Arizona Sheriffs: Won’t Go After Illegals Even if Voters Pass Law

Arizona voters will choose in November whether to make it a state crime for migrants to enter the US without authorization. But some law enforcement officers are saying they won’t enforce it. The impudence should be jarring. Alas, it is all too commonplace today. Government officials openly disdain the will of the people they allege to serve.

“Sheriffs in four Arizona counties that sit along the border with Mexico have warned that if voters in November pass a measure to make it a state crime for migrants to cross into the US unofficially, they will face problems enforcing the new law,” UK progressive ruling establishment newspaper The Guardian reported September 27.

Arizona Abrogation

What are these dire warnings? “Chris Nanos, the sheriff [of Pima County], said Proposition 314 ‘would lead down a path of racial profiling,’” the paper writes. Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway was every bit as opinionated. “It would be ridiculous for me to go up to practically every single person in my county and say, ‘Let me see your papers, I need to check your immigration status’,” said Hathaway, a Democrat.

There you have it. It’s not that they can’t do it; it’s that they don’t want to. The people of Arizona, however, seem to be very much on board with this proposal to crack down on illegals. “A poll of registered voters conducted in mid-August by Noble Predictive Insights showed that Proposition 314 has wide support from polled Arizona voters, with nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents saying they would support the border measure,” The Arizona Republic reports.

Pima County Sheriff Nanos is currently embroiled in assorted controversies over alleged abuses at jails he oversees and reputed gross misconduct by police officers on his force. Last month, the state Attorney General’s office found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in Nanos’s department.

Nevertheless, his reputation has been severely affected by the scandals.

‘He Gets Angry and Retaliates’

In September 2023, the Pima County Board of Supervisors mulled calling for an outside investigation into the sheriff department’s handling of an alleged rape of a deputy by a sheriff’s sergeant. Nanos responded in a shocking manner. “Effective immediately, the Sheriff’s Department will no longer be responsible for Board security,” Nanos wrote in an email to Board members. “I believe existing contracted security is available at a lesser cost to taxpayers.”

“[C]ritics of Nanos, who is running for re-election, point to the episode as representing a harmful tendency: He gets angry at people who cross him and retaliates,” Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller wrote last month. Republican Heather Lappin, a police lieutenant, is opposing Nanos in the November 5 election. But she works at the Pima County Jail and has been caught up in the abuse allegations as well. “Nanos, in an interview [on Sept. 27], acknowledged his threat to pull deputies from the board meetings resulted from that item being put on the board's agenda,” Steller relates. “That’s making a political statement, because that’s all that was on their part was a political statement," he told the columnist.

Rick Kastigar, Nanos’s former chief deputy, pulled no punches in describing his ex-boss. “I learned within a couple of months, he would become a tyrant, a micromanager, and one of the most vindictive individuals I have ever encountered as a boss,” Kastigar told Steller. Ouch. Now apply this character description to The Guardian’s splashy attempts to paint a picture of dedicated but overwhelmed police officials expressing grave concern over having to go after illegal aliens in their state at the behest of the citizenry.

“Who wants to do this silly law with no funding from the federal government?” Nanos exclaimed to the UK paper, which did not mention any of the black clouds surrounding his tenure as sheriff. “But here’s another caveat that I’ve seen for a couple of decades: the federal government on the border doesn’t have enough courts, therefore they don’t have enough judges, they don’t have enough attorneys.”

Again, this is a personal political statement made by a law enforcement officer on a pending ballot measure. However one may feel about that, it is the implied threat of non-enforcement if approved that should most outrage Americans.

As Liberty Nation has reported, big-money progressive heavyweights such as the ACLU and notorious globalist billionaire George Soros have targeted local prosecutor and sheriff elections in cities and towns throughout the US in an attempt to thwart local police action against illegal aliens. A duplicitous big-box media is always on tap to provide the proper spin for this long-term operation.

These so-called “defenders of democracy” despise the authentic voice of the people. Fighting “disinformation” online means harmless social media posts made by average citizens must be ruthlessly suppressed. But if an entire state votes to pass a ballot referendum, that can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and empty chatter about “racism.”