PHOENIX (AP) — The careers of most politicians would crumble under the heavy scrutiny that the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America now faces.
But despite a mountain of legal troubles, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio remains popular with voters and has more than $3.4 million in the bank for his November re-election campaign.
The Justice Department sued the five-term sheriff on Thursday on allegations that his officers racially profile Latinos — a move that has his critics saying that voters will finally be turned off and his supporters saying the development will only make him more beloved among voters who want a tough sheriff who doesn’t back down from anyone.
“He’s the new Wyatt Earp,” said Tom Morrissey, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party in a reference to the Arizona lawman made famous by the gun fight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. “The guy’s legendary.
“What he stands for resonates across the country,” said Morrissey, also a retired chief U.S. Marshal. “Hundreds sometimes thousands of people cheer this man, give him standing ovations everywhere he speaks. That speaks volumes.”
He said Arpaio’s hardline stance on illegal immigration and his tough talk have driven his popularity.
“He tells it like it is. He’s not polished, and a lot of times you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth,” Morrissey said. “The truth has a certain ring and Joe Arpaio speaks in that realm.”
Even as the Justice Department brought the lawsuit down against Arpaio, saying that he abused his power and violated the Constitution, the sheriff himself held a news conference and showed no signs of backing down.
“I will fight this to the bitter end,” a visibly angry Arpaio said, adding that the case will give him a chance to finally see what evidence authorities have to back up claims. “I’m very happy that we are being sued because now we can make them put up.”
He said nothing is going to affect his chances of winning in November.
“They know that I’m going to get elected. It’s a national issue,” he said. “I’m the poster boy. The national press is picking this up again … I can get elected on pink underwear.”
Arpaio has built his reputation in part by making inmates wear pink underwear, work in chain gangs and jailing them in tents.
His profile got even bigger when pushed for a stronger role for local police to enforce immigration law, launching 20 patrols looking for illegal immigrants since January 2008.
Thursday’s lawsuit comes as part of efforts to enforce a federal law that bans police from systematically violating constitutional rights.
Justice Department officials first leveled the allegations against Arpaio in December, saying a culture of disregard for basic constitutional rights prevailed at his office.
Arpaio denies wrongdoing and dismisses the case as a politically motivated attack by the Obama administration.
Arpaio’s office is accused of punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish and launching some patrols based on complaints that never reported a crime but conveyed concerns about dark-skinned people congregating or speaking Spanish.
The lawsuit also says that Arpaio’s office has virtually no policies or procedures designed to prevent or address discriminatory policing, and has no system in place to track any alleged misconduct by deputies during traffic stops, arrests or complaints.
State Sen. Steve Gallardo, a Phoenix Democrat, said the lawsuit eventually will shed light on corruption within the sheriff’s office.
“It forces Arpaio to go into a courtroom and explain a lot of these accusations,” Gallardo said. “You’re going to see the true Sheriff Joe Arpaio.”
Gallardo said that it may take a few years, but “at the end of the day, once the public sees the truth … I think the public will give a big thumbs down to Sheriff Joe.”
Antonio Bustamante, a Phoenix civil rights attorney and critic of the sheriff’s immigration enforcement, said that “there’s a big swath of voters that this will not sway at all,” calling much of the voting public in Arpaio’s jurisdiction racist and ignorant.
“People come (to Arizona) from other places and want to make it like Kansas or Nebraska,” said Bustamante, who said he’s a fourth-generation Arizonan whose ancestors came from Mexico. “A lot of those folks look upon us as the outsiders, and we’ve been here for generations. And we settled the state and were the pioneers of this state.”
The most recent reliable poll asking voters how they feel about Arpaio — conducted by the nonpartisan Behavior Research Center — showed that 41 percent of the 700 people asked thought he was doing an excellent or good job. Thirty-three percent thought he was doing a poor job and 19 percent said he was doing a fair job, according to the poll, conducted in April last year.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Arpaio has had no problem with fundraising, garnering more than $1.1 million in the past year. The majority of those contributions came from people living outside the state, with 2,700 donations alone coming from California, compared to 2,500 from Arizona.
Donors in Texas, Florida and Washington also made a substantial number of donations to the campaign.
