The self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff” in the country is having trouble proving why he should be allowed to bring a suit to bypass President Obama’s recent immigration reforms.
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost another round in his lawsuit against the Obama administration on Friday, when an influential appeals court ruled that his legal challenge doesn’t have standing.
Arpaio sued the administration last year over Obama’s executive immigration order, which shields more than 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The sheriff argued that the executive action was an overreach that would cause his department “irreparable harm,” claiming that failing to deport more immigrants would lead to an increase in crime in Maricopa County and a subsequent spike in the prison population.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit didn’t buy that claim. In an opinion written on behalf of the three-judge panel, Judge Nina Pillard pointed out that Arpaio’s logic rests “on claims of supposition” and contradicts “acknowledged realities.”
“His allegations that the policies will cause more crime in Maricopa County are unduly speculative,” Pillard, an Obama appointee, wrote.
Indeed, there’s no evidence to back up the stereotypical assertion that immigrants are more likely to be criminals. Most of the undocumented immigrants in the United States do not pose a violent threat. In fact, a recent American Immigration Council report found that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population. According to the report, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States tripled between 1990 and 2013, but the violent crime rate fell 48 percent over the same period.
Rhetoric about immigrants as criminals has recently heated up, however, as GOP lawmakers push for stiffening deportation policies. One Texas Republican recently claimed that undocumented immigrants kill Americans “every day,” while GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump infamously referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists and drug dealers.”
Arpaio, too, is notorious for this type of anti-immigrant sentiment. His outdoor “Tent City” jail, where thousands of immigrant detainees await trial for nonviolent offenses in sweltering conditions, is considered one of the United States’ worst prisons, and federal officials say the facility has a “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos.” In 2013, a U.S. District judge ruled that Arpaio was racially profiling Latinos during routine traffic stops, and he was ordered to undergo training to correct the problem.
The Arizona sheriff isn’t the only official who’s fighting Obama’s immigration order. Led by Texas, a group of more than 20 states sued the administration over the 2014 executive action. Many of those states have relatively small populations of undocumented immigrants to begin with.