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Eight years ago, there was no competition. Phoenix became a hub for human traffickers. And amid reports of a rise in car thefts and kidnappings, voters picked Thomas to be the county's top prosecutor. As he vowed an illegal immigration crackdown, a Pearce-backed ballot measure was passed to deny illegal immigrants benefits and ensure they did not register to vote. In April 2005, Arpaio's deputies arrested an Army reservist who held at gunpoint a group of Hispanics whom he believed were illegal immigrants. The sheriff said the reservist had no right to take that step. "Being illegal is not a serious crime," Arpaio said at the time. Thomas declined to prosecute the reservist. Over the ensuing few months, Arpaio moved to Thomas' view. They teamed up to use a law against human smugglers to arrest immigrants being smuggled. The sheriff launched "sweeps" that sent deputies into neighborhoods
-- often heavily Hispanic ones -- to detain people on sometimes minor violations and check their citizenship. Arpaio said the change came about because of the avalanche of new measures from the
Statehouse. "I used to be their hero when I locked up that reservist," Arpaio said of Hispanic activists. "I didn't switch. The laws were passed." Paul Penzone, a former Phoenix police sergeant and Democrat challenging Arpaio in November, said it was well known that if Pearce would get a law passed, Arpaio would use it to arrest as many illegal immigrants as possible and Thomas would prosecute them. "That's a very powerful and dangerous pact," Penzone said. "It has all been taken apart except for the sheriff, who's the last man standing." The trio's fortunes began to sour as Arpaio and Thomas got into a tangled battle with the largely-Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Arpaio arrested one GOP supervisor twice, even though a judge quickly dismissed the charges Thomas filed. Both men publicly accused a second supervisor of corruption and filed criminal charges against a judge who ruled against them. Those charges were quickly dismissed as groundless, and the county is expected to pay millions of dollars to settle lawsuits filed by the exonerated public officials. Many expect Arpaio to win in November, despite his other attention-getting actions, which include a probe into whether President Barack Obama was born in the U.S. and his agency's failure to investigate a series of sex crimes. Randy Parraz, the activist who masterminded Pearce's recall, scoffed at the expectation that Arpaio will survive. "He's had too much unchecked power for too long," Parraz said.
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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