Records show that Arpaio’s re-election committee had $3.4 million on hand as of Dec. 31, the most recent figure available. More updated figures will not be released until June or July.
Justice officials would like Arpaio’s office to seek training in constitutional policing and dealing with jail inmates with limited English skills, collect data on traffic stops and immigration enforcement, and establish a comprehensive disciplinary system that permits the public to make complaints against officers without fear of retaliation.
Separate from the Justice Department’s allegations, a lawsuit that alleges that Arpaio’s deputies racially profiled Latinos in immigration patrols is scheduled for a July 19 trial in federal court.
A federal grand jury also has been investigating Arpaio’s office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009 and is specifically examining the investigative work of the sheriff’s anti-public corruption squad.
The sheriff’s office also has come under fire for more than 400 sex-crimes investigations — including dozens of alleged child molestations — that hadn’t been investigated adequately or weren’t examined at all over a three-year period ending in 2007.
Arpaio has apologized for the botched cases, reopened 432 sex-crimes investigations and made 19 arrests.
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PHOENIX (AP) — The Federal Aviation Administration is seeking sanctions against a Colorado company stemming from a deadly 2010 medical-helicopter crash in Arizona that killed the aircraft’s three-member crew.
FAA spokesman Ian Gregor tells The Associated Press that the federal agency wants to lodge a $50,625 fine against Colorado-based Air Methods, the parent company of LifeNet Arizona and the helicopter’s operator.
The development comes on the heels of a report by the National Transportation Safety Board that says the July 28, 2010, crash likely was caused by a contract mechanic’s mistake and a lack of proper inspection and testing of his work.
The helicopter left Marana, Ariz., and was en route to its home base in Douglas when it fell 600 feet in eight seconds, crashed into a backyard fence in Tucson and burst into flames about six minutes after leaving the ground.
PHOENIX (AP) — The death of a former neo-Nazi whose group patrols Arizona’s desert near the Mexican border for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers is raising questions about his organization’s future.
Friends of Jason Todd “JT” Ready vowed Friday that U.S. Border Guard’s armed patrols will continue, but monitoring groups doubted the operations could be sustained.
Authorities say the 39-year-old Ready shot and killed his girlfriend and three others, including a toddler, before killing himself in a Phoenix suburb Wednesday, a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence issues.
Sean Rose, a 35-year-old Tucson man who said Ready was like a brother to him, said he would quit his job to keep the group going.
“He did a lot for this country as far as protecting the border, something the government doesn’t do,” Rose said. “I think it’s good to have civilians stopping the drug market.”
Groups that monitor the activities of organizations like the U.S. Border Guard expressed doubts that it will be able to maintain its operations. Without Ready’s leadership, they say, the Border Guard will likely disappear.
“The U.S. Border Guard is probably finished,” said Mark Potok of the anti-hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It really did revolve around JT Ready.”
An SPLC recent report said that “nativist extremist” groups like Ready’s decreased by almost half in 2011 to 184 groups, down from a high of 319 such groups in 2010.
The Minuteman Project and other similar groups have been plagued by infighting and financial difficulties, largely splintering or disintegrating altogether.
The movement’s decline comes as states like Arizona passed harsh immigration laws that included provisions allowing local police to question a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws, Potok said.
Those laws created an impression among some civilian border militia members that state governments were doing more about illegal immigration, and that they no longer had to, he said.
Jennifer Allen, interim director the Arizona chapter of the immigrant advocacy group, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said that organizations like Ready’s thrive on a charismatic leader, and tend to implode once that leader is gone.
“What brings hate groups together is anger and fear. So it makes sense that they would start to direct that toward one another,” she said. “They also attract a lot of people that want to be mega personalities.
“And it ends up being their own worst enemy — fighting over the limelight,” she said.
The SPLC also cites the case of Shawna Forde, a former member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. She was convicted in a May 2009 home invasion that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead.
Prosecutors said the invasion was an attempt to steal drug money to fund her group’s border operations.
Forde was expelled from the Minuteman group in 2007 amid allegations of lying and pretending to be a senior leader. At the time of the killings, she was the head of her own group called the Minutemen American Defense.
The SPLC’s report said the killings cast a pall over the entire civilian border militia movement.
