The federal government's decision to stop an Arizona sheriff from checking inmates' immigration status will allow criminals to be released into the community, Maricopa County's top prosecutor said Friday as he asked the president to order Homeland Security officials to restore access to federal systems revoked a day earlier.
The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.
The same Arizona group that took down the state's leading immigration hard-liner is now gunning for its best-known lawman.
Without the benefit of their state's strict new immigration law, officers from a single Arizona county helped deport more than 26,000 immigrants from the U.S. through a federal-local partnership program that has been roundly criticized as fraught with problems.
