Deportations called 'racial profiling' by Feds

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But the agreement that would allow street patrols was signed Sept. 21 and then rescinded, and a top-level DHS official from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs personally told him the federal agency wasn’t going to accept the agreement, but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

In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series published in July 2008, the Tribune found the sheriff’s office’s illegal-immigration sweeps violated federal regulations intended to prevent racial profiling. The five-part series also found that the sweeps diverted resources from core law-enforcement functions, which in some cases caused response times to increase.