NAACP: No Racial Profiling In Immigration Crackdown

The nation’s oldest civil rights group rejected a request to portray an Arizona sheriff who enforces immigration law as a racial profiler in congressional hearings.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) actually turned down the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee by refusing his invitation to describe Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies as racial profilers during recent immigration hearings on Capitol Hill.

The Judiciary Committee Chairman, Michigan Democrat John Conyers, has spearheaded a federal investigation into Arpaio’s high-profile immigration arrests and he recruited a series of open borders advocates to testify in congressional hearings last week. 

In his desperate effort to prove the popular sheriff is a discriminating and perpetual civil rights violator, Conyers enlisted the president of the local chapter of the NAACP to trash the entire department for doing its job. 

The NAACP answered the call by saying it had no racial profiling complaints about the sheriff’s office or other local law enforcement agencies. Conyers still found Latino rights groups to testify against Arpaio at the hearings although they could hardly offer the weight of the country’s best known and most established civil rights group.

The Maricopa Sheriffs Department is the biggest law enforcement agency to participate in a federal program that allows local agencies to enforce immigration laws. The crackdowns were actually requested by numerous county business owners and city leaders desperate to remedy the illegal immigration crisis that has overwhelmed their border state.

The sweeps have helped rid the area of numerous illegal aliens—some violent criminals who fell through the cracks—who should have been deported long ago and helped restore much-needed law and order in a Phoenix business district (36th & Thomas) rife with solicitation, trespassing, loitering and public health ordinance violations.

In the past two weeks alone 108 illegal immigrants were arrested by Maricopa deputies and more than half were booked on felony charges, including human smuggling, identity theft and forgery. Conyers’ highly publicized hearings were inspired by a Justice Department investigation into allegations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures on the part of Maricopa deputies who patrol the Phoenix metropolitan area.