist group, but Foley now says his main mission is gathering intelligence on Mexican drug cartels.

      Just before I visited Arivaca, Foley was in Washington, DC, speaking at “The Negative Impact of Illegal Alien Crime in America,” a rally hosted by families of people killed by undocumented immigrants. Other speakers included former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is also a Trump pardon recipient; presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway; and Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa with a history of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

      A few days after Meyer filmed his video, a BearCat armored vehicle—the kind used by SWAT teams—came rolling into Arivaca. It had a mock .50-caliber machine gun affixed to a turret on its roof and belonged to the Utah Gun Exchange, a marketplace and media company based near Salt Lake City with a mission to build what one of its co-owners, 46-year-old Bryan Melchior, described as “web platforms that allow free speech and that promote and protect the Second Amendment.”

      Before coming to Arivaca, the group had followed survivors of the Parkland high school shooting around the country during the teens’ “March for Our Lives” tour. But after President Trump threatened to shut down the government over funding for his border wall, Melchior shifted his attention. “Ultimately, we came here to tell stories from the border, and that’s what brought us to Arivaca, because there are some outspoken public figures here. Tim Foley is one of them,” Melchior told me.

      Melchior, stocky with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard and an ever-present sidearm, and his crew decided to get dinner at La Gitana. Davern was tending bar and asked the group what they were up to. When Melchior said they were a media company in town to tell border stories and that they were in touch with Foley, “the whole thing went to hell in a handbag,” he recalled.

      Davern said she left their initial conversation feeling optimistic that the Utah Gun Exchange’s platform could be a good avenue to reach a different audience with information about what life was actually like at the border. But when she found out it had a channel called BuildTheWallTV, she changed her mind.

      Melchior was down by the border when somebody sent him a picture of a new sign in La Gitana’s window listing the Utah Gun Exchange and Veterans on Patrol as groups that were not welcome. He later went into La Gitana with an open container of alcohol from a store across the street to ask about the sign. The interaction did not go well.

      The next day, Meyer came back to town ready to film again. Playing to an audience watching in real time on Facebook Live, he walked up to La Gitana, showed the signs hanging in the window, and knocked. “Do you stand by your convictions to tell tens of thousands of supporters [that they’re not welcome]?” he asked the bartender working that day.

      “Sure. Absolutely,” she replied.

      Meyer went on to say that Veterans on Patrol was going to build a wall around Arivaca to make it part of Mexico. He then walked across the street to again film the humanitarian office: “This town’s made it apparent they don’t want us. They’d rather have the illegals crossing over. They’d rather help traffic the children and the women.”

      To many Arivaca residents, it felt like things were building toward cataclysm. “People are terrified,” Davern told me. “These people come to town and they’re threatening. Extremely threatening.”
      To many Arivaca residents, it felt like things were building toward cataclysm.

      So they called a town meeting. It was held on September 9, and about 60 people came. Terry Sayles, the retired teacher from Green Valley, was there. He suggested that the town report Veterans on Patrol’s page to Facebook. The residents set up a phone tree in case they needed to quickly rally aid—local law enforcement is at least an hour away. Kelly and a couple of others formed a neighborhood watch of sorts. “We had a strategy that we had rehearsed so that if in fact there was some attempt by somebody to do harm, we could de-escalate it in a hurry and quietly defuse it,” he said.Arivacans weren’t so much concerned about Foley, Meyer, or Melchior, but about their followers, who might see their inflammatory videos and posts about Arivaca and take matters into their own hands. “Our greatest fear was some person incensed at the thought of this community engaged in sex traffic would come out here and have a shootout at our local tavern,” Dan Kelly, a Vietnam War veteran who lives in Arivaca, told me.

      One of the most important things, though, was channeling the spiraling fear into a productive reaction. “We worked hard to separate the emotional response to it and try to look at it logically and coldly,” Kelly said. “The visceral side, the emotional side, was the impetus to get organized and take a rational response.”

      Their containment approach worked. A couple of days after the meeting, Veterans on Patrol’s main Facebook account was taken down, stripping Meyer of his audience. The Utah Gun Exchange eventually packed up and left. Many people had refused to talk to the outlet. “Arivaca is the most unwelcoming town I’ve ever been to in my life,” Melchior complained to me.