But Ready began patrolling the desert with his group after the killings, dressing up in head-to-toe camouflage gear, helmets and boots, and carrying high-powered guns as they traveled out into the desert to look for illegal immigrants or smugglers.
Rose said that he never joined the group on patrols, but that he and Ready would go out with a handful of others about a dozen times a year on similar outings.
Rose and other friends of Ready’s said they are reluctant to believe that he killed four people and himself, and say they feel drug cartels are more likely to blame even though police have discounted that possibility.
Police say all the evidence points to a domestic-violence situation.
Those killed in the rampage in Gilbert on Wednesday were Ready’s girlfriend, her daughter; her 16-month-old granddaughter; and her daughter’s boyfriend.
Harry Hughes, another close friend of Ready’s and a regional director with the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, said he plans to continue his own one-to-two man desert patrols.
Members of the National Socialist Movement promote white separatism, dress like Nazis and display swastikas. They believe only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be citizens and that anyone who isn’t white should leave “peacefully or by force.”
Ready was a former member of the group who said he quit to focus on his desert patrols.
“Just because Mr. Ready is no longer with us doesn’t mean we’re going to stop,” Hughes said. “After we pay our last respects and get our ducks back in a row, I’m pretty sure business will continue.”
He added, “I don’t think JT would have wanted us to stop.”
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PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Border Guard was among the last known groups of armed civilians actively patrolling the Arizona desert on the lookout for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.
Now that its leader, former neo-Nazi Jason Todd “JT” Ready, is dead in what police believe is a murder-suicide involving his girlfriend in a quiet Phoenix suburb, the future of his group has suddenly come into question.
His friends vowed Friday that the patrols will continue in some form.
Sean Rose, a 35-year-old Tucson man who said Ready was like a brother to him, said he would quit his job to keep the group going.
“He did a lot for this country as far as protecting the border, something the government doesn’t do,” Rose said. “I think it’s good to have civilians stopping the drug market.”
Groups that monitor the activities of organizations like the U.S. Border Guard expressed doubts that it will be able to maintain its operations. Without Ready’s leadership, they say, the Border Guard will likely disappear.
“The U.S. Border Guard is probably finished,” said Mark Potok of the anti-hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It really did revolve around JT Ready.”
An SPLC recent report said that “nativist extremist” groups like Ready’s decreased by almost half in 2011 to 184 groups, down from a high of 319 such groups in 2010.
The Minuteman Project and other similar groups have been plagued by infighting and financial difficulties, largely splintering or disintegrating altogether.
The movement’s decline comes as states like Arizona passed harsh immigration laws that included provisions allowing local police to question a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws, Potok said.
Those laws created an impression among some civilian border militia members that state governments were doing more about illegal immigration, and that they no longer had to, he said.
Jennifer Allen, interim director the Arizona chapter of the immigrant advocacy group, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said that organizations like Ready’s thrive on a charismatic leader, and tend to implode once that leader is gone.
“What brings hate groups together is anger and fear. So it makes sense that they would start to direct that toward one another,” she said. “They also attract a lot of people that want to be mega personalities.
“And it ends up being their own worst enemy — fighting over the limelight,” she said.
The SPLC also cites the case of Shawna Forde, a former member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. She was convicted in a May 2009 home invasion that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead.
Prosecutors said the invasion was an attempt to steal drug money to fund her group’s border operations.
Forde was expelled from the Minuteman group in 2007 amid allegations of lying and pretending to be a senior leader. At the time of the killings, she was the head of her own group called the Minutemen American Defense.
The SPLC’s report said the killings cast a pall over the entire civilian border militia movement.
But Ready began patrolling the desert with his group after the killings, dressing up in head-to-toe camouflage gear, helmets and boots, and carrying high-powered guns as they traveled out into the desert to look for illegal immigrants or smugglers.
Rose said that he never joined the group on patrols, but that he and Ready would go out with a handful of others about a dozen times a year on similar outings.
Rose and other friends of Ready’s said they are reluctant to believe that he killed four people and himself, and say they feel drug cartels are more likely to blame even though police have discounted that possibility.
Police say all the evidence points to a domestic-violence situation.
Those killed in the rampage in Gilbert on Wednesday were Ready’s girlfriend, her daughter; her 16-month-old granddaughter; and her daughter’s boyfriend.
