Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, speaking at an immigration-reform conference Friday, said that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s workplace raids and immigration sweeps have given people the impression the state is becoming a hotbed for racial discrimination.
Gordon said that while he was in Washington, D.C., this week “several people told me that, due to profiling and other civil-rights abuses by the Maricopa County sheriff, Arizona is getting the same reputation as Alabama had in the 1950s.”
Later, Gordon told reporters that Arpaio is “not using dogs or hoses, but he’s targeting people of color.”
“This guy is in fantasy land,” Arpaio said. “He’s insulting not only this sheriff but all the deputy sheriffs, federal ICE agents and 160 of my officers who are risking their lives every night to enforce the immigration laws.”
Gordon has been ramping up his rhetoric, the sheriff said, perhaps in a bid to receive a federal appointment. The mayor faces term limits in January 2012.
Gordon’s comments came nearly a year he first publicly denounced Arpaio’s actions at a Cesar Chavez luncheon.
On Friday, the mayor told about 100 people at the Reform Not Raids National Summit in Phoenix that he believes the chorus of opposition against Arpaio has helped intensify a federal probe into possible civil-rights violations by the sheriff.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/03/28/20090328gordon0328.html