Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio Would Like It if You Stopped Calling Him Racist
Newly pardoned former Maricopa County, AZ, sheriff Joe Arpaio has a favor to ask you: Please ignore his history of racist policing, his racist proclamations about President Barack Obama’s place of birth, and his abhorrent treatment of those in his care, and kindly stop calling him “racist.”
“Joseph M. Arpaio was not convicted for ‘racial profiling,’ as certain news outlets have inaccurately reported,” Arpaio’s attorneys said in a statement released Monday evening. “His conviction had nothing to do with race.”
The request comes as Arpaio—convicted earlier this summer for criminal contempt after refusing to stop profiling undocumented immigrants—attempts to re-enter public life, following Donald Trump’s pardon last week.
“Mr. Arpaio respectfully requests that these statements be corrected, and that the correction be published in a manner comparable to that of the original publication and be disseminated to the same audience,” the attorneys’ statement continued, before stressing that the order the former sheriff had been “convicted of ‘willfully’ violating can be accurately described as an order not to detain illegal aliens based solely on their status as illegal aliens, ‘without more.’”