Harry Hughes, another close friend of Ready’s and a regional director with the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, said he plans to continue his own one-to-two man desert patrols.
Members of the National Socialist Movement promote white separatism, dress like Nazis and display swastikas. They believe only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be citizens and that anyone who isn’t white should leave “peacefully or by force.”
Ready was a former member of the group who said he quit to focus on his desert patrols.
“Just because Mr. Ready is no longer with us doesn’t mean we’re going to stop,” Hughes said. “After we pay our last respects and get our ducks back in a row, I’m pretty sure business will continue.”
He added, “I don’t think JT would have wanted us to stop.”
___
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GILBERT, Ariz. (AP) — Police said Thursday that they believe a former Marine with ties to neo-Nazi and Minutemen groups shot four people and then took his own life in a suburban Phoenix home.
Gilbert police spokesman Sgt. Bill Balafas said that police believe Jason Todd Ready, 39, was the gunman in Wednesday’s shootings in a home in Gilbert.
Ready lived in the home with a woman who was among the dead. In addition to Ready’s girlfriend, the dead include the woman’s daughter and granddaughter and the daughter’s boyfriend, according to media reports.
Ready was known in Arizona for organizing a militia with the goal of finding illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Known as “J.T.,” Ready led an outfit known as the U.S. Border Guard that dressed in military fatigues and body armor and carried assault rifles during patrols for illegal immigrants in the desert south of Phoenix.
Police identified the others killed as 15-month-old Lily Lynn Mederos; 23-year-old Amber Nieve Mederos; 47-year-old Lisa Lynn Mederos and 24-year-old Jim Franklin Hiott.
Balafas has said that all the evidence points to the shooting being related to domestic violence. But he said investigators aren’t sure what triggered the shooting.
Officers have recovered two handguns and a shotgun.
The shootings occurred in a subdivision filled with stucco homes with red-tile roofs.
Members of the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force and FBI agents removed what Balafas said were military-grade ordnance, munitions and two barrels of chemicals found behind the home.
Ready and Hiott were found dead outside the home, and the bodies of two women were inside. The toddler was found inside the home showing signs of life, but later died at a hospital.
A teenager in the house heard arguing followed by gunshots, Balafas said. She came out of a back room and found the bodies.
About three hours after the shooting, a man walked up to the police tape, pointed to the crime scene and said, “I have a daughter who lives in that house.”
Police pulled him behind the tape and out of view. Several seconds later, a loud, anguished cry could be heard. Minutes after, the same man was weeping and left the scene with police.
Ready took offense at the term “neo-Nazi,” but acknowledged he had identified with the National Socialist Movement, an organization that believes only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be American citizens and that everyone who isn’t white should leave the country “peacefully or by force.”
“We’re not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,” Ready said in a July 2010 interview with The Associated Press. “This is what our Founding Fathers did.”
Violence touched his life in ways beyond his militia work. Ready knew and organized border patrols with Jeffrey Hall, a California white supremacist shot and killed last year by his 10-year-old son.
Officers have been called to the home previously for domestic disputes, Balafas said. He had no details of those calls or if they involved Ready.
Neighbor Julie Collins said Lisa Mederos has lived in the home down the street from hers for about 10 years and had been in a relationship with Ready for years. She said Ready seemed pleasant and once helped her with a job in her yard, and that she never heard of any trouble between the couple.
She said she didn’t know about his involvement in the militia or anti-immigration activities.
“I saw him in fatigues a lot, and she told me he was a border patrol agent,” Collins said. “Yesterday I found out on the news that was not the case.”
Collins said Lisa Mederos had two daughters who moved in and out of the home, along with Amber’s boyfriend and her toddler daughter.
Police would not confirm if the teen who called police to the home was Lisa Mederos’ younger daughter.
Gary Davis, who also lives in the neighborhood, said: “There’s no excuse for taking a child’s life.”
“Nothing ever happens in this neighborhood,” Davis said. “It’s a shock to us.”
PHOENIX (AP) — Democrats are hailing first lady Michelle Obama’s visit to Tucson as the latest sign that Arizona will be up for grabs in November’s presidential election, but Republicans insist that the state will go red just like it has the past three election cycles.