      In January, Melchior was charged in Utah with felony drug and weapons possession. Meyer also faces legal trouble, some of it stemming from videos he took of himself trespassing on private property around Tucson. He currently has several cases pending in the Pima County court system.

      “There’s been significantly less obvious militia activity in Arivaca, which I contribute to a victory on our part,” Davern told me during a recent phone call. “There’s a lot less fear going around, which is great.” Town meetings continued for a while but have stopped for now. But to Davern, as long as Tim Foley is still in town, the issue isn’t resolved. “That person needs to leave,” she said, describing him as a magnet for conflict. High Country News detailed an incident in early March when locals eager to keep the peace dissuaded a group of reportedly self-described anarchists who had come to town to confront him.

      Foley knows what Davern and others in Arivaca think about him but insists there’s a silent majority in town that supports his presence. “They can keep calling me the bad guy. I already know I’m not, or else I still wouldn’t be walking the streets,” he told me. “I’m not moving. I’m staying in Arivaca. They can keep crying for the rest of their lives. I really don’t care.”

      Even at the height of their fear, a question hovered over the town’s residents: Were they overreacting?

      It’s a question more people across the country confront as they wake up to the reality of right-wing extremism and violence. When I was in Arivaca, the answer was clear to Clara Godfrey, whose nephew Albert Gaxiola was Shawna Forde’s accomplice in the Flores murders. He and Forde had met at La Gitana. “We can never say, ‘We didn’t know,’ again,” Godfrey told me. “If anything happens, we have to say, ‘We knew, and it was okay with us.’”

      https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/immigrant-vigilantes-arizona-border-arivaca

      Commentaire de Reece_Jones sur twitter :

      A truism of borders: the people who live there hate the way people in the interior politicize and militarize their homes.

      https://twitter.com/reecejhawaii/status/1116404990711492608
      ... ce qui me fait penser au fameux effet Tur_Tur !

  • Le shérif le plus coriace d’Amérique finira-t-il dans son pénitencier ?
    http://www.ouest-france.fr/monde/le-sherif-le-plus-coriace-d-amerique-finira-t-il-dans-son-penitencier-5

    Joe Arpaio, 85 ans, a été le shérif le plus célèbre des États-Unis, réélu à la sécurité du comté de Maricopa, en Arizona, de 1992 à 2016. Dans un pays où les responsables de la police sont élus, il vantait ses méthodes controversées sur les chaînes de télé, en se qualifiant de shérif « le plus coriace d’Amérique ».

    Sa cible préférée ? Les Mexicains qui traversent la frontière. L’immigration est à sa hantise, les clandestins son combat, les chasser son programme à chaque campagne électorale. Mais, en 2012, pour la juge Susan Bolton, il est allé trop loin.
    Des milices anti-immigrants

    Il a outrepassé ses droits de chef de la police arizonienne, en mettant en place des milices anti-immigrants. Elles raflaient des clandestins mexicains qui n’étaient soupçonnés d’aucun crime. L’immigration est une compétence fédérale et seuls les agents fédéraux sont habilités à intervenir. Joseph Michel, dit « Joe », le savait.

    En 2011, un juge fédéral avait déjà pris une ordonnance contre lui, afin qu’il cesse ces arrestations arbitraires et discriminantes. Lundi, la justice a conclu qu’il avait violé cette ordonnance et l’a donc condamné à six mois de prison.

    La presse américaine s’est aussitôt interrogée sur le sort de ce fils d’immigrés italiens qui a toujours fait sa loi. Va-t-il subir les terribles conditions qu’il a lui-même instaurées dans la prison de son comté ? Car les idées ne lui ont jamais manqué pour durcir la vie carcérale.

    Des chaînes de forçats au pied

    Il a ainsi rétabli le port de vêtements rayés noir et blanc et des chaînes de forçats pour les détenus qui travaillent à l’extérieur, une pratique que la plupart des États américains avaient arrêtée dans les années 1950 ! Joe Arpaio se gaussait même de l’avoir imposée aux femmes, « par pur souci d’égalité ! » Il a aussi supprimé des « luxes » comme le café, les salles de musculation, les chaînes de télévision, sauf la météo, « pour que ces abrutis sachent quelle température il va faire quand ils travailleront sur les routes ».

