Homeland Security Strips Sheriff Arpaio of Immigration Authority

Heaven forbid – a sheriff upholds the law and delivers thousands of illegals to Immigration for deportation. We can’t have that, now, can we?

Via Yid with Lid, East Valley Tribune Reports:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has stripped Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of his authority to arrest suspected illegal immigrants based solely on their immigration status.

But Arpaio said Tuesday he plans to continue his controversial “crime suppression operations,” despite DHS’s decision to not renew an agreement that would allow the sheriff to continue immigration enforcement on the streets.

“It’s all politics,” said Arpaio, who spent much of an afternoon news conference Tuesday wagging his finger, waving his arms and snarling at reporters.

Arpaio will have some immigration powers under an agreement signed Friday. His 60 detention officers in the county jails will still have the authority to check the immigration status of people they book.

But the agreement that would allow street patrols was signed Sept. 21 and then rescinded, and a top-level DHS official from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs personally told him the federal agency wasn’t going to accept the agreement, but he “didn’t really give a good reason,” Arpaio said.

“We’re being looked at by the Justice Department and all that.”

Arpaio said he believes DHS made the changes to stop his “crime suppression operations,” which are saturation patrols in designated areas where deputies would find illegal immigrants by stopping them for traffic infractions and minor violations.

The Department of Justice and other federal agencies are investigating the sheriff’s office on accusations of racial profiling during the crime suppression operations. …