Obama is expected to deliver remarks at a fundraiser in the southern Arizona city on Monday evening as part of a four-state campaign push in the West, with other stops in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
Her visit comes on the heels of stops in Arizona last week by Vice President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Biden attended a private fundraiser on April 19 in Phoenix. The day after, Romney had a round-table discussion with Phoenix-area Hispanic business and community leaders before holding a rally in Tempe.
“All the indicators are that Arizona’s in play,” said Jim Haynes, president of the nonpartisan, Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center, which conducts election polls.
“The voters are obviously restless and wrestling with what they’re going to do in November,” Haynes said. “There’s still a lot of question marks in their minds. And as things unfold positively and negatively on behalf of each one of them, I think people are going to bounce back and forth.”
A recent poll by the Behavior Research Center showed that 42 percent of the 511 registered voters contacted across the state supported Obama, that 40 percent supported Romney and that 18 percent were unsure. Because the poll, conducted April 9-17, had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, Obama and Romney are considered about even among Arizona voters.
In terms of fundraising, Romney has been more successful, raising $1.7 million in the state through March 31, compared to Obama’s $1.1 million.
Haynes said that although Arizona doesn’t carry the electoral punch like California, Florida and other states, it is highly coveted by both parties for its national reputation as a Republican stronghold and as ground zero for the immigration debate.
“Arizona’s a symbolic state now, for both sides,” he said. “It’s big stuff for a Democratic candidate to be able to say, ‘I’m running neck and neck in a state like Arizona.’ The flip side is that Romney has a strong interest in keeping the so-called faith base safe.
“We’re going to get a lot of attention paid to Arizona,” Haynes added.
The last time a Democratic candidate won the presidential race in Arizona was Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996.
Shane Wikfors, communications director with the Arizona Republican Party, said the Obama campaign is well-organzied and has a network in place in Arizona and across the country, giving them an advantage.
But Wikfors said Romney’s campaign is very disciplined and can come out on top.
“Our take on the Obama administration thinking that they can put Arizona in play is, let them continue to believe that,” he said. “In fact, let them spend as much money here in Arizona as they want. Arizona is going to remain red.”
He said Arizonans upset about the economy and the unemployment rate will vote for Romney.
Luis Heredia, chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, said Democrats have thought they could win presidential races in the past but that there is a different energy on the ground in the state this time around.
He said Arizonans frustrated with the Republican-led Legislature will turn to Obama, and that the first lady’s visit Monday should be the first of many high-profile visits from Obama’s team.
“It’s going to motivate Democrats for what’s going to be an exciting summer,” he said. “We’re hoping her visit will be the first of many different things that will motivate voters, not only Democrats, but Independents and frustrated Republicans.”
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Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, arrives to answer questions regarding the Department of Justice announcing a federal civil lawsuit against Sheriff Arpaio and his department, prior to a news conference Thursday, May 10, 2012, in Phoenix. According to the Department of Justice, after months of negotiations failed to yield an agreement to settle allegations that the sheriff's department racially profiled Latinos in his trademark immigration patrols, the lawsuit was filed.(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - Helmets and flight suits for the LifeNet crew members killed in a helicopter crash in Tucson, Ariz. are displayed during their memorial service in Tucson, Ariz., on Friday, Aug. 6, 2010. The medical-helicopter crash that killed three people likely was caused by a mechanic's mistake and the lack of an inspection and testing of his work, according to a recently released federal report. (AP Photo/Jill Torrance, Pool)(Credit: AP) 
Hugo Mederos, father of shooting victim Amber Nieve Mederos, grandfather of 15-month old victim Lilly, Amber's baby, and ex-husband of victim Lisa Lynn Mederos, sits in a car after speaking outside of the home where five people were gunned down Thursday, May 3, 2012 in Gilbert, Ariz. Police have identified one of the five people killed in a shooting in a Phoenix suburb as a former Marine with ties to new-Nazi and Minutemen groups. (AP Photo/Matt York)(Credit: AP) 
Police officers stand outside a house after a shooting, where police say a man shot and killed four people, including a toddler, before killing himself, in Gilbert, Ariz., on Wednesday, May 2, 2012. Police say the man was armed with several firearms, and officers recovered two handguns and a shotgun. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Michael Schennum)(Credit: AP) 