    De 1992 à 2016, Joe Arpaio a été constamment été réélu à la tête du comté de Maricopa en prônant un programme anti-immigrants, dans cette région frontalière du Mexique.

    Comme il l’avait promis à ses électeurs, le shérif incarcère à tour de bras ; la prison du comté est rapidement surchargée. La solution est vite trouvée et attire les caméras du pays. L’élu républicain installe des tentes en plein milieu du désert et les entoure de barbelés : ce pénitencier de plein air ne coûte que 100 000 €. Les critiques pleuvent à la vue de prisonniers suant sous les 45° de l’Arizona.

    Mais selon le journal Arizona Republic, c’est surtout de la nourriture que les détenus se plaignent. Les repas d’un prisonnier de Maricopa ne reviennent qu’à 60 cents par jour, contre en moyenne 8 dollars dans le reste des États-Unis. Afin de décourager totalement de futurs délinquants, le gros bras de l’Arizona a fait installer un message en néon rose en haut du mirador de sa prison : « Places disponibles ».
    Abus de pouvoir et discrimination raciale

    Ces excès auraient porté ses fruits. La criminalité aurait baissé de 20 % à Maricopa, entre 2004 et 2008. Mais à quel prix ? L’Arizona Republic estimait l’an passé qu’Arpaio avait déjà coûté 142 millions en frais de justice aux contribuables du comté. Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’il doit se défendre contre des accusations d’abus de pouvoir et de discrimination. En 1999, ce sont 8,5 millions de dollars qui disparaissent des finances publiques en dommages et intérêts payés à la famille de Scott Norbert, mort par suffocation dans la prison de Joe.

    En 2016, c’est à cette célèbre figure de l’autorité que le candidat Donald Trump, autre chasseur de Mexicains, confie la sécurité de son meeting de campagne. Ces deux hommes à poigne ont plus d’un point commun, dont un goût affiché pour la téléréalité. Comme le milliardaire, le shérif a eu sa petite heure de gloire dans l’émission de Fox News intitulée Smile You’re Under Arrest (Souriez, vous êtes en état d’arrestation).

    Mais si l’un a gagné sa présidentielle, le second a perdu son poste. Trop d’abus.
    Il fait appel

    Son avocat a assuré devant les caméras de la BBC, lundi, que son client n’ira pas en prison, à 85 ans. Il fera appel de la décision de la juge Susan Bolton, qu’il estime « partiale ». Joe Arpaio s’est aussi fendu d’un communiqué : il n’aurait fait que son « devoir, protéger le public ». Aurait-il peur d’être condamné à porter des sous-vêtements roses, mesure qu’il avait imposée dans sa prison pour réduire le trafic de drogues ?

    #prison #torture #acab #racisme #milice #homophobie #sexisme #asshole #police_partout_justice_nulle_part #impunité #injustice

  • Une #prison de Phoenix aux Etats-Unis devient végétarienne | Vegactu
    http://www.vegactu.com/actualite/une-prison-de-phoenix-aux-etats-unis-devient-vegetarienne-9922

    Dans un effort pour économiser l’argent, les menus des prisons sont désormais sans viande.

    Joe Arpaio a remplacé le boeuf par du soja, ce qui selon lui, permettra d’économiser 100.000 dollars. La chaîne de télévision FOX 10 Phoenix a été invité dans la cuisine de la prison pour voir comment Arpaio fait ce que les détenus appellent, « slop. » (qu’on pourrait traduire par de la boue..). Alors que le shérif était enthousiaste sur l’utilisation de morceaux de soja dans un ragoût, le présentateur de FOX 10 était plutôt craintif.

    Joe Arpaio lui a alors lancé : « Voyez vous-même comme le ragoût à base de soja ressemble à celui avec de la viande. »

    Pour les prisonniers qui souhaitent tout de même manger de la viande, ils devront payer un supplément d’ici quelques mois. Pour l’instant, seul le « slop » soja est disponible.

  • The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio | Culture News | Rolling Stone
    http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-long-lawless-ride-of-sheriff-joe-arpaio-20120802

    Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!

    Joe Arpaio, the 80-year-old lawman who brands himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” is smiling like a delighted gnome. Nineteen floors above the blazing Arizona desert, the Phoenix sprawl ripples in the heat as Arpaio cues up the Rolling Stones to welcome a reporter “from that marijuana magazine.”

    Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!

    The guided tour of Arpaio’s legend has officially begun. Here, next to his desk, is the hand-painted sign of draconian rules for Tent City, the infamous jail he set up 20 years ago, in which some 2,000 inmates live under canvas tarps in the desert, forced to wear pink underwear beneath their black-and-white-striped uniforms while cracking rocks in the stifling heat. HARD LABOR, the sign reads. NO GIRLIE MAGAZINES!

    From behind his desk, Arpaio pulls out a stack of news clips about himself, dozens of them, featuring the gruff, no-frills enforcer of Maricopa County, whose officers regularly round up illegal immigrants in late-night raids, his 60th made only a few days ago, at a local furniture store. “Everything I did, all over the world,” he crows, flipping through the stories. “You can see this week: national magazine of Russia... BBC... Some people call me a publicity hound.”

    “My people said, ’You’re stupid to do an interview with that magazine,’” says Arpaio, talking about Rolling Stone, “but hey, controversy – well, it hasn’t hurt me in 50 years.”

    Arpaio is an unabashed carnival barker. And his antics might be amusing if he weren’t also notorious for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America. As Arizona has become center stage for the debate over illegal immigration and the civil rights of Latinos, Arpaio has sold himself as the symbol of nativist defiance, a modern-day Bull Connor bucking the federal government over immigration policy. As such, he’s become the go-to media prop for conservative politicians, from state legislators to presidential candidates, who want to be seen as immigration hard-liners. “I had Michele Bachmann sitting right there,” says Arpaio, pointing to my chair. “All these presidential guys coming to see me!”

    Private Citizen Slams Sheriff Arpaio with Scathing Ad
    http://www.prlog.org/11981841-private-citizen-slams-sheriff-arpaio-with-scathing-ad.html
    The haunting details of a brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl are replayed in an unforgettable ad that asks Sheriff Arpaio, “why didn’t you do something?”

    The commercial highlights one of the 432 sex crimes cases MCSO failed to properly investigate and puts the blame squarely on Sheriff Arpaio.

    The ad isn’t being released by a Political Action Committee but rather a single individual: local artist and longtime critic of Sheriff Arpaio, Devin Fleenor.

    Fleenor is the creator and administrator of the popular People Against Sheriff Joe Arpaio Facebook page, which boasts more than 118,000 members.

    “I wanted to hit Arpaio hard with this ad. I hope he winces when he sees it.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uzSe1ykLDM

  • Les caleçons roses du shérif Joe - Great America
    http://washington.blogs.liberation.fr/great_america/2010/05/les-cale%C3%A7ons-roses-du-sh%C3%A9rif-joe.html

    « Vous voulez visiter ma prison ? » A vrai dire non, ce n’était pas l’idée du jour. Nous sommes en Arizona pour un reportage sur l’immigration, la fameuse loi SB 1070, qui continue de faire beaucoup de remous. Mais le shérif Joe Arpaio est si fier de sa réputation de « shérif le plus dur d’Amérique », et des supplices qu’il inflige à ses prisonniers, qu’il nous a vite convaincus. Dans son bureau, au centre de Phoenix, le shérif a dressé un grand panneau en bois qui fait la publicité de sa prison de tentes : « Travail rude, cheveux courts, repas à 35 cents, sous vêtements roses (…). Pas de cigarette, pas de films, pas de café, pas de magazines avec nénettes ». « If you don’t want to do the time… Don’t do the crime » prône encore l’affiche, surmontée du signe « Vacancy », signalant qu’il y a aura toujours assez de places dans les prisons du shérif Joe pour ceux qui enfreignent la loi.

    #prison #usa #loi #for:twitter